Winter
The start of the year always feels numb, and I typically look forward to something that will make me feel anything besides cold. This year I found exquisite devastation in O Beautiful by Jung Yun, a startling and disturbing look into the life of a former model turned journalist researching the oil boom in North Dakota and finds herself instead ruminating on the intertwined power dynamics between gender and the state’s male-centric workforce. I was floored by my first read of Yun’s searing novel Shelter, and O Beautiful is a repressed calamity that left me bouncing between fear-inducing nausea and utter fascination and back once more.
Hermoine Hoby slices at the whispery morality of New York City elites, torn away as easily as a stripper’s tearaway pants at a Magic Mike Live show in her intoxicating novel Virtue. It was full of bite and left me with the same realization you have when you make extended eye contact with that dancer’s eyes that this is all a performance, but for who’s enjoyment.
Regarding performance, Michelle Quach’s Not Here to Be Liked is a substantial YA novel following a high school senior grappling with her relationship to feminism and activism when she unfairly loses the election to become president of the school paper to boy with a pretty face…then develops a crush on him. Quach’s rumination on theory versus actions was an honest conversation about navigating one’s activism as a mindset as opposed to tangible action. Like Virtue, it explores the concept of perception, activism as a social cash, albeit with a lighter hand.
And I would be remiss to leave out Kyle Lucia Wu’s Win Me Something which while following a biracial nanny who becomes a babysitter for a rich New York couple and perfectly captures that wintery isolation that seeps into one’s bones.
Spring
With the soon-coming sun, I found myself reaching for the works of Akwaeke Emezi, and after one book, I couldn’t help but fall into the other. Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji are standouts, works that felt inextricable from one another in their story and concepts but also distinctly different bodies of work. Of the four Emezi books I read this year, I appreciated how they all felt in conversation with one another and there’s something deeply satisfying about recognizing those similar strokes when reading different books. Emezi reminds me that looking at life is like peering through different sides of a prism, there is always something new and illuminating on each side.
Summer
With summer comes the most chaotic time, when your social meter is at a thousand, crawling out of the seasonal depression winter has trapped you in. And with more interaction comes Shakespearean levels of drama, and the times of redefining oneself. For many New Year’s really starts at the step of your first day party and this feeling points me to books that feel like late sunsets and 3AM phone calls.
Standouts from this era are Akwaeke Emezi’s You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, a romantic romp of grief, friendship lust, desire, and straight up astronomical chaos. Bobu Bablola breathes distinctly Black love into Honey & Spice, which is part rivals-to-lovers (the best of the romance tropes if I do say so myself) and journey to appreciation of female friendships. Nikki May’s Wahala brings the complexity of the girl group chat to life, when three lifelong best friends’ lives are uprooted when a new woman enters the friend group with mischievous intent. Wahala in particular captures the morning-after gossip session at brunch and visceral pulse leap when you get a private text outside of the group chat. It is the modern drama we all pretend to be above but cannot deny loving when it happens upon us. The reality is I love to see women at war, I love the stench and gore and to see who lives and who dies by the sword of group chat opinion.
Fall
And in the end, the first winds of September will always bring me back to school uniforms, first days of school, and the renewed motivation to get my life in order after a summer of debauchery, all hallmarks of the young adult experience I can’t outrun. But also, dead bodies. I found the pensive built-up energy in Antonia Angress’s campus novel Sirens & Muses as art starlets began to search and become the fuse for each other’s work. I longed to feel fear and Kayla Cottingham’s My Dearest Darkest delivered blood and sapphic pining and Tiffany D. Jackson kept me up at night with the deeply eerie prose of White Smoke and her bloody vengeful take on Stephen King’s Carrie in The Weight of Blood. Lastly, Sabaa Tahir’s National Book Award winner All My Rage left me with blistering rage for the ways the world will choose to see brown children for their mistakes and not for their grief, their pair, and their unrelenting hope to survive it all.
