Favourites Reads of 2022: Top Three

 So yeah, I inteded for this post to go up either on the 30th or the 31st but life got in the way. I had some family situations come up and I had a major deadline on the 31st (I know, rude, who puts a deadline on the 31st?), so we're only getting to this post now! Also, what better way to go into a new year full of reading then by looking back at my three favourite reads of the previous year?

3. Maria, Maria: And Other Stories by Marytza K. Rubio

For fans of Kali Fajardo-Anstine and Lesley Nneka Arimah, a darkly funny and imaginative debut conjuring tales of Mexican American mystics and misfits.

"The first witch of the waters was born in Destruction. The moon named her Maria." From former PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow Marytza K. Rubio comes Maria, Maria, an inimitable collection set across the tropics and megacities of the Americas.

Readers will be enticed and infuriated as characters negotiate with nature to cast their desired ends—such as the enigmatic community college professor in "Brujeria for Beginners'; the disturbingly faithful widow in "Tijuca"; and the lonely little girl in "Burial," who awakens a sabretooth tiger. Brimming with sharp wit and ferocious female intuition, the book bubbles over into a novella of fantastical proportions—a "tropigoth" family drama set in a reimagined California micro-rainforest about the legacies of three Marias, possibly all Marias. Writing in prose so lush it threatens to creep off the page, Rubio emerges as a bold voice new voice in contemporary short fiction.

About the Author: Marytza Rubio has an MFA in creative writing: Latin America and was a Bread Loaf scholar. She is the founder of Makara Center for the Arts, a nonprofit library in her hometown of Santa Ana, California.

This is going to sound weird but I hadn't initially imagined that Maria, Maria would be in my Top Three. When I read it I was utterly amazed by the stories, by the way they feel so alive and yet so mythical. But I didn't know yet if it was going to stick with me, if it would be one of those I would keep thinking about. As it turns out, I did. I kept thinking about certain images or turns of phrase in Rubio's stories since reading it in October. I also love it when it is not an "established" author who surprises me that way, if that makes sense? With the next two books it's kinda like 'Yeah, we all heard those are good', but with Maria, Maria I really got to go into the collection completely blind and just be amazed by the creativity and feeling it displayed. So yes, one of my favourite reading experiences this year!

2. The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Bergensdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Northern town of Vardø must fend for themselves.

Three years later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband's authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God and flooded with a mighty evil.

As Maren and Ursa are pushed together and are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them with Absalom's iron rule threatening Vardø's very existence.

Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1620 witch trials, The Mercies is a feminist story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization.

This is the book I probably passed around most this year. I physically gave it to at least three people and have been talking about it nonstop to others. I loved this book and what it did to me as a reader! As the situation worsens for the women in Vardo I could feel the walls of my room closing around me. I don't know how Millwood Hargrave did that, but she did it. And I loved exchanging this book with other book-lovers around me, getting their input, meeting over coffee to discuss the book and its characters. So in a way this was a combination of a great reading experience and a great reader experience because I got to share it and revel in how amazing books are with others. 

1. Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell

Drawing on Maggie O'Farrell's long-term fascination with the little-known story behind Shakespeare's most enigmatic play, Hamnet is a luminous portrait of a marriage, at its heart the loss of a beloved child.

Warwickshire in the 1580s. Agnes is a woman as feared as she is sought after for her unusual gifts. She settles with her husband in Henley street, Stratford, and has three children: a daughter, Susanna, and then twins, Hamnet and Judith. The boy, Hamnet, dies in 1596, aged eleven. Four years or so later, the husband writes a play called Hamlet.

Award-winning author Maggie O'Farrell's new novel breathes full-blooded life into the story of a loss usually consigned to literary footnotes, and provides an unforgettable vindication of Agnes, a woman intriguingly absent from history.

I didn't actually review this one because after I had read it the experience was too fresh. And then my love for this book became like my own private thing I almost didn't really want to share? But let's track back!

While I still lived in the Netherlands I regularly met with my cousin to talk books and eventually we decided to have our own little book-club and read books at the same time. One of these books was Hamnet, a book I had heard so much about and was so hesitant to read. I have said it before, I worry about book-hype because it makes it harder to approach the book on its own, to not go in with preconceived ideas about how good it had to be. Reading it with my cousin I knew I had a "safe space" where, if it turned out that way, I could admit to not liking or not getting through the most awarded book of 2020. And I shouldn't have worried because oh.my.God... Hamnet hit me in the gut almost from the first page and it just didn't let me go.

Reader, I sobbed. I sobbed at multiple points in this book, even though the blurb literally already told me what was going to happen. I loved Agnes and I cried for her, for the way O'Farrell brings her pain so close to the reader. It literally hurt me as well, which hardly happens. But there was something so cathartic about hurting with her that I also felt lighter after Hamnet. I guess sometimes the hype really is all true. I still think it's good to let the hype die down a bit before going in though.