Susannah C. Richards' 3 favorite reads in 2023

When I began to read Matt Haig’s 2020 bestseller The Midnight Library, I paused. Immediately confronted with the realization this work is about mental health issues, I was not certain I wanted to continue reading. However, I am grateful I hit the “resume” button, which eventually confirmed this time-travel work of fiction is whimsical, magical, creative, quirky, thought-provoking, and artful.

The main character, Nora, suffers from acute depression and a lack of self-love. Disenchanted with her current pathway of life, she makes a suicide declaration. In a plot similar to It’s a Wonderful Life, Nora visits a library that offers alternate lives; to “correct” career pathways, mend relationships, pursue lofty dreams, and form new friendships. Yet, altering subtle decisions in new life experiences can have deleterious changes, such as death, conditional love, and negative influences.

Understandably, some readers will not be able to move past the book’s discussion of suicide. But for me, the overarching theme is less about mental health issues and more about promoting a mindset of gratitude instead of listening to an inner voice ruminate about prior mistakes. 

As I began to read Horse by Geraldine Brooks, I was baffled: I expected to immediately be drawn into a cannot-put-the-book-down experience by this Pulitzer Prize-winning author. But, I should have known that the superb writing of the author would first require me to studiously set the time period and character placement perimeters in this 2023 historical fiction.

Woven into three different time periods were topics that consisted of a cast-off painting at a curb-side junk pile, a racehorse whose skills were unparalleled, and a skeleton from a Smithsonian storage.

Additionally, Horse included characters that lived in 1850 – Jarret, the enslaved groom of the racehorse; 1954 – Martha Jackson, an art gallery owner; and 2019 – Jess, a Smithsonian scientist, and Theo, a Nigerian-American art historian student.

While the author’s artful juggling of characters and time periods is impressive, Geraldine Brooks is most masterful with her inclusion of the need for social justice, which begins with a subtle prickling and gradually swells to a declaration of today’s continual unfair distribution of means, power, and resources.  

In 2017, Jason Reynolds introduced the world to Long Way Down, a young adult novel that follows a fifteen-year-old’s sixty-second elevator passage from the seventh to the ground floor. Written in narrative verse, the revenge-seeking teenager meets up with ghosts who press him to decide if he truly wants to use a gun as a means to avenge the murder of his older brother.

It appears the author is using a literary platform to incite the public to WAKE UP! to the cost of gun violence. Yet, how ironic that the very theme of Long Way Down caused the book to be censored, even though it has been bestowed with countless accolades.

Shouldn’t the array of positive reviews and numerous awards override a censorship board?