Stephanie Vanderslice's 3 favorite reads in 2023

I love, love, love a book that keeps me engaged from start to finish and makes me think at the same time. I Have Some Questions for You is the rare book that does precisely that.

Deftly moving between eras—the 90s and the 20teens, the former of which was marked by heart-wrenching tragedy in Bodie Kane's life, she perceptively captures the inner world of the “outsider” at a private school, casting a piercing light on women’s victimization while seamlessly weaving in the #Metoo and Black Lives Matter movements. This book has it ALL—it makes you think on every single page and keeps you turning them. I found myself revisiting my own school memories, thinking about my own #Metoo experiences and differences between then and now. It all fits together as naturally as the air we breathe—never once did any of the issues that arose feel forced into the narrative.

Rebecca Makkai is writing at the height of her powers, knocking another one out of the park. I don’t know how she does it, but each of her books is wildly different from the others, and I consider that a great talent. The Great Believers is one of my favorite books of all time, and I Have Some Questions for You is a completely different book, but it did not disappoint.

How do rural areas fail young women? Monica Potts relentlessly pursues this question in The Forgotten Girls because, while she escaped this particular kind of failure, her best friend did not.

This is an uncompromising look at the challenges of growing up in Clinton, AR, a typical small southern town that soaks its young people in a particular and complex bath of religiosity and rural politics with a generous handful of toxic sexism thrown in. I felt like Pott's burning questions had become my own. How did we get here? How do we stop this and enable young women to pursue their goals and dreams? Why does this happen and what can we do about it? It didn't hurt that I have lived about 39 miles south of Clinton—I have met and taught these women. I know what they're up against.

Even though anyone who reads the reviews knows how it "ended" for the characters, I was completely absorbed by Potts' questioning and her deft integration of memoir and data—I could not put this book down.

David Grann has a unique talent for getting granular with archival research and laying bare the true stories that read stranger than fiction. In this case, the voyage of The Wager was ill-fated from the beginning, and this tale of shipwreck, folly, and mutiny grows more absurd with each page.

It’s an absurdity that mirrors our own times and leads the reader to the realization that every era is as marked by its failures as much as its successes.

Talk about worldbuilding. Grann patiently zooms in and out of the historical contexts through which the story of the Wager plays out so that the reader never doubts the power of hubris in the making and destruction of men and their society.