Barb's Best Books of 2021

Welcome to my 2021 round-up, friends. Every single book on this list that wasn't written by Janet Lambert is damn near perfect. I put them in order of how much I personally enjoyed reading them, not in any order of quality. I try not to be too enthusiastic and use the word "adored" too much, but you know how I am. I adored every single one of them. Now I am a super-easy grader, but also, if I don't like something, I just put it aside. Life is too short. 

This year, at the beginning of December, I began reading for the Mass. Teen Choice Book Award committee and it is making me stick things out a bit longer and stray from my comfort zone a bit, at least in YA and Middle Grade. My adult fiction is still straight up Middle-Aged Lady books, and I am okay with that. And this year I have pulled out middle grade fiction and audiobooks and given them their whole own posts! (That is mostly because I had planned to do whole posts for every subset, but that died on the vine due to my inherent laziness.) So here are my favorites - enjoy!

YA Fiction

Young Adult Fiction - it is my bread and butter. I love it most of all! This year I have read 41 new (to me) YA titles. Okay, 20 if you don't count Janet Lambert, but still, that's a lot.  So my top seven (I chose seven for no other reason than the pictures look cool in groups of seven.) are thus:

1. NOT MY PROBLEM takes place in a foreign country and even though I usually stick to American writers because I am incredibly lazy with regard to reading about other lands, I loved it. Okay, the foreign land is Ireland. They speak English there and I've seen DERRY GIRLS so I know what it looks like. But honestly, Ciara Smyth doesn't explain any of the deep Irish stuff like Camogie and Gaelic and Craic. (I knew the last two, but barely.) This book is a combo of a screamingly funny high school caper, a look at socio-economic disparity, a sad tale of a girl having to parent her alcoholic mom and a sweet lesbian romance. But it doesn't feel busy. It is a freaking gem.
2. IN THE WILD LIGHT is the story of a teenaged boy and his best friend who go from Appalachia to a Connecticut prep school. It is also the story of him losing his mother to an opioid overdose and watching his grandfather struggle with emphysema. Doesn't that sound like a fun read? Right up my alley? Despite the many sad bits, which I have been trying to avoid in these covid times, it ended up being a favorite in a very strong year. 
3. THE GIRL'S I'VE BEEN is probably the tightest book I read this year. Most of it takes place in one barn-burner of a day. There are also some flashbacks and a wee epilogue-ish bit. The many-named heroine is the daughter of a con-artist and when she gets caught up in a bank robbery, well, it is not the bank robbers' lucky day by a long shot. The story has a lot going on and yet it doesn't feel over-crowded. And it is damn near impossible to put down because it just keeps going. I am going to need to reread it because I read it SO FAST because I just needed to know how it turned out. 
4. BAD GIRLS NEVER SAY DIE is by Jennifer Mathieu who wrote MOXIE, another favorite. This is not a re-telling of THE OUTSIDERS, but it is set in the same era and in the same size city - Houston to S.E.Hinton's Tulsa - and it has the same soc vs. greaser vibe. And it is from a female perspective. I think Mathieu is a genius at showing the way society treats teenage girls without making her characters victims. 
5. LOVE, JACARANDA is a sweet retelling of DADDY LONG LEGS that I read quickly on my road trip and I don't remember much about it other than it went down like a cold beer on a warm afternoon and I kept giggling as I read it. 
6. To say I enjoyed LAST NIGHT AT THE TELEGRAPH CLUB would be imprecise. It has a touch of sadness that never quite dissipates, but it was a fascinating look at life in a time when gay Chinese girls were pretty much punished 24-7 for just being who they were and how love sneaks in anyway.
7. And finally, PUMPKIN! Oh, how I long to put an apostrophe at the end of the word, but if Julie Murphy can resist it, so can I. I adore Murphy's take on being fat. She empowers her larger than life characters, while not shying away from the emotional impact of the world constantly telling us that we are not enough by virtue of being too much. Oh, did I just make this about me? She does have a way of making me live her characters' lives. This is the story of Waylon who is a fat, gay, twin and all of those definers take their turn in propelling the story. He lives in Clover City, Texas - setting of Murphy's other YA novels - but plans to kick the dust of that one horse town off his cute boots and go to Austin for school ASAP.  But in the meantime, he dabbles in drag, mistrusts others and runs for prom queen. Characters from DUMPLIN and PUDDIN make appearances - which adds to the fun. 

Middle Aged Lady Fiction Tier One

I love everything I read. But I love these just a little bit more.

1. MARY JANE was a gift from a friend and I usually hate it when people give me books because I can pick my own damn books. But this one was a doozy! I wrote a full review here - feel free to read it!
2. Everyone loves Stacey Abrahams because she helped save democracy. But I ALSO love her because she wrote WHILE JUSTICE SLEEPS which was another book I read on my road trip that kept me hooked from the first chapter. It's a Grisham-y thriller about a young clerk at the Supreme Court with a messy past who ends up, well, saving democracy. 
3. THE GUNCLE was the rarest of rare things - a book club book that I actually adored! Patrick takes in his niece and nephew when his sister-in-law dies and his brother goes to rehab. He is currently mourning the loss of his partner, while trying to live mostly anonymously in Palm Springs despite his former sit-com fame.  Spoiler - everybody, except the people who are already dead, gets better. 
4. THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO was wonderful. Everybody has already read it, for good reason. You can google it. 
5. GOOD COMPANY was also pretty popular. It slams around in time and is the story of a cadre of actors, two of whom are married, perhaps not as happily as they thought. 
6. THE OTHER BLACK GIRL got a ton of great press and, while I am thrilled it did, it also did a bit of a number on me. I read it kind of lazily. (I'm sure that comes as a huge surprise.) It turns out that it was something completely different than I was expecting, the ending blew my mind, and now I have to wait until I have forgotten much of it before I can reread it and see how it all came about. 
7. Ooh, fat girl romance, I love you so! IF THE SHOE FITS is a lovely, reality TV creampuff. I don't watch the stuff (well, I was a little indoctrinated into the Below Deck franchise this year, but I insist on calling it Below Decks so that people don't think I take it seriously) but I do enjoy it as a backdrop to novels. 

Middle Aged Lady Fiction Tier Two

These ones are all tied for eighth most enjoyable read of the year. 

1. THE HOUSE AT TYNEFORD, in which a wealthy Jewish girl leaves Vienna to become a housemaid during WW2 and finds love, was another book club book that really hooked me.
2. THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, in which a suicidal woman enters a library that contains all the possible iterations of her life and finds love (sometimes), was a little sad for me, but also joyful. 
3. HOW LUCKY, wherein a young man with a medical condition that leaves him nearly immobile possibly witnesses a crime and tries to solve it with the people he loves, was a nice little thriller with some great dialogue. 
4. HOW THE PENGUINS SAVED VERONICA, wherein a lonely elderly woman decides to leave her fortune to save some penguins and instead finds out that she has a grandson and decides to take an interest even though her life has been virtually free of love, made me rethink my "no books set in the arctic" policy.
5. THE SUMMER SEEKERS is pretty much HOW THE PENGUINS SAVED VERONICA except with driving Route 66, and no penguins or grandson. And since I am a sucker for Route 66 I ate it like candy.
6. ON TURPENTINE LANE involves some prep-school faculty shenanigans, a late midlife crisis of a Dad and a new house all told with Elinor Lipman's perfect sharpness this was my middle-of-the-night-read-on-my-phone book. An ebook! How modern!

Graphic Novels & Graphic Nonfiction

I love reading graphic novels because I whip right through them almost always in one sitting. But that is mostly because I just read the text and don't pay much attention to the pictures. But I still love the format, and I am getting better about looking at the art. 

1. DANCING AT THE PITY PARTY made me cry a lot. It is Tyler Feder's story of the loss of her mother. It was also hilariously funny. It's frankly the best. 
2. SOLUTIONS AND OTHER PROBLEMS was also extremely funny. And had some sad bits. Is this a theme with graphic novels? Are they trying to give me whiplash? 
3. DRAGON HOOPS was the story of a championship basketball team, but also about the history of basketball, and a slice of life at a high school and an illustration of a man coming into his genius as a graphic novelist. It's all kinds of interesting. 
4. NUBIA REAL ONE is a super-hero story with a strong black female bent and a lot to say about being involved in social justice.  
5. ALMOST AMERICAN GIRL is an immigrant story that feels incredibly true because it is. 
6. ON TYRANNY scared the living daylights out of me, but I am glad I read it and I think everyone in America should. 
7. WENDY MASTER OF ART started out annoying me and I almost put it aside, but darned if that little cloud of doom, Wendy didn't charm me by the end. 
8. DISPLACEMENT was a beautifully drawn and interesting to read look at the internment camps that Japanese-Americans were forced into during WWII. I liked it, but I did keep catching it trying to teach me things. I like books that just let me learn things without looking like they are trying. 

Nonfiction & Memoirs

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Okay, they were all memoirs. I read some nonfiction, but it was all boring crap for Jeopardy. But I am a fool for memoirs! So I messed up the sizes in the picture here, but the order is the same. 

1. My favorite was NOBODY WILL TELL YOU THIS BUT ME because it was a weep-fest! Beth Kalb tells writes in her her grandmother's voice as she tells her life story and it is to die for. 
2. YOU'LL NEVER BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED TO LACEY is the funniest thing I read all year. Lacey is comedian Amber Ruffin's sister and she lives a regular old normal live where people behave bizarrely around her. Seriously, she is a magnet for weirdness. I hurt myself laughing. 
3. Shockingly, in YEARBOOK I don't remember a ton of belly laughs, although I am sure they were there. But I love Seth Rogan. He is my celebrity little brother. I remember seeing him in FREAKS AND GEEKS and it's not that I thought he'd be as successful as he has been, it's just that I found him fascinating as a performer. Go figure. And his memoir didn't disappoint. 
4. MY LIFE AS A VILLAINESS is straight-up the best written of this group because Lippman, is an actual writer of novels, unlike the rest of these authors. And you can tell. Her prose is magnificent, but I like my memoirs more sparkly and famous. I once had a drink in a bar with Laura Lippman at the Betsy Tacy convention a few years ago.  (Sure, there were a bunch of other people there, but still...)  And just like US magazine says - Stars: they're just like us! 
5. I WANT TO BE WHERE THE NORMAL PEOPLE ARE is my favorite cover of the year. Seriously Rachel Bloom, it's like you read my diary. 
6. WE'RE GOING TO NEED MORE WINE reminded me of how much I love Gabrielle Union. I read a review of her new memoir in the New York Times (which I read every day, cover to cover, and brag about to the point of absurdity) and while I was waiting for my interlibrary loan of that one, I read this in one sitting.
7. A VERY PUNCHABLE FACE is my favorite memoir title of the year. I couldn't have given a fig for Colin Jost before I read this. Someone donated it, I love a celebrity memoir and I didn't have anything to read in line when I was going into the post office and I grabbed it. Could not put it down. 

Rereads - 

I love all these books - hence the rereading! 

1. THE FIRST FEW FRIENDS I read fairly often when I was younger but I haven't reread it in a few years so it was lovely to learn that I still adore it. And as an extra treat, I got to meet Marilyn Singer (via Zoom) to interview her for a talk I gave at the public library. 
2. ANNE OF GREEN GABLES is second because I haven't read that since I was in my 20s and had completely forgotten how hard it makes me cry! It was also for the talk, but only because I needed to read RILLA OF INGLESIDE and couldn't jump into it without reading the other books in the series. 
3. ELLA OF ALL OF A KIND FAMILY is my least favorite of the series, but a friend told me that it holds up and when I read it, independent of its better sisters, it did. 
4. I was a group-read leader for DADDY LONG LEGS on the Betsy Tacy listserv and also experimented with recording myself reading it aloud. I think I did a nice job, but I read WAY too fast. If you'd like to read my take on it, it begins here. 
5. FIFTEEN was another group read books which has always been a favorite. Reading it along with the many, many Janet Lambert books I read this year gave it a bit of a boost.
6. ALL OF A KIND FAMILY UPTOWN was both a group read lead AND fodder for my public library talk! It has always been my favorite of the series, my reading experience of ELLA this year notwithstanding. 
7. I reread ELEANOR & PARK because my book club at school was reading it and those girls are brutal when I don't read the book. Plus, every time I read it, I am thrilled by the delicate work Rainbow Rowell has done of illustrating first love at the same time she shows the cruelty that can exist alongside the happiness. 

Children's and Middle Grade

You can read a separate post about these here.

Audiobooks

You can read a separate post about these here. 

and finally... Janet Lambert -

I have read a bunch of these they are just in chronological order because, well, because I'm me. If you want to read the reviews, just click the title! (Ya big nerd...)

Where the Heart Is
Treasure Trouble 
Little Miss Atlas
Confusion by Cupid
The Reluctant Heart
Star Dream 
Miss America 
Don't Cry, Little Girl
Summer for Seven 
Rainbow After Rain 
Welcome Home, Mrs. Jordon 
A Dream for Susan 
Cinda 
High Hurdles 
Love Taps Gently
Song in Their Hearts 
Fly Away, Cinda 
Myself & I 
The Precious Days 
Big Deal 

We're Going Steady - still haven't recapped it yet because it was a LOT. I will just tell you, Janet Lambert HATES going steady!

I also put most of this together before I read these two -

and they were both lovely.

That's it! If you want to look at my actual stats here - feel free.

Or I can just tell you it was 34,659 pages.