Nine terrible mothers in horror

Katrina Monroe is the author of They Drown Our Daughters and Graveyard of Lost Children.

A private investigator by day, she lives in Minnesota with her wife, two children, and Eddie, the ghost who haunts their bedroom closets.

At CrimeReads Monroe tagged a reading list of "books featuring bad moms, imperfect moms, moms whose sanity slips at the birth of their children. Books that walk the razor-edge of what it means to be good mother." One title on the list:

Good Neighbors by Sarah Langan

Rhea is a good mother. A good wife. A good neighbor. When a new family moves in disrupting the power balance, she will stop at nothing to right this egregious wrong. Except a sink hole has opened up at the center of her world and if she’s not careful, she may just fall in.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Good Neighbors is among Chris Cander's eight novels about dealing with difficult neighbors and Amelia Kahaney's six top coming-of-age mysteries & thrillers.

The Page 69 Test: Good Neighbors.

My Book, The Movie: Good Neighbors.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten contemporary novels inspired by art and artists

For the Royal Academy Connie Sjödin tagged ten top contemporary novels inspired by art and artists, including:

Girl Reading, Katie Ward (2011)

Stand in any gallery and you might find yourself wondering about the story behind a portrait. The thoughts of the sitter, their relationship with the artist — whether one of economy, friendship, or chance — are often left to the viewer to decipher or invent.

In her debut novel, Girl Reading, English writer Katie Ward fills in the stories of seven such portraits, all of women reading – from 14th-century Siena to Angelica Kauffman, and even an image created in the near future. The breadth of historical settings and careful research sit together under the wider question, what does it mean to read a portrait of a woman reading?

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 novels about motherhood

Claire Kilroy is an author and reviews books for the Guardian.

Her novels include All Summer (2003), which won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and Tenderwire (2006), which was shortlisted for the 2007 Hughes & Hughes Irish Novel of the Year Award as well as the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

Kilroy's latest novel is Soldier Sailor.

At the Guardian she tagged ten "novels that capture motherhood in an interesting way," including:

Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Pity poor Toby Fleishman, the good doctor who has put saving lives above getting rich. His ex-wife has done a runner leaving him holding the kids. So far, so Great American Novel. But then, after Rachel Fleishman has been dealt a good sound judging, the writer flips the narrative to include the female perspective and a Greater American Novel is born.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven books that celebrate trees in all of their glory

Amazon Book Review editor Al Woodworth tagged seven books celebrating trees in all of their glory, including:

Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard

We named Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree one of the Best Science Books of 2021, and let me just say, it transcends the category. Suzanne Simard has been studying trees her entire career and what she has discovered is nothing short of extraordinary: through their vast root networks, trees communicate with one another, they warn one another of threats, they learn and adapt their behaviors, they recognize their neighbors, and they sustain one another. Bringing in her own experiences of love and loss, connection and disconnection, Simard’s book is a resoundingly powerful portrait of what it means to live, to survive, and to learn—whether you’re human or a tree, because we’re really not that different, after all.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Top 10 books about being poor in America

Monica Potts is a writer who returned to her hometown in northern Arkansas to work on her new book, The Forgotten Girls.

She is a senior politics reporter for the website FiveThirtyEight. Her previous work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Republic, among other publications, and on NPR. She was a 2015–16 New America Fellow and is a former senior writer with The American Prospect. She lives in Clinton, Arkansas.

At the Guardian Potts tagged ten top books about being poor in America, including:

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

This masterpiece about the US’s racial stratification is an essential book about the country’s poverty. It explains how the US was founded explicitly as a racist system designed to keep the descendants of slaves on the bottom of the social and economic hierarchy, and all of the ways this caste system is perpetuated.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nine top books about shipwrecks

At B&N Reads Brittany Bunzey tagged nine "venerated tales of vessels succumbing to the sea," including:

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann

When two groups of survivors give contradicting accounts of what happened to the shipwrecked crew, an inquest is launched to discover the truth. An incredible story of unruly behavior and unknowable facts, The Wager is a powerful and fast-paced narrative about the British warship and the tragic outcome of its voyage.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Six titles about spiritual disillusionment

Christiana Spens is a writer and artist based in London, with a background in academia. She has published several books in the past, including Shooting Hipsters (2016), The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain (2019) and The Fear (2023), generously supported by The Society of Authors. She has written for Glamour, Stylist, LitHub, The London Magazine, The Irish Times, Architectural Design, Byline Times, Art Quarterly, Prospect, Aeon + Psyche, Flux, Dazed & Confused, The Quietus, and Studio International. Spens wrote her PhD thesis on visual portrayals of terrorists and other political villains in media and fine art, before turning to practicing art herself.

At Lit Hub Spens shared a reading list of her spiritual disillusionment. One title on the list:

Matt Rowland Hill, Original Sins

When I had broken up with my first love at university, the betrayal and disillusionment was so crushing that it felt I had lost my religion; it felt that Earth-shattering. More recently, echoes of that feeling returned, reminding me of that sense of total loss and desolation.

And then I picked up Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill—about the author’s loss of faith and then addiction after a childhood in a fundamentalist family—and found in it a kind of lifeline. When we are brought up in controlling, precarious, chaotic situations, whether it is in a cult, or through being left for one, or in some other way, we have to deal with this crushing loss of faith and love, from the youngest age, before we are remotely equipped to deal with it.

What are the repercussions of this sort of childhood, this philosophical and emotional framework—and how, as individuals, do we find ways to rebuild our lives with true freedom? In these memoirs, each author found reading, or writing, or love, or some combination; the key was in painstakingly creating a new faith and everyday stability despite the ever-present absence of the one we were brought up to want for.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top spine-chilling space books

Jenny Hamilton reads the end before she reads the middle. She reviews for Strange Horizons and Lady Business. At Tor.com she tagged five "books set in space that might or might not be very, very, very full of ghosts," including:

Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji

Adam Oyebanji’s debut SF novel combines two of my favorite things: ghosts in space, and biting depictions of the many ills that arise from the unjust distribution of resources. Our protagonist, Ravi Macleod, is slated to be the first member of his family to attain respectability, just on the eve of what his generation ship calls Braking Day: their arrival at the ship’s final destination of Tau Ceti. To become an officer, all Ravi has to do is keep his nose clean for one more semester—except that he starts to see visions of a girl with unbound blonde hair floating helmetless outside the ship. Nobody who spends any time in zero-g keeps their hair loose around their shoulders, and more importantly, space will for sure kill you if you’re not wearing a helmet. [Unless you are General Leia Organa.]

Ravi’s haunted not only by the impossible floating girl, but by the specter of the all-powerful AIs the Archimedes fled Earth to avoid. AIs are super illegal on board the Archimedes, and the ruling class have no plans to change that when they reach Tau Ceti. Except that if Ravi wants to find out what’s going on with his ghost girl, he’ll have to make use of his cousin Boz’s illegally created AI. Braking Day has some debut novel–typical pacing problems, but it’s a fun read that left me eager for more books by this author.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books featuring English & British monarchs

At the Waterstones blog Mark Skinner tagged "ten titles featuring English and British monarchs from authors who are themselves national institutions," including:

The Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor

Murder and intrigue abound in the shadow of the Great Fire of London in the gripping first Marwood and Lovett mystery, as Taylor masterfully evokes the seventeenth-century capital through period detail and walk-on parts for Christopher Wren and King Charles II.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven historical novels with mysteries at their core

Chanel Cleeton is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick Next Year in Havana, When We Left Cuba, The Last Train to Key West, The Most Beautiful Girl in Cuba, and Our Last Days in Barcelona.

Her new novel is The Cuban Heiress.

At CrimeReads she tagged "seven historical novels feature page-turning mysteries that will transport you to the past and keep you guessing until the end." One title on the list:

The Shadow Land by Elizabeth Kostova

When Alexandra Boyd travels to Bulgaria and discovers an urn filled with human ashes, she embarks on a quest to return the ashes to the deceased man’s family and becomes embroiled in a mystery that takes her back through the country’s dangerous history. Richly detailed and filled with haunting prose, The Shadow Land proves that sometimes untangling the events of the past can be the greatest mystery of all.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five top books for tree-lovers

At the Amazon Book Review Chris Schluep tagged five favorite books about trees, including:

Barkskins by Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx’s Barkskins is an epic, multigenerational novel of dynasty building and, ultimately, ecological and cultural destruction. It’s really quite a work of art—big, sprawling, and a little heartbreaking. Beginning in the 1600s, the book tracks the lineage of two French immigrants, Charles Duquet and Rene Sel, who arrive in the Canadian region of New France looking for a better life. Sel marries a Mi’kmaq woman and they have children. Duquet founds the beginnings of a vast timber empire. The book follows generations of Sels and Dukes (nee Duquets), eventually concluding in 2013. The vast forests of North America are the key to both families’ futures, and the forest itself becomes a character in the novel, bringing wealth, taking lives, and slowly dwindling. While the book’s length and character count require much from the reader, it remains taut and compelling throughout. Barkskins a book lover’s book. And, apparently, also a tree lover’s book.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven haunting ghost stories by Black women writers

Soraya Palmer is a Flatbush-born-and-raised writer and licensed social worker who advocates for survivors of gender-based violence who are facing criminal charges related to their abuse. She has been interviewed for her work against police brutality, gentrification, and violence in The New York Times and BuzzFeed News. She has been awarded a residency at Blue Mountain Center. She lives in New York. The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts is her debut novel.

At Electric Lit she tagged "seven contemporary Black women authors who have continued [the] long tradition of Black ghost storytelling," including:

What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons

In Zinzi Clemmons’ novel, Thandi and her father grieve their mother, who has died of cancer. Clemmons weaves seamlessly between moving anecdotes of grieving her dead mother, meditations on racism, and original chartings of the seven stages of grief.

At one point, Thandi tells us that “The most important aspect of the ghost is the need that creates it.” The protagonist makes the decision to create a ghost out of her mother in order to help herself grieve, showing us that loneliness can create the feeling of haunting, whether it physically exists or not.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue