Steve Piacente's 3 favorite reads in 2025

• 2023
• 2024
• 2025

Given the blank canvas and infinite palette, many authors, perhaps hankering for a blockbuster movie deal, choose romantasy, thrillers, or sci-fi. Monica Wood finds her thrills – and ours - in everyday folk. The owner of a beauty shop. The district manager for a dental supply company.

So it is in, “My Only Story,” where Rita Rosario inserts herself into another family’s tragedy as she seeks fulfillment in her own life.

You might be thinking, hmm, pass, doesn’t sound like much. If so, revise your thinking. Wood is an insightful storyteller with a gift for making the routine feel extraordinary. No wasted words. Incredibly original. If you read or write a lot, you’ll spot it instantly.

Pick nearly any page. Rita thinks of the sound of her lover’s old car as a “balm.” Her sister is having a meltdown. Her man gives her a wide berth, “as if she were a breed of animal he wasn’t familiar with.” Her sister lifts her arm and three bracelets shimmy down, “making the sound of a dragging chain.”

I feel readers like Wood because she makes them think of their own lives. She asks questions of her characters as a tough reporter would interview a source. Something happens and we need a deeper understanding. The journalist fires the question, the source answers. And why does that matter? Another answer, followed by the same question.

Five more iterations and we’ve got it. And then the light shines. The trick then is to assemble it all into an order that maintains interest, delivers a satisfying ending, and provokes thinking beyond the last page. It is a trick Wood has mastered.

Each of us at times has felt isolated or disconnected. What does it take to pull us out of it? Sometimes reconnecting happens in ways that are unexpected. When we look back, we see we couldn’t have mapped out the path back with the most sophisticated GPS.

Then again, we’re not Monica Wood, who in, “The One-In-a-Million Boy” connects dots and lines between places and people so adroitly, we end up looking back at our crucial crossroads, the choices that have led us to where we are today.

One in a Million seems early as if it’s going to be a sad book. I found the opposite. I found that Wood gives hope to those who feel alone. Through her characters, she suggests we will likely find purpose and bridges in the most unlikely places. An 11-year-old boy and a 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant? Come on. And yet…

Will Ona Vitkus reach her Guiness world record? Finding out is well worth your time.

This novel opens in a women’s prison in Maine, a setting that suggests one kind of story but delivers another entirely. “How to Read a Book” is really about second chances, guilt’s long shadow, and finding a way back from tragedy through the power of stories.

As Anne Lamott has said, “Plot grows out of character. If you focus on who the people in your story are, something is bound to happen.”

Monica Wood does this as well as anyone. You can almost picture Wood having long conversations with Violet, Harriet and Frank that lead to the twists and turns that make this book so memorable. We don’t naturally root for this trio until we understand what they’ve been through.

I also imagine Wood as a scientist at a microscope, dialing the big picture down to its tiniest details until we get to the very beginning. She refuses to settle for anything cursory or unexplained. It must make sense. It must track for the reader, who may come up with the same questions.

Though Voltaire was right when he said, “The best way to be boring is to leave nothing out,” Wood puts everything in, and it is anything but boring.