The Ocean at the End of the Lane
by Neil Gaiman

Have you ever read a book that was so beautiful you wanted to cry?  That spoke to the deep places of you in a voice you’d didn’t know you’d been longing for, about people and places you’ve missed your whole life without ever having encountered them before?  This was that book for me.  Like the duck pond in the book that is said to actually be an ocean, this small book is so much more than its modest page count would suggest.  There is darkness here, and magic.  Tragedy and hope.  Loss and love.  Danger and protection.  Readers of fantasy often debate whether they would rather live in Middle Earth, Narnia, Wonderland, Neverland, or Hogwarts.  But me?  I would forsake them all if I could only live on the Hempstock’s farm among those wise and magical women.

The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August
by Claire North

What if when you died, you were born again back into your same life, over and over again, only with a perfect memory of of everything that happened in all your earlier lives?  And what if, on one of those cycles, you got a warning that changed everything?  Complex, suspenseful, poignant, and profound, this is a startlingly new and clever twist on the time-travel story, with a plot that spans lifetimes.  It’s  a book I know I’m going to revisit and reread many times in the years to come.  I highly recommend it!  Maybe one of my top 10 books of all time.  I haven’t yet read any of the author’s other works (she also writes as Catherine Webb and Kate Griffin), but you can be sure I’m going to.

The Martian
by Andy Weir

Let’s put it bluntly:  This is quite possibly the best sci-fi novel I’ve ever read, and the most believably realistic.  From the very first sentence, it had me hooked, and it kept my interest all the way through the protagonist’s grueling ordeal.  Stranded alone on Mars with only his brains and resolve to keep him alive, he keeps his composure and his sense of humor.  Never has a novel made math and science seem so relevant and so page-turningly compelling.  This book deserves every ounce of the hype it has received and more.  Destined to become a classic.

Bloom:  Or, the Unwritten Memoir of Tennyson Middlebrook
by Martin Kee

Of all the books I read this year, this one takes the prize as the most original.  Is it a classic fantasy adventure, with monsters, magic, and fairies?  Is it a modern urban apocalyptic sci-fi with strange, invasive alien spores?  Wait, is that a hint of steampunk coming in toward the end?  Can this author possibly tie all these seemingly disparate threads together in a satisfying way?  Yes, my friends, he can, and it is awesome.  Also, mega bonus points for inventing the most biologically satisfying (and frightening) portrayal of the fae folk that I’ve ever read.  If you like your fiction weird and genre-bending, this book’s for you.

The Ghost Bride
by Yangsze Choo

I love everything about this book.  It’s historical and it’s supernatural, but the quality of the storytelling is such that it rises above simple genre descriptions and shines as a unique gem all its own.  It has the sympathetic, poor-but-respectable heroine and the unwelcome betrothal of a classic fairy tale.  It has the ominous hungry ghosts of an unsettling supernatural story.  It has Chinese folk magic.  It has lush, beautiful descriptions that immerse all your senses in the intricately realized landscape and culture of colonial Malaysia.  It has a dangerous quest through a very creepy underworld.  I try a lot of new books on my Kindle, but after I’m finished only a rare few are “shelf-worthy” enough get put on my must-buy list to get a real paper copy because I know I’ll want to revisit the book repeatedly in the future.  This is one such book.  I’m eagerly awaiting the author’s next book, too.

The Little Stranger
by Sarah Waters

I do love a good gothic novel, and this one did not disappoint.  A crumbling English mansion with a tragic legacy.  An unexplained presence that may (or may not) be ghostly.  Incipient madness… or is it just the lingering stress of war, death, and poverty?  Just enough dissonance between the words and actions of the main characters to keep me on edge, wondering about their true motivations. A creepy, suspenseful atmosphere thick as the English fog.  Having loved the author’s earlier novel, Fingersmith, I was braced for a huge plot twist (and had my ideas about what it was going to be), but the twists and resolutions of this book were much more subtle and insidious.  Excellent character development too.  After finishing this book, I immediately went out and bought two more of the author’s books, so that should tell you something!

The Seventh Bride
by T. Kingfisher

I love fairy tales, especially dark ones, so it’s no surprise that I enjoyed T. Kingfisher’s (aka Ursula Vernon’s) retelling of the Bluebeard story.  I loved the charmingly wry and pragmatic writing style and the delightfully grumpy young heroine who (of course!) has an intelligent hedgehog sidekick. For all the horrors and dangers that the heroine encounters during her adventures, the narrative maintains a kind of cheerful nonchalance that kept a perfect balance between the lighter, more humorous aspects of the tale and the darker, creepier ones.  I would read this author for the pleasure of her writing style alone.  The fact that she writes in one of my favorite genres?  Even better!  I’ll be seeking out more of her books in the future.

Ready Player One
by Ernest Cline

It seems like an oxymoron to say so, but this is the most fun dystopian book I’ve ever read.  Set in a bleak future, it’s about an an eighteen-year-old boy competing in a virtual reality world to win a high-stakes contest that could change his life forever… or get him killed.  I’m probably not quite the demographic this book was intended for, since I was never a teenage gamer boy, but I did grow up in the 80s so a lot of the old pop culture references in the contest were familiar for me.  The book is face-paced and suspenseful, and the protagonist encounters plenty of challenges and dangers, yet for a dystopian novel the whole story felt surprisingly upbeat.  This is an adventure designed to delight children of the 80s, gamer geeks, computer nerds, and D&D players.  If you are (or were) any of those, you’re going to love this book.

Bitter Greens
by Kate Forsyth

Exquisitely crafted.  A rich, multi-layered story that weaves together history, fairy tale, passion, suffering, witchcraft, and the lives of several remarkable women.  This complex, thoughtful re-envisioning of the Rapunzel fairy tale captivated me from the first sentence.  The narrative felt fresh and intimate, the characters easily relatable, while still capturing just enough fairy tale magic and plenty of lavish, realistic historical detail from Renaissance Italy and seventeenth-century France.  This book kept me torn between wanting to hurry forward to find out what happened next and wanting to linger over the scenes to stay in the beautiful historic settings longer.

The Girls at the Kingfisher Club
by Genevieve Valentine

As soon as I heard the description of this book, I knew I had to read it.  It’s a retelling of the fairy tale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses set in the Roaring Twenties of New York, complete with speakeasies, jazz music, foxtrots, and the Charleston.  The book sheds the dreamy, distant enchantments of your typical fairy tale and recasts our twelve young heroines in a hard, twentieth-century man’s world of tyranny and seclusion, where the only release they can find is in their secret rebellion:  dancing the night away, incognito, at the town’s glittering nightclubs.  Their desperate thirst for even that tiny slice of freedom collides with stern social expectations and family loyalties in ways that were, at times, heart-wrenching.  Kudos, also, to the author for managing to develop distinct personalities for all twelve girls in such a concise way.