Chain-Gang All-Stars, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Chain-Gang All-Stars is one of 10 winners of the Alex Awards which goes to written for adults that have special appeal to young adults. It’s one of the awards sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) Youth Media Awards. This book was beautifully written, dark, disturbing, gritty and brutal!
CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, is a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx, both teammates and lovers, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity, in defiance of these so-called games, but CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.
The Berry Pickers, Amanda Peters
Another popular award from the American Library Association is the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. This year’s winner for Fiction was The Berry Pickers. I haven’t read this one, but there’s over 100,000 reviews on Goodreas so far with an average rating of 4+.
July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.
Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, Jesse Q. Sutanto
The Audie Awards recognize distinction in audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment. The winner for the Mystery category in the 2024 Audie Awards is Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, Narrated by Eunice Wong. This novel also won a 2024 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original. The Edgar Awards honor the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television, film, and theater. This book was a whole lot of fun to read with a quirky, older protagonist.
Sixty-year-old self-proclaimed tea expert Vera Wong enjoys nothing more than sipping a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy ‘detective’ work on the internet (AKA checking up on her son to see if he’s dating anybody yet). But when Vera wakes up one morning to find a dead man in the middle of her tea shop, it’s going to take more than a strong Longjing to fix things. Knowing she’ll do a better job than the police possibly could – because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands – Vera decides it’s down to her to catch the killer. Nobody spills the tea like this amateur sleuth.
Night Watch, Jayne Anne Phillips
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is awarded for outstanding achievement in fiction published by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. The winner in 2024 is Night Watch, a historical fiction novel about the Civil War, the effects on both soldiers and civilians in the aftermath of the war and the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia.
In 1874, in the wake of the War, erasure, trauma, and namelessness haunt civilians and veterans, renegades and wanderers, freedmen and runaways. Twelve-year-old ConaLee, the adult in her family for as long as she can remember, finds herself on a buckboard journey with her mother, Eliza, who hasn’t spoken in more than a year. They arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, delivered to the hospital’s entrance by a war veteran who has forced himself into their world. There, far from family, a beloved neighbor, and the mountain home they knew, they try to reclaim their lives.
Yellowface, R.F. Kuang
While the Book of the Year Winner for the 2024 British Book Awards (aka the Nibbies) was non-fiction – Murdle, G.T. Karber, the Nibbie for Fiction went to Yellowface. “Rebecca F Kuang returns in her second consecutive win in this category for the trailblazing Yellowface, following her triumph with Babel last year.” We just talked about Yellowface being one of the Popular Books Worth the Hype. It’s about internet trolling, racism and cancel culture in the literary community, and it’s done in such a smart way. June steals her friend Athena’s manuscript on her death, refines it and passes it off as her own. Athena is Chinese-American and her book is about a part of Chinese-American history. June justifies the book as her own to herself (and others) in a number of ways. I won’t say much more, but the story unfolds in such a train wreckish way where you just can’t look away or stop reading.
The Reformatory, Tananarive Due
The Reformatory, Tananarive Due won the 2024 Bram Stoker Award, presented by the Horror Writers Association, for Superior Achievement in a Novel and the 2023 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel (presented in 2024). This was one of my favorite reads for 2024. It’s set during slavery times, and the descriptions are graphic! It’s a horrific time, and the author’s skill with words makes for vivid imagery. But the story is also compelling, blending together injustice, death, hauntings, grief and so much more. This is a tough read, but so, so worth it. Empathy starts with seeing … and this book lays it bare.
Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens, Jr., is sentenced to six months at the Gracetown School for Boys, a reformatory in Jim Crow Florida that is a chamber of terrors where he sees the horrors of racism and injustice, for the living, and the dead. Robbie also has a talent for seeing ghosts, or haints. But what was once a comfort to him after the loss of his mother has become a window to the truth of what happens at the reformatory. Boys forced to work to remediate their so-called crimes have gone missing, but the haints Robbie sees hint at worse things.
The Saint of Bright Doors, Vajra Chandrasekera
The 2023 Nebula Award for Best Novel (presented in Jun 2024) was given to The Saint of Bright Doors, which also won a 2024 Locus Award for First Novel. The Nebula Awards are given to the writers of the most outstanding speculative fiction works and The Locus Awards are given to winners of Locus Magazine‘s annual readers’ poll.
Fetter was raised to kill, honed as a knife to cut down his sainted father. This gave him plenty to talk about in therapy. He walked among invisible devils and anti-gods that mock the mortal form. He learned a lethal catechism, lost his shadow, and gained a habit for secrecy. After a blood-soaked childhood, Fetter escaped his rural hometown for the big city, and fell into a broader world where divine destinies are a dime a dozen. Everything in Luriat is more than it seems. Group therapy is recruitment for a revolutionary cadre. Junk email hints at the arrival of a god. Every door is laden with potential, and once closed may never open again. The city is scattered with Bright Doors, looming portals through which a cold wind blows. In this unknowable metropolis, Fetter will discover what kind of man he is, and his discovery will rewrite the world.
A House With Good Bones, T. Kingfisher
Another 2024 Locus Award Winner was A House With Good Bones, T. Kingfisher, for Best Horror Novel. I enjoyed this too, but while I love a quirky character, the combination of a constant, non-stop inner monologue combined with the constant self doubt of this character was sometimes a bit too much.
“Mom seems off.” Her brother’s words echo in Sam Montgomery’s ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone. Stepping inside, she quickly realizes home isn’t what it used to be. Gone is the warm, cluttered charm her mom is known for; now the walls are painted a sterile white. Her mom jumps at the smallest noises and looks over her shoulder even when she’s the only person in the room. And when Sam steps out back to clear her head, she finds a jar of teeth hidden beneath the magazine-worthy rose bushes, and vultures are circling the garden from above. To find out what’s got her mom so frightened in her own home, Sam will go digging for the truth. But some secrets are better left buried.
Orbital, Samantha Harvey
The Booker Prize 2024 winner was Orbital. Each year, the prize is awarded to the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. This is a slim 200 page novel or novella, which I’m currently reading. So far, it appears to be just about the ruminations of 6 astronauts while they are in space and light on the plot.
Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft above the earth. They are there to collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
James, Percival Everett
The 2024 National Book Awards Fiction Winner was James. This was probably the most lauded book of the year. The the Awards currently honors the best Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature published each year. Jamies is a retelling of the classic novel, Huckleberry Finn, but told from the point of view of James, the slave companion of Huck. Of course, reading a book about slavery is never easy, and this novel is graphic in it’s reminders, but it’s a book that I couldn’t put down. There are so many subtleties shared by the author that made the story for me – the way the slaves played up the type of “dumb” speech expected, the secrets they kept, the inner dialogues, the complexities of relationships, the tightrope the slaves walked for almost every waking minute of the day.v b
How many of these award winning books have you read?
