Bookloft Top 10 of 2019

“Meeting the Conroy family and stepping into their elaborate Dutch house—part museum, part home, with all its secrets and charm, comfort and sadness—enthralled me as the mystery unfolded like a gentle call to arms. From poverty to wealth and from wealth to poverty, we see through Danny’s eyes the struggle to hold the family together against grief, greed, and the heartbreak of losing all that once bound them. Patchett paints a masterpiece here; there’s no looking away. It lingers in your imagination long after the story has been told.”

“I lie awake at night thinking about this trilogy! A beautiful and thrilling Russian folklore re-telling. Kathleen Gati's narration is excellent.”

“This memoir is unlike anything I've ever read, yet I fear that there are others who were raised in circumstances like Tara Westover. Westover documents her childhood devoid of education beyond the family's radical, extreme, doomsday religion with chilling detail as if investigating herself as a case study will help explain how she escaped. Highly recommend.”

“I adore our former president and I miss him. Yet I cannot help but be ecstatic that Michelle is coming out with a book about her own life so that I can learn more about this powerful, intelligent, and singularly awesome woman. Barack would be the first to say that his wife is a superstar, and I can’t wait to get my hands on Becoming to read about her in her own words.”

“A stunning debut novel by an original voice. Twelve characters of Native American descent, interrelated by birth or chance, struggle with the competing forces of cultural history and modern urban existence. Their stories build separately before colliding powerfully in the book’s final pages at The Big Oakland Powwow. I was riveted.”

“Everyone that Kya has ever known has abandoned her. From the time that she was a young child she is left behind. After the student truancy officers track her down and get her to school the children laugh at her so she retreats to the only place that she feels normal - the marshland of North Carolina. She perseveres when she has every strike against her. She fends for herself and studies the natural surroundings of the marsh carefully. She paints and catalogs her collections, studies animal biology carefully, and becomes more in tune with nature than with the townspeople who call her "The Marsh Girl." Then one day the town's "golden boy" Chase Andrews ends up dead and Kya is the one that is suspected of killing him. The story that unfolds will draw you in - I was consumed with the story to the point where I could think about little else during the day because I had to know what happened next in the book. I laughed, I cried, I did fist pumps when things go well for Kya... this book infected me and I'm still having a tough time with the idea that the book is over. I'll carry these characters and this story with me for a long time.”

“This remarkable journey into mythology brings the ancient gods directly and viscerally into the present. Circe is a perfect mashup of elegant language, glorious storytelling, and exquisitely modern sensibilities. Miller's telling left me awed and moved by Circe and her story, all while wishing I could invite her over for a glass of wine on the porch. How this amazing author so perfectly melds the human and the divine, creating a story both immediate and epic, is dazzling.”

“Do you love trees? Probably not as much as Richard Powers does! This books weaves together the converging stories of nine characters, but they really function as a means to probe the perspective of the trees themselves. With lyrical prose and amazing stories of naturalist history, this is an epic of environmental literature.”

“Written as a letter from son to mother, Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is desolately beautiful. Each carefully crafted sentence builds upon the last, a momentum that carries you through a hundred pages before you remember to take a breath. Bleak, brilliant, it is the book other books will be compared to for years. Honestly, I would have been fine if it had been the last book I ever read.”