This is exactly what it sounds like. Please enjoy my nonsensical analysis of the books I loved this year, and consider adding them to your TBR! I promise, they're all worth it.
10. Compound Fracture, Andrew Joseph White
This is the first of two AJW books that made my top ten this year, which I think is a testament to what a good writer he is, and how much I adore his work. The three books that AJW has released so far all center around young trans autistic boys, usually in the early teen years about to go through literally the worst thing you could possibly imagine. All of AJW's work is saturated with queerness, laden with intentionality and authenticity; you can tell, or at least I can tell, when the addition of queer characters is done by someone who is not queer, or who does not understand the deeper implications of queerness and the importance of acceptance and connection within it. AJW, a trans man himself, of course understands exactly how to handle the topic with the utmost consideration and care, and it comes across clearly with his portrayal of Miles and his reminder throughout the story that trans people have always been here, and they will always be here, and that is something worth loving and accepting whole-heartedly.
In each of his books, too, the main character has a slightly different way of handling their body and interpreting their gender, and that’s something I really enjoyed discovering as I read all of the books. Admittedly, I am not the one who gets to decide how trans men should or shouldn’t be presented in media, so keep that in mind. Regardless, as a genderqueer individual I deeply loved and related to Miles and his struggle with his identity.
For Compound Fracture specifically, I obviously loved Miles coming into himself, but I also loved the inclusion of Lady, Miles’ pet dog. Animal sidekicks are a little harder to pull off in books, in my personal opinion, because they are either more helpful than realism permits or are forgotten about in 90% of the book, only to reappear to come in clutch during the climax. Lady, however, is present the entire book, and does become incredibly useful during the climax of the story, but is still well within the parameters of what a dog is capable of. A little stretching of realism isn’t something I’ll ever bash, especially in a book where Miles’ ancestor ghost keeps coming around to help Miles learn new things about himself - which was an addition that I ADORED, by the way - but I appreciated it nonetheless.
Also, as a person who loves union music and anything Appalachian, having spent a lot of time in the blue-ridge mountains, the lore of Miles’ family, its feud with the town, and the history behind it was absolutely stellar. I am the kind of person who unfortunately can get a little bored during lore and world building moments, but I was completely invested the whole way through.
9. Gather The Daughters, Jennie Melamed
I will admit, this book pissed me off at the end. We’ll get to that in a second.
I had a month-long tiff over the summer where I became obsessed with learning about cults, how they work and their usual inclinations, and this book really scratched that itch for me. I wasn’t raised religious, and if I was anything I would be leaning more pagan, but Christianity and its relentless appearance in cults has always fascinated me, and though Gather The Daughters focuses more on the characters’ ancestors than God, it still reeks of the same mentality. Jennie Melamed is a psychiatric nurse who specializes in working with traumatized children, so it would make sense for this dystopian island of hers to reflect modern cultish behavior, much of which is centered around christianity. You can also tell Melamed’s background through the way she handles the characters, who are all young women incredibly traumatized by the sexist and misogynistic world they have been raised in.
One of my pet peeves in books is when authors are afraid to use what I refer to as “unaesthetic” behavior or terminology in their writing. A good example is the word “squat”. It’s sort of a personal litmus test when I’m reading; if an author uses the word “squat”, rather than “crouch” or “bends down”, using writing that allows the character to seem inelegant and genuine, I instantly trust their writing a little bit more. Does that make sense? I like when authors write like their characters are real people, not doll-like adaptations of what the ideal human is, even at their most hurt or vulnerable. Along with that, Melamed’s use of nakedness amongst the women, not as something dirty or uncouth but as their truest, freest self, was a very refreshing take to see.
The meat of this book is in the relationships between the girls. Desperate to find freedom and support in one another, they find creative and bold ways to lift each other up, protect one another, and connect with one another and the individual trauma’s they’ve faced as a group. The comradery was, I think, my favorite part about this book. How the girls stuck to and stood by one another, and held firm in the leering, masculine face of adversity. The ending of this book fell flat because it felt like all the work the girls did during the entire story was a tad pointless, with several of the girls dead and one of our main characters gone with the wind, but the sheer joy and righteousness I felt reading the vast majority of this book outweighs my irritation over the last four chapters or so.
8. Songs of Penelope Trilogy, Claire North
Like many other people, I read Song of Achilles and then fell into a massive rabbit-hole of Greek Mythology retellings of which I have yet to find my way out of. Not that I’m trying all that hard. With this in mind, I think the Songs of Penelope trilogy may be my favorite retelling to date, simply because of how beautifully complex each of the many characters were portrayed to be.
To start, each of the books is narrated and observed by a Greek Goddess; which is a brand of narration I love very deeply. You see it in Lovely War by Julie Berry, a story told through the perspective of a multitude of Greek Gods, and in The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, where the Grim Reaper narrates the events of WW2. Each of the Goddesses have to endure a different type of sexism and hurt at the hands of their male God counterparts, and this is all explored and acknowledged without letting the goddesses get away with their at times selfish and ill-meant behavior. Gods are still Gods, after all.
I found the inclusion of each Goddess and their specific outlook on life equally enrapturing. The first book is told through Hera’s point of view, which I was thrilled for because you rarely see Hera extensively discussed on her own, and not in relation to someone else. The second book is told through Aphrodite, who has such a unique outlook that I really enjoyed leaning into. By the time we reach the third book, we’ve strongly built up the perceived opinion of Athena, who has hovered over the last two books, being a crucial part in the survival of Ithaca and, of course, Odysseus and his family. Her outlook, and how we’ve subtly seen her change through the other two’s perspectives and now through hers, is breathtaking.
I’m not going to make an argument over whether or not this adaptation of the Greek Pantheon is accurate to Mythology. Maybe I should, but I’m looking at this purely from an entertainment standpoint. Entertainment wise, I prefer when the Goddesses are recognized to make bad choices because of the dash of egotism every God realistically would have, while still exhibiting mercy, intelligence, respect, and kindness for mortals along the way. I actually made an entire separate post dedicated to this series and my love for the narration, so scroll a post or two down if you want to read a longer version of this.
Of course, I can’t NOT talk about Penelope. In the name of honesty, I have mixed feelings about the Odyssey because I have a deep and endless hatred for Odysseus, but Penelope, especially in this series, made one hell of a fan out of me. She views herself as a Queen before she is a Mother, a Wife, or a Friend, and the problems that this perception spurs are incredibly interesting to watch play out, especially with her son, Telemachus. Penelope is not void of guilt but she tries, and she tries harder and more effectively than almost anyone. Each Goddess, through their narration, highlights a different part of Penelope and compares her to someone else from Greek Mythology. Hera sees her as a queen, clever yet much quieter in her approach to ruling than Hera’s beloved, Clytemnestra. Aphrodite recognizes that Penelope may be a queen first, but she still is a mother, wife (technically), and lonely woman , though she refuses to acknowledge these urges in ways Aphrodite’s favorite, Helen, may. For a small change of pace, Athena seems to be more comparing Odysseus to Penelope, by the time we reach the third book, than she is comparing Penelope to Odysseus. North’s adaptation of Odysseus, too, might be one of my favorites, because it acknowledges the horrible things he’s done while also highlighting his intelligence, willingness to work with what he has, egotism, and struggle to learn to change.
I’ve been going on a little bit of a tangent and there’s still a bunch more I could say about this series, but I’m going to cut it off here. Just know that it’s insanely good, and I’m not sure how any mythological adaptations after this are going to match up.
7. Butcher, Joyce Carol Oates
Along with my stint with cults over the summer, I also got really into stories centered around real traumatic events women faced throughout history. Why, you ask? Couldn’t possibly tell you. Anyways, Butcher focuses on Silas Weir, the “godfather of gyno-psychiatry” in the mid 1800’s, which kind of tells you all you need to know about this shitbag.
What amazes me about this book is how Oates manages to make the most accurate adjective one could use to describe Silas Weir loser. It was incredibly striking while reading that this man, despite all of the horrible, monstrous things he did to women during his time working at a women’s-exclusive asylum, experimenting on patients, abusing and assaulting his staff and the like, I really viewed him so strongly as a loser. A daft, stupid, socially awkward yet painfully narcissistic loser, and that’s an incredible feat for a book that is told mostly through his point of view. Literal scum of the Earth, you wish people had bullied him more as a child.
Another character I want to bring attention to is Brigit Kinealy, who worked at the asylum from a
young age and had, through trauma, become mute and deaf. In the moments where Joyce Carol Oates switches from Weir’s POV into Brigit’s, Oates takes lines and moments pulled from Brigit’s own memoir Lost Girl, Found: An Orphan’s True Story Told By Herself. This, I think, is the most tasteful thing Oates could have done; not take a real woman who wanted to share her side of the story and turn her into something she isn’t for the sake of your own book, but to show her as she is, and as she wanted to be perceived. It’s outstandingly authentic and tasteful, and Brigit’s book has been added to my TBR list.
A much shorter summary than the others, but this book placed so high not because of how many moving parts I adored, but because of how strongly adored the few parts there were. This book caught me completely by surprise, and I couldn’t be happier that I read it.
6. The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty
This is the most recent read on this list but it’s already been haunting me a little bit. The Rabbit Hutch reads as long-form prose, a contemporary wonder that heavily considers the human mind and all its behavioral oddities. Each character has an bizarrely human thought process, relates incidents that the average person wouldn’t find any correlation between and experiences urges that would be socially frowned upon, like covering yourself in the liquid from glow sticks and wiggling around in the dark of your enemies bedrooms, which is an actual thing one of the characters does.
What I loved about this book was that every character, no matter how bland or normal they seemed on the surface, was full of outrageous desires, worries, and was fully fleshed out in the few moments we’re allowed to see them. Along with that, no character was an obviously bad person. They may have leaned more in one direction, but each character was spectacularly complex, and a discussion could be had over their morality and life choices.
As someone who also loves female mystics of the middle ages, Blandine - our mainest of characters, though there is a revolving cast of recurring characters whose POV’s we witness - and her interest in mystics, particularly Hildegard of Bingen, were incredibly entertaining to me. Fun fact, female mystics were known to commonly take part in something we call “Mortification of the Flesh”, which was when a person intentionally causes themselves harm, sometimes by sitting in sickness or starving oneself, sometimes in other ways, in order to get closer to Christ and his suffering. There is something to be said about the people of Vacca Vale, and how their town is dying all around them and they know that things are changing, that their town is not a good place to be, but insist on being there anyways. Blandine herself, when asked why she doesn’t just leave if she seemingly hates Vacca Vale so much, can’t give a real reason. She just keeps repeating that she wouldn’t leave. I can’t say for certain if this was an intentional choice the author made, but it is a trend that I found really interesting across most of the characters; exhibiting damaging or stagnating behavior and refusing to move away from it, finding a sort of peace and purpose within it, or finding comfort in the lack of purpose.
This book has so much to interpret, and I think that’s one of the coolest things about contemporary work. There are a million different conclusions that a person can draw. Other than the material, which was so uncomfortably relatable in a way I absolutely adored, the writing itself was beautiful. Gunty truly encapsulates what the inside of a person’s head sounds like, and the shift between character mindsets was as smooth as butter. I wish she had more books out because I would buy all of them immediately.
5. The Radium Girls, Kate Moore
Less of a novel and more of a nonfiction recounting of events, Kate Moore is one of the first people to not just discuss the intricate and grotesque ins and outs of the Radium Girls and the medical horrors they faced at the hands of corrupt, capitalist employers, but to discuss who the Radium Girls were as people, individually, in their personal lives. She humanizes them in a way the group picture, as most books often present them, fails to do, and makes a point to emphasize the strength, compassion, and resilience each individual girl expressed throughout the long, tedious, and occasionally deadly medical and court orchestrations.
I feel like the Radium Girls are a group that everyone knows about, but only to the extent of what happened to them; namely the radium. Although the scientific, radium aspect of the book was also interesting, the real allure came from the women, the practical disintegration of their bones that led to the inability to talk, walk, or move much at all without excruciating pain, and the ways that they worked through this incredible pain in order to take care of their children, their families, and show up in court to find justice for what their employers did to them. Most of the women, Moore explains, wanted money from the company because the amount of medical bills they had to pay were crippling their families, and that’s one of the things that hurt the most while reading; they were mothers and wives and daughters and women, who were trying to protect themselves and the people they loved by any means necessary.
Moore leaves nothing out. I didn’t know until I began reading that there were multiple radium factories with multiple sets of girls, all separate from one another, experiencing the same pain and heartache in stilted intervals. I didn’t know just how hard the companies that were employing the girls fought to make them seem like they were liars and gold-diggers, or just how many atrocious doctors didn’t want to come off as clueless, so they stamped fake, ill-fitting illness titles on the girls as they passed away. It’s a painful reminder of how history bludgeons women with suffering and then belittles them when they point it out, but Moore does such a fantastic job pointing out the courage of these women, you can’t help but end the book a little in awe. INSANE combination.
One last thing; in a lot of books, especially ones that talk about real life events that involve a lot of people, my main critique is always that I keep forgetting who people are, and that the book could do with a small key, or some way to remind yourself who is who.
This book has a key. It was incredibly helpful.
4. After The Fire, Will Hill
I read this book during my cult phase over the summer, and I’ve thought about it daily ever since. I’ve said it on multiple platforms, but Will Hill is one of the first male authors I’ve seen write a female main character so spectacularly; Moonbeam, our protagonist, is a young girl who grew up in an off-grid cult, and was set to marry the cult leader.
First, the formatting of the book was spectacular. A lot of the book takes place after the destruction of the cult, where Moonbeam lives in a hospital and deconstructs her life with an FBI agent and a psychologist. As Moonbeam introduces situations and experiences in the cult, we switch to her POV in the past, when that experience was actually taking place, rather than listen second-hand as she explains it to the two men. Once the situation is over, the next chapter returns to the hospital, so we can see the men’s reactions to her experience. It’s beautifully maneuvered and easy to follow, and the slow reveal of information through this formatting, the questioning of the agent and psychologist and Moonbeam slowly deprogramming herself from the cult and finding the courage to share is done on an expert level.
Secondly, I want to jump back to Will Hill and his presentation of Moonbeam as a woman. One thing I learned over the summer in my cult deep-dive is that cults tend to be much worse for women; cult leaders are usually men, always narcissistic, and almost always quick to use their platform to access women sexually, consensually and nonconsensually. For most male authors, there’s a clear disconnect when they write female characters where you can see the space that misogyny and sexism should take route, but hasn’t. Women written by men experience misogyny and sexism either in ways that a male character can save them from it or in ways where their harm can be fetishised, and in most situations in either direction, the hurt they are objected to is not a recurring struggle or trauma they have to overcome. It’s because of this that I’m always wary of men writing incredibly violent scenes regarding women, because part of me is always afraid that they’re writing the scene with misguided intentions.
I will tell you, there is a scene in which Moonbeam faces sexual assault at the hands of another cult member. I figured something like that would happen going in, given the fact that it’s a book about cults, but I was genuinely surprised that, in the grand scheme of what men can do, the assault that Moonbeam faces is not nearly as bad as it could’ve been, but is still treated as a traumatic and horrifying event that she has to heal from. From Moonbeam’s own memory, the terror and uncomfortability she experienced, to the reaction of the two men she retells the situation to, everyone treats the assault with the carefulness and respect that it deserves.
Thirdly, I want to talk about the FBI agent and psychologist. The entire book, Moonbeam grapples with the world outside of her cult being vastly different from what she was told it was like, and she steadily works to deprogram the belief that nobody can be trusted and is only looking for new ways to hurt you. Distrustful myself (though not nearly to a similar degree, nor for the same reasons), I held my breath the entire book and waited for the moment where the agent and the psychologist turn on her, report their findings to the government or send her to live somewhere else. It felt like not enough “bad things” had happened to her outside of the cult, and like Moonbeam, I was also waiting for the other shoe to drop. Imagine my surprise when it didn’t.
The FBI agent and psychologist were genuinely good people. They cared about her, they wanted to see her get better, and though they pushed her at times, they were entirely well-meaning. A book that could have very easily been stuck into the genre of "women’s never-ending suffering" uplifted itself strongly as a story about women’s healing, and I adored every second of this book. If I were ranking these based entirely on which one made the most impact on me, After The Fire would be #1, no questions.
Also, he started the book with a few lines from God's Gonna Cut You Down by Johnny Cash, which is one of my favorite songs ever, so I appreciate it's inclusion.
3. Lilac Girls, Martha Hall Kelly
In case it wasn’t clear, I’m a very big fan of unique POV’s, and this book is no exception. Taking place during WW2, we follow three different characters; there's Caroline, an American woman trying to help French orphanages and, later, bring attention to the women who experienced medical malpractice (to put it very lightly) at the hands of Germans. There's Kassia, one of the young women who was forced to deal with the medical malpractice, and then there's Herta, a German doctor who was performing medical experiments on Kassia. You go into each of the headspaces of these individuals who were either real people or based off of real people and begin to get the sense of who they are, what they want, and what they’re willing to do to get it. Herta’s perspective was very similar to Silas Weir’s from Butcher, and it was really interesting to see the sheer near-sightedness and narcissism she displays throughout the book, even in the face of the polish woman’s grief, with a particular emphasis on Kassia.
Kassia is what made this book for me. All three perspectives are stunning, and I didn’t find any one character lacking interest, but Kassia as a character meant the most to me. There are no words to properly articulate the horror that she and her sister went through even before becoming the Ravensbruck Ladies, the name for the group of women at the camp who were experimented on. The grief she experiences after the fact, particularly when it comes to her mother, caught my attention the most, and it was heart wrenching to see how she carried it into her adult life, her marriage, and her child. Grief isn’t clean or pretty, it’s not a hurt/comfort fanfiction. People say mean things and they do mean things and they try to find ways to justify it, and that doesn’t make them a bad person. Kassia especially, with the way the people around her (family included) downplayed her grief because they were exhibiting theirs differently, was made to feel almost like a villain for setting boundaries and becoming upset when they were crossed. Martha Hall Kelly does a beautiful job of displaying that even when the war had ended, even when Kassia was free, the grief and the trauma from the experience lingers for a life time. Along with that - and this genuinely enrages me, as it would anyone - Kelly also shows how Herta didn’t experience any of the intense guilt or grief Kassia did, and how the victims, in many historic situations, are going to hurt more than the villains that hurt them. It’s agonizingly realistic.
At the same time, Kelly manages to display a modicum of hope through her writing, that amidst pain, trauma, and grief, there are things to enjoy, people to love, lives to live. There will always be something worth rebuilding and trying again, and the ultimate form of healing that a person can begin with is to believe that sometimes the thing worth rebuilding is yourself. Lilac Girls is if The Radium Girls and Butcher wrote a book together, and seeing as those two are in my top ten, naturally Lilac Girls has to be too.
2. Burning Kingdoms Trilogy, Tasha Suri
I read the first book in this trilogy in 2024, then the second and third were two of the first books I read in ‘25, so please bear with me as I try to remember what happened. I will say that when I read the first book in ‘24, it made it into my top ten, and Tasha Suri has firmly remained in my top ten this year, which is decent enough proof as to how insane she is. I read the third book in one day while sitting on a hardwood floor and my ass was sore for days afterwards. Worth it.
The world itself is so unique. As a character-oriented reader and writer, I often find myself struggling to fully understand magic and world systems, especially when they are as vibrant and intricate as the one Suri's created. However, I fell in love with this world, it's magic and curses and all the nasty political endeavors. The religious aspect, too, and the ways it related or differed from how religion is celebrated and treated in our world, was a beautiful, thorny unflowering that took place over all three books, and I enjoyed literally every second of it. Let me tell you, it takes a lot for a book to make me care about politics, but I cared a hell of a lot when it involved Malini.
Malini and Bhumika were two of the most striking characters to me; I love a good ol' complex character, and these women both had a lot going on, and were stuck in this constant struggle between power and personal, the people they loved and the home they wanted to protect. The way Malini and Bhumika handled sacrifice and navigated their way through a war while desperately trying to maintain the things that made them who they were was spectacular. As for Priya, I mean- how can you not like Priya? We're introduced to Priya as a shatteringly kind individual, and she continues to cement this idea throughout the rest of the three books. I don't want this to sound like she isn't complex, because she is. Of the three women, Priya was just the most upfront and honest, so it was easier to understand where she was coming from and why she did the things she did.
Now, Priya and Malini. Who would I be if I didn't talk about Priya and Malini? I am a huge fan of relationship dynamics that are "if there was just one more thing a little bit different, they would probably kill each other, so thank god there isn't". Priya and Malini are a realistic, stressed couple in a very homophobic and dangerous time, and though they spend a lot of the time separated, especially in later books, their romance is believable. Books not centered on romance but including romance have to walk this fine line where the romance can't take over the central plot, but it also has to make sense for the characters to love each other and to want to, after everything that's happened, find their way back to each other. Suri doesn't stutter across this line once in all three books.
I love a happy ending. I think, honestly, happy endings are underrated nowadays, and many people are under the impression that in order for the stakes to be high or for a story to be realistic, several people have to die. I disagree, especially when it comes to the fate of canonical queer characters. Suri does the world's most amazing job with the building of Priya and Malini's relationship, and their ending, without giving too much away, was perfect. Just the right amount of bittersweet. I know she has another series out and I have every intention of reading it because of how much I loved this series.
1. Hell Followed With Us, Andrew Joseph White
(The Shining, 1980)
