Hi, everyone. Welcome to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. In this post, I will be talking about my favorite books of 2022. Here goes:
1. The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd
This book is the story of women during the time when Jesus lived. More specifically, the women whose stories got lost in history because there is no one to tell them. It is more common for men to tell the story of other men, whilst women are cursed by oblivion. So Ana, Jesus’s wife, tries to be the one to tell those stories; stories that, as Ana buries her books at the end, will get lost sometime throughout the history of mankind but which will inevitably be found again.
There are two things that I liked about this novel: Jesus’s humanity and Ana’s struggle to have her say in a world devised to silence her. This is the first book I read that doesn’t portray Jesus as the son of God but as a man, like any other, trying to find work and sustain his family. A man who goes away for work (and later, to preach) weeks on end, leaving his wife alone. And Ana, while he is gone, suffers the dislike of the woman who was supposed to have been Jesus’s wife instead of her (but whom he rejected), the death of her own daughter, and later, the torment of knowing that her husband has been betrayed, captured, and killed. Through all this, however, Ana finds solace in the women around her, especially her aunt Yaltha and her friend Tabitha. And this is the best part of the novel. The relationships of the women, and how they support and comfort one another to survive in a time, place, and culture that wants to silence them. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in reading it.
2. War Lord by Bernard Cornwell
This is the final installment of The Last Kingdom series, and I really liked it. It is the story of the bloody battle that finally united all the kingdoms of Britain and made Alfred’s dream of Englaland a reality. Here the kingdoms in the North unite as one to defeat the power of Wessex, (Mercia, and East Anglia) and Uhtred is caught in the middle trying to defend his home. This book is fast-paced, action-packed, and a very satisfying ending to the entire series. Uhtred is an awesome character, and his friendship with Finan, like I said before, is one of the best things of the entire story. And because of that alone, I know that I will very likely read this series again in the future. It is one of my favorites of all time.
3. The Faithful And The Fallen by John Gwynne
Malice, the first book of The Faithful and The Fallen, is John Gwynne’s debut novel, and it introduces us to The Border Lands, a broken world in which its God, Elyon, has all but vanished. Now Asroth, who was once imprisoned by Elyon, and his forces, the Kadoshim, are stirring again. And the only one who can defeat them is the Bright Star.
This book (and the rest of the series) is a prototypical example of The Chosen One trope. But ultimately, it is also about a war between good and evil; between the forces of Elyon, led here by Corban, and those of Asroth, led by Nathair. Malice (specifically) is also a coming-of-age story where we see Corban grow up and begin his training as a warrior.
Personally, I thought that Malice was the weakest book of the series. For starters, it took me a while to figure out who was who in the story. We are introduced to a vast array of characters, and it is important to figure out who is a bad guy and who is a good guy in order to understand what is going on. There is no in-between. Either you fight for Asroth or you fight against him. Yes, the author is starting to build his world here, but there were times when I thought that he went into way too much detail than was necessary and at other times when he just fast-forwarded in time without saying much about what happened in the meantime. This happened in every character’s POV but it was most noticeable in Veradis’s chapters. For example, in one chapter Veradis is only just beginning his training in Nathair’s warband and in the next, where he’s the POV, he’s already one of the prince’s best warriors and is training newbies. This was very jarring for me, and it took me a while to get used to. Corban’s storyline in this book is also very slow, and sometimes it bored me.
My favorite character (of the whole series) was Maquin. His storyline is harrowing and no other character in the entire series suffers as much as he, but I liked how despite it all Maquin still had something to live for at the end. The relationships between the characters is something else worth reading too; for example, the relationships between Corban and Gar, Maquin and Kastell, Corban and Brina, and especially the romance between Maquin and Fidele. However, there were also those (un)expected pairings that I would have liked to see more of. When we are introduced to Coralen, for example, it is obvious that she is going to end up with Corban but their romantic relationship isn’t explored much. And for all of us character-driven readers, sometimes this is more important than the plot itself. After all, we already know how the story is going to end. Another romance that is hinted at during Book 3 and 4 is that between Veradis and Cywen, but if we don’t see much of Coralen and Corban, we see even less of Veradis and Cywen. And honestly, I would have liked to. I hated the first guy she wanted to marry.
I recommend this series to anyone who loves epic fantasy. The four books in this series are Malice, Valour, Ruin, and Wrath.
4. The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn
This book is a fictional account of Lyudmila Pavilchenko’s life, a woman sniper with 309 kills to her name in the Russian army during the first few years of WWII. The book centers primarily on Mila Pavilchenko’s visit to the White House in 1942 as part of a delegation sent by Stalin to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to aid Russia against the Germans in the front.
And though we do follow Mila Pavilchenko first as she learns to shoot and later as she enlists in the Army when war breaks out, this book is primarily about Pavilchenko’s life in the Army and how she defends her country against Germany’s invasion of Russia. We also witness, however, important milestones in Mila’s personal life and we see her fall in love not once but twice throughout her years at the front. But her greatest love, no matter who she was married to (she had three husbands throughout her lifetime, one she despised and two that she deeply loved while married to each), was her son, and despite all the time that she spent at the front, she never forgot about him and fought tooth and nail to go back to him. I however really liked how the author wrote her relationship with the two men she fell in love with (I’m a sucker for romance).
I admit, I didn’t use to read books about WWII before, but this author got me into them. Maybe it was because I hadn’t yet found a book (or author) that I liked or maybe it was because I mostly read history about medieval and ancient warfare, and not contemporary warfare, I don’t know. But after first reading The Rose Code and then The Diamond Eye by this author, I found myself interested in reading more books about WWII and have now read some very good books, both nonfiction and fiction, about this period of the 20th Century. I will talk about a couple more in my upcoming wrap up. However, I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes to read books about WWII.
5. Obsidian and Blood by Ailette du Bodard
TW: violence, gore, and death. I found this series on a whim. I had just finished reading Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (read my full review here) and I wanted to read something set in Mexico and its pre-Columbian history that I would enjoy more. And this series became an instant favorite. The protagonist is Acatl, the High Priest of Mictlantecuhtli, the God of Death, turned into a reluctant detective tasked with looking into the disappearance of a priestess (in the first book). This who-du-it storyline is solved by the end of the first installment but all three books are interconnected somehow and I really liked how the author makes the world of Tenochtitlan come alive in her writing. The Aztecs’ way of life was heavily influenced by religion and the author doesn’t let you forget that. She brings the gods’ grievances with one another to the forefront of the story, and it is up to Acatl to figure out what on earth is going on. I recommend this series to anyone interested in mysteries in unconventional settings, but I do warn them that it isn’t for the faint of heart. In Aztec culture, human sacrifices were the norm and the author doesn’t shy away from that here. And because the protagonist is the High Priest of the God of Death, death is prominent in this story as well.
The three books in this series are Servant of the Underworld, Harbinger of the Storm and The Master of the House of Darts.
6. The Riyria Revelations by Michael J. Sullivan
This series is extremely popular with fantasy readers, and I was seeing it everywhere for a while there. I will start by saying though that I don’t like books about thieves all that much, and there have been popular series’ about them that I DNF’d, among them The Gentlemen Bastards by Scott Lynch, The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman and the ever popular YA series The Queen’s Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. So it took me a bit though to pick this series up because I wasn’t sure if I was going to like it, but eventually I did. And I don’t regret it. The Riyria Revelations is superbly written and the bromance between Royce and Hadrian is hard to beat. I really enjoyed their relationship and camaraderie, and I definitely did not see the end coming. In fact, it took me a bit to finish Book 3, The Heir of Novron, because I didn’t want the story to end. Granted, there were parts of the story that didn’t stick with me as much as others (for example, Royce and Hadrian’s time on the ship in Book 2) but I was pleasantly surprised by the way the author finished the story, and this series is now one of my favorite fantasy series ever and definitely worth a reread later.
This series consists of Theft of Swords, Rise of Empire and Neir of Novron.
7. Los Recuerdos del Porvenir by Elena Garro
The period of Mexican history that this book touches upon is the period after the Mexican Revolution when all of its heroes, amongst them Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Francisco I. Madero, y Felipe Ángeles have been betrayed by Victoriano Huerta and killed. Now Plutarco Elías Calles is President of Mexico. However, Mexico is still at war. This time against Calles and his famous Calles Law, which intended to limit the participation of the Church in public life and to implement secular and anticlerical articles in the Constitution of 1917. During The Cristero War, as the war that this new law prompted is known and which is named after those fighting for the right to worship Christ, churches were closed, and priests were both persecuted and executed.
Ixtepec, the town-narrator of Recollections of Things to Come, relates how the war came to disrupt the lives of its inhabitants upon the arrival of General Francisco Rosas to its brothel, and how his appearance began a reign of terror in its streets. The town and its residents, however, stop time and create an illusion to thwart the general’s game of death and reality and eventually Rosas gets lost in that illusion. However, the fluidity of time also causes the people of Ixtepec to become a recollection of things to come for as long as time endures.
This book is magic realism at its finest, and I really loved it.
8. La Amortajada by María Luisa Bombal
Translated as The Shrouded Woman, this book is the story of Ana María as she reminisces on her life the evening of her wake when she sees (because she can see) who has come to sit next to her coffin and pay their respects. This way Ana María reminisces about her relationships with Ricardo, her first love, with her father and the death of her mother years before, with Fernando, the man who loves her but whom she does not love and yet cannot cut loose, with her daughter in-law, María Griselda, the most beautiful of women, and finally, Antonio, her husband, who loved her deeply early in their relationship but who cheated on her with countless women by the end. Ana María sees all of these people stand vigil next to her coffin, and it is through this remembering of life that the dead woman will learn to let go and accept death. The death of the dead. I loved this book.
That is everything for today. Thank you for reading. My next post will be about my most surprising books of 2022.
