The Relentless Moon, Mary Robinette Kowal
The Lady Astronaut series is one of my favorites. It has all the things I love in it – alternate history, outer space, strong women characters, and science fiction.
In this book, the third in the series, we follow Nicole Wargin, a fellow lady astronaut, while Elma York is off on Mars. She’s married to a politician and leaves him (along with a lot of complications) behind to go to the Moon. There was the same intrigue and excitement in this book, along with some twists and turns and a wonderful surprise at the end that made me smile so so much. Highly recommend this series.
The Address Book, Deirdre Mask
I don’t read a lot of non-fiction usually, but this one grabbed my attention via the Goodreads Best Books of 2020 voting. As a person who loves writing letters, sending postcards, and checking my mailbox, the idea of addresses is a familiar one. The history of addresses isn’t something I’ve given much thought to, but Mask uncovers so much in this book. As a privileged person, I admit I’ve never considered what someone without an address might be lacking or how street names might affect how someone thinks of that neighborhood. This book contains a wealth of information that I still want to know even more about.
The Downstairs Girl, Stacey Lee
I love historical fiction, and Stacey Lee doesn’t disappoint with her YA novels. What I liked about this one in particular is that Jo is a writer. She has to write anonymously, not only because she’s a woman but also because she’s Asian. It’s set in the South, and there’s some romance, some intrigue, and a lot of great historical fiction world development.
Untamed, Glennon Doyle
I needed to read this book this year, and I’m so glad that I did. I regret mostly that I read a library ebook and didn’t have my own copy to mark up and highlight. Then again, it’s possible that I would have simply underlined the entire memoir.
I really appreciated how much Glennon’s story spoke to me this year, and I’m so glad she was brave and strong and wrote it all out for us.
If We Were Villains, M.L. Rio
I feel like this is outside of my normal type of reading. It came recommended to me by way of the Plant-Based Bride YouTube channel. I like theater, Shakespeare, literature, and all things literary. I don’t so much like mystery novels, so I wasn’t sure how this was going to fall, but I ended up really liking it. There’s a lot of danger and revelations throughout, and I most appreciated the narrator and trying to decide just how unreliable the narration was with every page turn.
You Had Me at Hola, Alexis Daria
This was a very fun romance to escape into in 2020. What I really liked about this was that it was set in the film and TV industry and discussed the use of an intimacy coordinator. Of course, I recognized that a lot of love scenes on screen were likely done more as choreography than anything else, but this was a great angle for the book to take. And of course, our main characters had their own off-set intimacy to, er, coordinate.