Rachel Baack

Summary: After losing her fiancé, Freddie, in a car accident, Lydia Bird is devastated, unable to face life without him. As it turns out, she doesn’t quite have to. Seeking some respite from her grief, she begins taking sleeping pills to help her rest, and she discovers that, every time she takes a pill, she is somehow able to enter an alternate life in her sleep, one in which Freddie didn’t die. Thrilled at first to be united with her fiancé, Lydia soon realizes that she may not be able to sustain a life split between two realities.

Summary: When a famous artist dies and unexpectedly leaves his most famous work to Louisa, who has just lost her best friend and is on the verge of aging out of the foster care system, she and the artist’s lifelong friend, Ted, are thrown together against both of their wills to figure out the logistics. As the unlikely pair get to know each other, Ted reveals the story of the artist’s life to Louisa, and Louisa, in turn, begins to share pieces of herself with him.

This book was full of heartbreak laced with small, blindingly bright moments of joy, and its plot was interesting and unique.

Summary: Crawford Cope, the star pitcher of his small Arkansas town’s baseball team, has just been sentenced to 300-hours of community service for beating his dad, an even bigger MLB star and hometown hero, with a baseball bat. Crawford, convinced that his lack of anger management skills are to blame for the whole situation, determines to keep his head down, pay off his debt to society, and learn to keep his emotions under control, if not for his own sake then for the sake of keeping his family, which includes his eight-year-old brother, together. His plan is interrupted, however, when he meets Hannah Flores. Also the recipient of a community service sentence, Hannah is Crawford’s opposite: she is a talkative, edgy, social outcast who loves punk music and, after forming an unlikely connection with Crawford, recognizes that Crawford is carrying the burden of family secrets that he shouldn’t—and possibly can’t—carry alone.

In this collection of short fiction, the stories of Black women and girls—all of whom are impacted in some way, whether large or small, positive or (more commonly) negative, by the church—are told with both heartbreaking clarity and heartwarming humanity.

“Dear Sister,” “How to Make Love to a Physicist,” and “When Eddie Levert Comes” were my personal favorites.

Summary: 35 years after her aunt Viv inexplicably vanished from the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York, 20-year-old Carly arrives in the small town to investigate. As she looks into the circumstances surrounding Viv’s disappearance, she learns that the situation is much more complex, terrifying, and even supernatural than she had every imagined.

The novel alternates between Carly’s perspective in 2017 and Viv’s in 1982.

This collection of short stories features female Nigerian protagonists, many but not all of whom have immigrated to London, and who represent a range of ages and stages of life. These stories are at times funny, at other times heartbreaking, but always raw and compelling.

Summary: Tress is a seemingly ordinary girl living on an island in the midst of the Emerald Sea, an ocean made not of water but of fluidized green spores that burst to life as deadly vines when coming into contact with water. This naturally makes sailing this and Tress’s planet’s other seas, similarly comprised of spores of varied hues and with different but equally life threatening reactions to water, quite treacherous. In spite of this danger, after Charlie, a young nobleman with whom Tress has fallen in love, is shipped off to the Midnight Sea that is home to the infamous Sorceress, Tress resolves to sail the seas on a rescue mission. The resulting journey is one full of adventure, peril, and—to Tress’s surprise—friendship and personal growth.

This story is as exciting as it is heartwarming, and Brandon Sanderson lays down some banger figurative language and one-liners throughout the novel.