My Favorite Reads of 2021

December was a bust for me, reading-wise. I started three books but only finished one of them. I gave up on the other two. So instead of “The Best Book I Read This Month,” I’m looking back at my favorite reads of the year.

Overall, I finished 38 books this year. There were 8 more that I started but gave up on. Of the 38 I finished, these were my favorites.

The Broken Girls and The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

Simone St. James is a master at crafting dual timeline stories that are part mystery and part ghost story. These two blew me away.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

A heart-breaking exploration of William Shakespeare’s marriage and family.

Horseman by Christina Henry

An imaginative “sequel” to the Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The Dry by Jane Harper

A breathtaking mystery set in the Australian Outback

West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

Part buddy road-trip comedy, part conservationist commentary, West with Giraffes imagines the Depression-era cross-country journey of the San Diego Zoo’s first giraffes.

Death in the East by Abir Mukherjee

The fourth of installment of one my favorite mystery series, Death in the East takes place in 1905 London and 1920s India. It focuses on two closed-room mysteries—and a detective who is detoxing from an opium addiction.

Murder on the Red River by Marcie Rendon

Set in 1970, Rendon’s book introduces us to Cash Blackbear, an Ojibwe woman who takes it on herself to solve the murder of a fellow Native American.

The Best Book I Read This Month: West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

The best book I read this month was an unexpected delight. Lynda Rutledge’s West with Giraffes is a fictional account of the cross-country journey of the San Diego Zoo’s first two giraffes. I was looking for something light(er) to read after finishing a particularly intense mystery (The Broken Girls by Simone St. James, in case you’re interested in that sort of thing). West with Giraffes fit the bill perfectly.

Set primarily during the Great Depression, with a frame story set in the very near future, Rutledge’s book follows the adventures of Woodrow Wilson Nickel. Displaced by the Dust Bowl, young Nickel is looking for his place in the world when he stumbles across two giraffes being offloaded from a ship that survived a hurricane at sea. Nickel is captivated. When he hears that they are being sent to San Diego, he decides he must go with them, that his destiny lies in California. What follows is part mad-cap chase, part buddy road trip, part coming of age, and entirely full of heart.

The story is narrated by Nickel, who is 105 years old in the frame story. He’s just heard that giraffes are about to become extinct and he’s desperate to tell the story of the two giraffes that changed his life.

Nickel’s voice is colorful and conversational, which made the book an easy, enjoyable read. I may have even laughed out loud in some places. If you’re interested in a light, fun read, this could be just what you’re looking for.

The Best Book I Read This Month: Horseman by Christina Henry

It’s spooky season, so it’s fitting that the best book I read this month had a spooky bent. Horseman by Christina Henry is not so much a retelling of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as it is an imaginative sequel. I adored Henry’s Alice in Wonderland retellings, and this one didn’t disappoint, either.

The story follows Ben Van Brunt, grandchild of the original Legend’s Brom Van Brunt and Katrina Van Tassel. Ben wants nothing more than to be just like brave, bombastic Grandpa Brom, but that determination is put to the test when two village children turn up dead and mutilated. Ben knows a monster killed the boys, but Sleepy Hollow’s residents want something human to blame—something like Ben.

Henry has crafted a story in which nothing is quite what it looks like—not Ben, not the murderous monster, not even the legendary horseman. I loved that. And while I can’t imagine a sequel to this book, I would happily read anything else set in this world.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Secrets We Kept by Laura Prescott

The best book I read this month was a spy story, but one that had far more depth and nuance than any James Bond tale. Laura Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept tells the story of the novel Doctor Zhivago but from the perspectives of women: Pasternak’s mistress tells the story of its publication and women who work at the CIA as typists and spies tell the story of how it was smuggled back into the Soviet Union.

In these stories, we get a sense of life on both sides of the Cold War during the 1950s. The lives of Irina and Sally in the United States feel like technicolor compared to that of Olga in the Soviet Union, and I found the story of Irina and Sally’s friendship the most compelling part of the book.

I admit there were times I wasn’t sure at first who was narrating a particular chapter, even with the clues in the chapter titles, but I found the story engaging and I especially appreciated the female perspective on what has traditionally been a male genre.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

I read some very good books this month, but the best of them was The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James. The story is a dual timeline ghost story/murder mystery. A while back, I read and reviewed another book by St. James—The Haunting of Maddy Clare—and this one is so much better. It’s clear that St. James has grown as a writer and honed her craft.

The Sun Down Motel tells the story of two young women, Vivian Delaney in 1982 and her niece, Carly Kirk, in 2017. Viv disappeared in 1982 while working the night shift at the Sun Down Motel in a small town called Fell, NY. Thirty-five years later, Carly is determined to find out what happened to her.

Not much happens in the first six pages—it’s just Viv sitting in her car—but it was some of the spookiest writing I’ve ever read. I’ve been working on a spooky story myself, and I reread those first six pages multiple times as a master class. The rest of the book isn’t as spooky, even with the ghosts that populate it, but it is gripping and a very solid mystery. (Two mysteries, actually, but I don’t want to spoil anything.)

With this book, Simone St. James became one of my favorite writers, and I’ve added two more of her books to my TBR (to be read) list.