Nine coming-of-age stories about girls who do bad things

Alison Wisdom's new novel We Can Only Save Ourselves "follows the disappearance and radicalization of one 'perfect' teenage girl, told from the perspective of the town she left behind."

At Electric Lit, Wisdom tagged nine pieces of literature that explore the dark side of girlhood, including:

You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott

No one writes about the psyches and complexities of teenage girls like Megan Abbott; this entire list could have been comprised solely of her fantastic novels. But I could only pick one, and as a mother who has logged many hours watching her gymnast daughter work out, I had to go with this one: Katie Knox and her husband Eric have made their daughter Devon, an exceptionally talented gymnast, the center of their world—everything revolves around Devon’s training and their shared Olympic dreams. Devon herself is steely, icy, wholly apart from her peers in the gym and at school; she is untouchable, and, as Katie learns, unknowable. When a member of their gymnastics community is found dead, everyone is shocked, but Katie watches Devon absorb the event with a cool detachment, and Katie worries about what that means about Devon and about herself as a parent. As the book unfolds, we see how Devon’s ambition, which serves her so well in the gym, is its own kind of darkness, and her parents must confront their own complicity in that. Like [Celeste Ng's] Everything I Never Told You, You Will Know Me explores the horrifying reality that all children remain, to a certain degree, strangers to their parents.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five fantasy heroines that fight systems of oppression

J. Elle was born in Houston, Texas, and is a first-generation college student with a bachelor’s in journalism and MA in educational administration and human development. An advocate for marginalized voices in both publishing and her community, J. Elle’s passion for empowering youth dates back to her first career in education. She’s worked as a preschool director, middle school teacher, and high school creative writing mentor. In her spare time, she volunteers at an alternative school, provides feedback for aspiring writers, loves on her three littles, and cooks up dishes true to her Texas and Louisiana roots. Wings of Ebony is her first novel.

At Tor.com she tagged five favorite fantasy heroines that fight systems of oppression, including:

Bad Witch Burning by Jessica Lewis (2021)

Favorite line: “I don’t have the luxury of being a good person.”

Bad Witch Burning is a YA contemporary about Katrell, a Black teen battling poverty, who can talk to the dead. She starts a side business to make money, allowing people to commune with her loved ones for a bit of change. But when she accidentally raises someone from the dead, she sees a shiny new way to upgrade her hustle (read: make a lot more money). But, the deeper she leans into her new gig the more she realizes all that costs—that to truly change her she might have to confront the darkness in herself.

This book is a game changing read. Katrell isn’t the typical sword wielding heroine taking on the system. And that’s my favorite part of this book. This is a keenly perceptive YA debut explores the adultification of teen Black girls, mental health, domestic abuse, all wrapped up in a thrilling page-turner about a Black teen in a fight for her life against a product of systemic oppression: poverty. Lewis seamlessly blends fantasy elements in a contemporary setting with a voice that makes you sit up in your seat. There are horror elements but accessible for non-horror readers. There’s necromancy, revenants. This book is haunting, but not just in the way you might think. Contemporary readers, fantasy lovers, horror and gothic STANs, this book is your next obsession. You will be up all night, compelled to devour it in one sitting.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the most dynamic detective duos in crime fiction

Joanna Schaffhausen wields a mean scalpel, skills developed in her years studying neuroscience. She has a doctorate in psychology, which reflects her long-standing interest in the brain—how it develops and the many ways it can go wrong.

Her new book, Every Waking Hour, is the fourth book in her heartpounding Ellery Hathaway mystery series.

At Publishers Weekly Schaffhausen tagged ten of her favorite dynamic detective duos in crime fiction, including:

Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs

Jeffrey Deaver’s detective pair is unusual in that Rhyme is a brilliant forensic analyst who also happens to be paralyzed and house-bound after suffering a serious injury on the job. NYPD detective Amelia Sachs does the fieldwork as the two combine to investigate diabolical serial offenders like the villain in The Bone Collector, their first appearance together. Lincoln and Amelia’s intellectual interplay and growing personal connection has remained strong through 14 books, and the intricate plotting keeps readers coming back for more.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about children fending for themselves

Una Mannion’s debut novel is A Crooked Tree.

At the Guardian she tagged ten books in which "the dramatic force of the children portrayed is not their weakness but their strength, their ability to resist and sometimes to forgive." One title on the list:

My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout

“We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash,” says Lucy, reminiscing about her childhood during which her family lived in a garage until she was 11. They were set apart not just because they were poor but by an emotional poverty with parents unable to express affection and who routinely neglected and humiliated the children. They are locked in the truck while the parents work. Her brother is humiliated by the father on the town’s main street. Despite this difficult and lonely childhood, shadowed by ill-treatment and the suggestion of abuse, years later when she is sick on her hospital bed: “It was the sound of my mother’s voice I most wanted.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

My Name Is Lucy Barton is among Hannah Beckerman's top ten toxic families in fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten titles that explore true crime obsession

Eliza Jane Brazier is an author, screenwriter, and journalist.

If I Disappear is her adult debut.

At CrimeReads, Brazier tagged ten favorite novels that explore true crime obsession, including:

Truly Devious, Maureen Johnson

Citizen Detective: Stevie Bell, a true crime superfan who enrolls in the mysterious Ellingham Academy intent on solving a notorious cold case.

Crime: The kidnapping of the wife and daughter of Ellingham Academy’s founder, Albert Ellingham. Ellingham was a notorious tycoon who wanted to build a school “where learning is a game.” So, he packed it with riddles, twists and garden mazes.

Fandom: True Crime fan Stevie uses her knowledge to track the cold case when one of her housemates is murdered. This cold case just turned hot! Can Stevie solve the crime and keep her head above water at the mysterious academy, where even murder feels like a game?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten of the best female assassin books

Vernieda Vergara is a freelance writer who specializes in comics, entertainment, and literature.

At Book Riot, she tagged ten female assassin books about death, justice, and survival. One title on the list:

SPIDER’S BITE BY JENNIFER ESTEP

The first installment of Estep’s long-running Elemental Assassin series introduces us to Gin Blanco. Gin’s family was murdered when she was a child, landing her on the streets. Many people do all sorts of things to survive when in that situation. Gin chose to become an assassin. But when her latest job ends up being a trap, she must use her lethal skills to uncover the people responsible—and more importantly, why they chose to target her.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six stories for fans of beautiful Australian Gothic

Kathleen Jennings is an illustrator and writer based in Brisbane, Australia. As an illustrator, she has won one World Fantasy Award (and been a finalist three other times), and has been shortlisted once for the Hugos, and once for the Locus Awards, as well as winning a number of Ditmars. As a writer, she has won two Ditmars and been shortlisted for the Eugie Foster Memorial Award and for several Aurealis Awards.

At Tor.com she tagged six favorite stories for fans of beautiful Australian Gothic, including:

Tales From Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan (2008)

Shaun Tan is far from under-recognised as an illustrator (most recently winning the Kate Greenaway award for Tales from the Inner City—the first BAME author to do so). However he is viewed primarily as an illustrator and artist, and the books he writes—being heavily illustrated—are frequently labelled as children’s books. But he has always been a writer and teller of speculative fiction, and the Kate Greenaway-award-winning book would be better categorised as a collection of masterfully cool—and occasionally achingly bleak strange speculative fiction, half glimmering post-apocalyptic dreamscape, half longing, urban-weird folk-horror.

But the preceding collection, Tales from Outer Suburbia, is a warm, effusively illustrated collection of deeply affectionate—if extremely unexplained—tales, and a number of the stories in it are either squarely Australian Gothic or increase in fascination if you read them that way. These include a family scrabbling to survive in a hostile Australian landscape who discover a secret hidden in the walls of their house—and what the neighbours might know about it (“No Other Country”), children in a magpie-stalked suburb encountering a forbidding neighbour and the ghost of a pearl diver (“Broken Toys”), a distinctly Australian urban development haunted by the presence of inscrutable terrors watching through the windows (“Stick Figures”), judgements passed and witnessed by a court of the voiceless (“Wake”), and the fearsome inexplicable loveliness of nameless night-time festivals (“The Nameless Holiday”), and how people in a landscape of backyards and watching neighbours choose to live when in the immediate shadow of a potential apocalypse (“Alert but not alarmed”).

The Australian-ness is clearly identified in the layered, textured, bounding artwork; the doublings and secrets and hauntings are indisputably Gothic. But they are beautiful, all these stories: painterly and allusive, deceptively slight and enormously resonant, bird-filled, haunted by the possibility of joy, the ghost of understanding. (I recommend writers spend a little time studying what Tan does in his illustrations—the exuberant and ominous textures, the references and hints and possibilities and all the narrative techniques that appear in the art, let alone the accompanying prose). While Tales from Outer Suburbia is littered with silvery flecks of loss, there’s a warm, impossible, grand (sometimes terrifying) beauty at the core of (or wilfully and relentlessly ornamenting) what could in other hands be merely grim.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six top academic mysteries

Edwin Hill is the Edgar- and Agatha-award nominated author of Little Comfort, The Missing Ones, and Watch Her.

[Q&A with Edwin Hill]

At CrimeReads. he tagged six favorite academic mysteries, including:

Gaudy Night, Dorothy L. Sayers (1935)

I teach a course called Women Crime Writers as part of the Emerson College MFA program. Sayers’ novel was the first book I added to the syllabus (paired with her fantastic essay, “Are Women Human?”). Set in Oxford’s Shrewsbury College, the novel focuses on Lord Peter Wimsey’s occasional partner, Harriet Vane, who returns to attend a gaudy (a reunion of sorts) expecting to be called out for having been accused of murder (in 1930’s Strong Poison). Instead, Harriet has a blast – and snarks on plenty of her fellow alums herself – only to have the event marred by a series of malicious pranks, including a poison pen letter, graffiti, and vandalism. Harriet then calls on Wimsey to solve the crime.

This is by far my favorite of Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels, if only because it’s more of a Harriet Vane novel, and she’s a much more interesting character for me. It’s too bad that Sayers abandoned the series after one more book (1937’s Busman’s Honeymoon). Who knows what Harriet could have done if she’d been given her own novel?

Read about the other entries on the list.

Gaudy Night is among Ruth Ware's six favorite books about boarding schools, Kate Macdonald's top ten conservative novels, and Anna Quindlen's favorite mystery novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight titles about mothers separated from their daughters

Eman Quotah grew up in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, and Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Toast, The Establishment, Book Riot, and other publications. She lives with her family near Washington, D.C.

Her new "novel, Bride of the Sea, tells the story of Hanadi, a daughter separated from her father when her mother, Saeedah, abducts her. In the end, though, the true rift is with her mother." (That's not a spoiler.)

At Electric Lit, Quotah tagged eight books about mothers separated from their daughters, including:

Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Margo Crane’s mother disappears from their rural Michigan home one day, leaving only a note. After surviving rape and family violence, 16-year-old Margo flees in the teak rowboat her grandfather bequeathed her, embarking on a river odyssey that leads her to her mother and then away again. Margo’s life current pushes her toward her own motherhood; in the story’s coda, a pregnant Margo floats in the river, “a paradise for a girl swollen up the way she was.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven chilling snowy thrillers

British-born Allie Reynolds is a former freestyle snowboarder who swapped her snowboard for a surfboard and moved to the Gold Coast in Australia, where she taught English as a foreign language for fifteen years. She still lives in Australia with her family. Reynolds’s short fiction has been published in women’s magazines in the UK, Australia, Sweden, and South Africa.

Shiver is her debut novel.

At CrimeReads, Reynolds tagged seven of her favorite chilling winter thrillers. One title on the list:

In Lee Child’s 61 Hours, a tour bus crashes on an icy road in a savage snowstorm. Jack Reacher is one of the passengers who finds himself holed up in a freezing South Dakota town. Trouble finds Reacher, like it always does, and the small town has sinister goings on for him to investigate. Reacher braves the arctic conditions without a coat in a fight for justice against someone who is determined to stop him.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about spirit mediums

Laura Purcell is the author of The Silent Companions, The Poison Thread, and The House of Whispers. She worked in local government, the financial industry and a bookshop before becoming a full-time writer. She lives in Colchester, the oldest recorded town in England, with her husband and pet guinea pigs. Fascinated by the darker side of royal history, Purcell has also written two historical fiction novels about the Hanoverian dynasty.

Her latest novel is The Shape of Darkness.

At the Guardian, Purcell tagged her top ten books about spirit mediums, including:

Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel

No one writes about the dead better than Mantel. She breathed new life into the bones of Thomas Cromwell and the Wolf Hall Trilogy was full of gothic touches, but this earlier work is on another level. It tells the tale of spirit medium Alison and her toxic relationship with her manager, Collette, who inhabit a drab, threadbare life very like a ghost land in itself. They jazz up the concept of life after death to make it more palatable for their audience, however, the real fiends haunting Alison are obscene and bleakly horrific.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Beyond Black is among Jess Kidd's ten essential supernatural mysteries and Sarah Porter's five top books with unusual demons and devils.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten feminist retellings of mythology

Christine Hume is the author of an experimental memoir in the form of three interlinked essays, Saturation Project (2021), as well as three books of poetry. Her chapbooks include Lullaby: Speculations on the First Active Sense; Ventifacts; Atalanta: an Anatomy; a collaboration with Jeff Clark, Question Like a Face, a Brooklyn Rail Best Nonfiction Book of 2017, and A Different Shade for Each Person Reading the Story. She recently curated and introduced two issues, on #MeToo and on Girlhood, of the American Book Review.

Since 2001, she has been faculty in the Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University.

At Electric Lit, Hume tagged ten "modern stories that turn patriarchal folklore on its head," including:

Under Everything by Daisy Johnson

Daisy Johnson’s Under Everything hijacks the Oedipus cycle with fairy tale riffs and fingerings. Her Jocasta-figure steps from the shadows into a visceral presence; her Oedipus is trans. The novel’s gorgeous prose immerses us in fluidity—gender, sexuality, memory, language—yet that very mutability, its queer, abolitionist currents, determines “everything” eternally.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue