Operation Heartbreak by Duff Cooper

 Operation Heartbreak was fetching and fascinating, exactly the sort of brief, immersive unfolding into a life of hopes, dreams, resentments, and resolutions that I needed.

Black Bag by Luke Kennard

I simply could not with this book.

It has been a long time since I set a book aside unfinished, but this truly met the criteria.

The opening conceit that we simply would never hang out with our favorite narrators felt like a gloss for the fact that the narrator is whiny and self-absorbed. 

I understand that it’s supposed to be a commentary on the modern-day struggle of masculinity, but the first few chapters seemed more an apology for the idea of modern-day masculinity narratives and how they no longer were attainable, and please. Miss me with that.

Wild Dark Shore By Charlotte McConaghy

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins

This might be my favorite book of The Hunger Games series. 

Haymitch’s voice comes through like a bell. I wanted to see more pages in the last third, and I wonder if this is the last installment in the series or if Collins has more to offer us of this world of Panem.

Haymitch as a reluctant everything is a compelling foil to the standard hero/ine arc, and provide just the right lens to view the inevitability of the Games and the social structures that built them. 

I particularly found the percolating resistance to the Games an interesting element. The Games seem always to have been the brainchild and darling of a small handful in the elite ranks, yet they not only come into being, they thrive and grow. Is it that evil is so difficult to stop, or is it simply that we are too resigned to try?

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins

Songbirds & Snakes was published during the pandemic, and as much as I loved the original trilogy, I simply couldn’t pick up dystopian literature in 2020. 

Collins paints a portrait of our favorite villain that makes him three-dimensional, and at times we even root for Snow. This is a magic trick that is worthy of the Covey, and I love that Collins has woven the Covey into her tale. This enriches the world that she paints and deepens my love for the series and the author. 

One of the things we say is that the deck is stacked and the cards are marked, but even so, when you start to win anyway, they will try to change the rules. Because Snow must always, always, land on top. 

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North

I love a good time loop, and Claire North really delivers.

Bonus points for bringing some sturdy philosophical ethical theories into the characters’ conversations and rumination, especially for calling out the oft-used “complexity is the reason for inaction”  argument against trying to live a life of consequence. 

But more than anything, I found the loves and losses—and even the eventual apathies—of Harry August to be compelling narrative. His fifteen lives, and the ways in which he creates and then unties a Gordian knot will stay with me long past the page.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow

I loved everything about this book.

Portals, stories, the story of the self, self-determination and self-discovery, the crafting of a life of meaning.

It’s beautifully written and, as El-Motar said, “unbearably beautiful.”

I love stories about the power of stories, and I think story is somehow inherently linked to the idea of freedom, and how we write the stories of ourselves, and how we reclaim that space and power when we have let others write that story, and why and how that matters.