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Category: Fiction

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

I recently read Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, which I think is a great novel. Hamnet is O’Farrell’s last novel before The Marriage Portrait and was published in 2020 to much acclaim, so I decided I had to read it as well. If you were required to read William Shakespeare’s plays when you were in high school, you may recognize the name Hamnet. Hamnet was Shakespeare’s only son and he died at the young age of eleven. Hamnet is a sad and moving story about how the death of Hamnet affects his family.

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Atomic Anna by Rachel Barenbaum

Atomic Anna by Rachel Barenbaum

If you are fascinated by stories about time travel, then I think you may enjoy Atomic Anna. I find time travel to be fascinating, and I love debating the ethics of time travel (since it is still a theoretical concept). But Atomic Anna is not merely a story about time travel, it is also a multigenerational story about a family populated by strong, brilliant women. If you are expecting some pulpy sci-fi story, you are not going to find it in Atomic Anna. Atomic Anna is better than that.

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Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley

Cult Classic by Sloane Crosley

I came across Cult Classic on a BuzzFeed listicle of books to read. It sounded interesting enough to me that when I later found it on the BookOutlet website, I decided to add it to my order. I needed something light to read after Demon Copperhead, and the blurbs on the back over of Cult Classic describe it as “funny” and “romantic”, so I thought it would do the trick. After a slow start, I found Cult Classic to be an interesting read, but not the rom-com I was expecting. I did not find it very funny, more like mildly amusing.

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Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

Demon Copperhead is a modern take on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield – they have a similar narrative structure and many of the characters have the same names. Demon Copperhead is set in the 1990s and early 2000s and is about an orphaned boy caught up in the opioid crisis in the poor mining communities targeted by Purdue Pharma (the makers of OxyContin). The protagonist is Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead because of the copper-coloured hair he inherited from his father who died before he was born, who grows up in Lee County, Virginia. Demon Copperhead, like David Copperfield, is a likeable character that you want to root for, but unlike David, Demon tends towards self-destruction instead of striving to change his situation, which is understandable growing up in a part of the country that has been ravaged by opioids and made the butt of many hillbilly jokes. Demon Copperhead is a heavy read, but I think it is a great novel.

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Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo

I re-read Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo just before reading its sequel, Hell Bent. I still love it, and you can read my review of it here. I have been waiting over two years to read Hell Bent; unfortunately, I am on the fence over whether it was worth the wait. I did enjoy reading it, but certain elements have been introduced into the series (the way that Hell Bent ends, I am sure Bardugo is turning it into a series) that I could do without.

WARNING: There be spoilers ahead if you have not read Ninth House.

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Greywaren by Maggie Stiefvater

Greywaren by Maggie Stiefvater

Greywaren is the third and final volume of The Dreamer Trilogy. I love Maggie Stiefvater’s novels, I enjoyed the first two books of The Dreamer Trilogy, but unfortunately, I found Greywaren to be an underwhelming conclusion. SPOILER ALERT: do not read further if you plan on reading The Dreamer Trilogy. Even though Greywaren is the weakest link, I still think the trilogy as a whole is worth reading if you enjoy YA novels.

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Babel by R. F. Kuang

Babel by R. F. Kuang

Well, my 2023 reading is off to a good start. I was not sure what to expect of Babel, but it was one of Indigo’s picks for best books of 2022, which intrigued me enough to read it. I enjoyed every second of reading this novel. The novel’s full title is Babel or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. If you do not mind a bit of magic mixed into your historical fiction, I highly recommend that you give this novel a shot.

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The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is my last completed book of 2022, and the third novel by Silvia Moreno-Garcia that I have read this year, after Mexican Gothic and Velvet Was the Night. Out of the three, I like this novel this best. If you are familiar with the works of H. G. Wells, then you will immediately realize that The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is inspired by The Island of Doctor Moreau. I have read The Island of Doctor Moreau, so long ago, though, that I cannot remember if I read it in high school or college, and I only have a vague recollection of not liking it and feeling sorry for Doctor Moreau’s hybrid creatures. On the other hand, I enjoyed reading The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, although I still feel sorry for the hybrids.

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The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas

The Hacienda is a gothic novel set in Mexico, along the same vein of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic; however, I like this novel better. It features an actual haunting, not a haunting imagined by the protagonist, that made my skin crawl (although it would have been even more creepy if I had read this novel at night instead of in the bright afternoon), and it has vibes of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.

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The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell

I think fans of historical fiction will love Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait. One of the year’s more buzzed about releases, The Marriage Portrait is set in 1550’s Florence and is inspired by the short life of Lucrezia de ’Medici, who was married at age 13 to Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, Modena and Reggio, and died at age 16. The official cause of her death was “putrid fever”, but it was rumoured that her husband murdered her. The Marriage Portrait is a well written and immersive novel, but how does it feel to read a novel knowing that the main character died young in real life? I spent the entire time reading The Marriage Portrait in nervous anticipation of Lucrezia’s death, but also hoping that O’Farrell would change the fictional Lucrezia’s fate and give her a happy ending.

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