With us officially one week into the New Year and 2022 in our rear view, I’ve had a little time this week to reflect on all of the books that I read last year and the ratings that I gave them upon finishing them. Having had a whole year to marinate with these books and explore different genres and writing style, it’s clear that my tastes have changed from the beginning of 2022 up until now, the beginning of 2023. With this article I wanted to highlight with retrospect my favourite five of the twenty-seven books that I read in 2022 in a series of small, spoiler free reviews to help you find some quality books that might make your 2023 highlights!
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
This collection of short stories was written for the Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter lovers, for those with a taste for ghosts and dystopia and hopelessness. In other words it was written for me. Machado portrays worlds where women are slowly losing corporeality, live with mysterious ribbons tied around their bodies and disappear in strange, old hotels in the middle of nowhere all with the rhythm of a classic fairy tale and the bleak monotone of dystopian landscapes desensitised to their own horrors.
With clean prose and striking imagery – a single green ribbon tied tightly around our narrator’s neck that must never be untied; the ghostly faces of women stitched into fabric – Machado tells the stories of women and their bodies in a way that is fantastical but also very, very real. Collating the realities of women’s lives today and bending it to the extremes to create something uncanny; horrifying but ultimately familiar to any female readers.
This book is a standout to me and I will not stop raving about it to anyone who will listen!
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Normal People was the first book that I read in 2022. It took me only one day’s reading and earned itself a rating of five stars upon immediate reflection for the nostalgic, longing feeling that lingered in each page as though the narrative itself is already aware of its own ending. Marianne and Connell are the central characters of the novel and the perspective shifts between the two of them as they become entangled in a secret relationship as teenagers.
Rooney opts out of using quotation marks, which can take some getting used to at first when reading but is ultimately a technique that works perfectly with the narrative to illustrate the constant miscommunication between Connell and Marianne as well as their tendencies to internalise and overthink everything that they hear and see. It can require a little extra attention as you’re reading, but is a very unique and effective way of writing which I really warmed up to in the end.
The characters of Marianne and Connell are both dealing with a lot, and throughout their romance they each content with matters of their class difference – Marianne is from an affluent family, whereas Connell is raised by his working class single mum – as well as their own issues, lending commentary to themes of abuse and mental health, but at the core this story is about first love and the profound ways in which people can impact each other’s lives, without even really meaning to. I loved it and would recommend it to anyone who is looking for a short read that is going to make your heart squeeze inside your chest.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
This feminist horror novel gives us all of the conventions of a gothic horror tale and does not hold back on the dramatics while still maintaining its fresh, modern charm! The benchmarks are all there: A mysterious letter penned by our protagonist Noemi’s newly-wed cousin, Catalina, claiming that her new home High Place – a gothic mansion built in the isolated, cold and misty hills of rural Mexico, no less! – is ridden with rot and plagued with ghosts that live in the walls. She is growing sicker by the day and believes that her husband, Virgil Doyle, is slowly poisoning her.
When Noemi arrives to check on her cousin, what begins as a wellness check becomes a prolonged stay in High Place, where snake-motifs are on every surface, strange fungus lines the walls and disgraced ancestor of the Doyle family line attempts to make contact with the women of the house. ‘Mexican Gothic’ feels familiar as it hits all of the beats of stories we’ve read hundreds of times over (if you’re like me and love the melodrama of a classic gothic novel) but gives a refreshing perspective in the shoes of Noemi, who is strong-willed, intelligent and determined to solve the mystery of High Place and save her cousin – and now herself – from the disturbing fate that her new family has in store for her.
A fun and thoughtful read, Moreno-Garcia provides insight to Mexican culture and history while providing commentary on the effects of colonialism and eugenics through the lens of a refreshing new kind of gothic heroine that the genre sorely needs.
This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno
An absolutely brilliant novel with a horrific-to-the-point-of-comedic story of grief, anger and demonic possession. I was hooked by the first line as Thiago, addressed his dead wife in the narration: “Your parents wouldn’t let me bury you in a tree pod. Mostly your mom.”.
This novel provides an interesting perspective for the reader – a lengthy letter written by Thiago to his wife, Vera, allows him to be brutally honest in is despair after a freak accident that has left him widowed. Thiago is haunted, angry and exhausted as he is forced to navigate his own grief as well as the grief of those around him, which he very clearly has little patience for. Also, he’s being tormented by his Alexa device, which is almost definitely possessed by some kind of demonic entity, so, everything is pretty awful, thanks for asking!
Each chapter goes from bad to worse as the hauntings that began long before Vera’s death escalate and terrorise Thiago, eventually even driving him out of the home he and Vera made for themselves and into a large cabin in the forest, too large for Thiago to live in alone. But here in total isolation is where things really get insane.
This novel doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to portrayal of grief, displaying the very ugly and isolating side of loss and parallels this with the horror of the story, which is equally graphic and gory as the hauntings come to a head in the climax of the novel and is reminiscent of David Wong of ‘John Dies at the End’, dripping with irony and sarcasm and fatigue for the cosmic horrors that they are faced with in a ‘if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry’ feeling that you just can’t shrug off. At least until the book just makes you cry.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
I can’t imagine that there is anything I have to say about this book that hasn’t been said already. Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize Winning ‘Beloved’ is everything that it is hyped to be and more. It is a story of haunting; of generational trauma and motherhood and an unflinching and brutal look at slavery in America.
Set in 1970s Cincinnati, ‘Beloved’ introduces us to Sethe and her eighteen year-old daughter Denver, who live in124 Bluestone Road – a house that is notoriously haunted. There is no slow build to the spirit’s introduction in the novel; it is there, it has been there for eighteen years, and it is angry. Sethe, unwilling to abandon the house and the spirit within it, lives in dutiful subjection to the spirit’s violent outbursts until Paul D, a friend from Sethe’s past at Sweet Home, the plantation they were both formerly enslaved in arrives and changes the dynamic of the household and forces the spirit to take new measures to be noticed, or perhaps loved, by Sethe.
Morrison artfully weaves the past of the central characters with their present, providing interesting takes on history and how the past, while in the past, is always happening and never truly dies. Heart-breaking, gut-twisting and uncomfortable, this book is worth every minute spent reading it and has not left my mind since I turned the final page.
Honourable Mentions
Because it’s me, I really can’t stick to just five books that I absolutely loved, so below is a little list of the books that just missed out on getting their own reviews in this post for one reason or another! Maybe some of these will be getting their own reviews posts… Very soon… Who knows!
- We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
- the King of Scars duology by Leigh Bardugo
- Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.
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MAISIE VIOLET WICKS 