Here’s a quick round-up of recent 5-star reads – three wildly different but equally brilliant books that kept me up many nights in the first half of 2024.
But First You Need a Plan – There’s nothing better than being a writer and meeting other writers on social media who are writing exactly the type of stuff you like to read. I wouldn’t have known about this book without Threads and first meeting K.L. Anderson there. This Pacific Northwest based literary psychological thriller/domestic noir sucked me in from the opening lines and took me on a wild, vivid ride through heightened emotions and varying POVs leading up to a dynamite ending. And, oh, that “falling from the sky” scene!
James – Who doesn’t know about James? Its release was the literary fiction event of the year. Percival Everett (fresh from the recent buzz around American Fiction, the Oscar-winning adaption of his earlier novel, Erasure) brilliantly flips the script on Twain’s classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by focusing on the runaway slave, James. Believe the hype! And, oh, that riverboat scene!
One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow – Believe it or not, I met Olivia Hawker on Threads, too, where she posts under her real name and shares all kinds of useful knowledge about both self-publishing and traditional publishing. It took me awhile to realize she was a bestseller…of some of the best historical fiction around. This gripping, poetic, epic, languid but wholly immersive tale of two women forced to bring their families together in 1876 to survive on the brutal but beautiful Wyoming prairie is one not just for the birds, but for the ages. And, oh, that flood scene!
The Schleicher Spin 