Recommended Reads of 2022 – Women’s Fiction
Happy New Year! Let’s hope 2023 is a marvelous year for all of us.
2022 had its challenges but I read a lot of great books in the last 12 months and I’m ready to share some recommendations with you here. Last month, I talked about three murder mysteries I loved. This month, I’m talking about three more books that, for want of a better category, I’ll call women’s fiction.
I’m going to start with the latest release from an author I’ve come to love since picking up her Daisy Jones and the Six a couple of years ago. Taylor Jenkins Reid started off writing really clever modern relationship books, definitely in the romance realm. But these days, she writes really BIG stories about women in the spotlight and the way fame for women has changed and yet remained the same between the 1970s and today. But she still manages to convey the same emotional punch that was such a huge part of her earlier books. Perfect, really!
Carrie Soto Is Back (2022) fits this description to a T. That’s T for tennis! Carrie Soto was a character in one of my favorite Taylor Jenkins Reid books, Malibu Rising, and not a particularly nice one. But this book tells her story and makes her a dynamic, charismatic, occasionally self-destructive but always fascinating heroine. Carrie plays tennis the way the boys do and she does nothing to hide her drive and ambition. That would ruffle a lot of feathers now, but in the 1980s, it makes her hated as often as she’s loved. Despite ruffling a lot of feathers, she rises to the top of her profession and then has to negotiate staying there.
It’s lonely at the top and Carrie has a lot of lessons to learn before she can become a star off the court as well as on it. I read this in one gulp and couldn’t help thinking back to pioneering tennis players like Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King and, in particular, Serena Williams as they fought for respect for their sport and for themselves as elite athletes. Well worth a look, even if you’re not a tennis fan.
My second recommendation is a suspense thriller set in the beautiful Southern Alps of New Zealand. Remember Me (2022) by Charity Norman has a wonderfully brooding atmosphere that will stay with you for a long time.
Twenty-five years ago, Leah Parata vanished in the wild mountain landscape surrounding the small town of Tawanui. No trace of her has ever been found and her unexplained disappearance has haunted every member of the community ever since. This feeling of absence and loss permeates the book and gives it a powerful emotional charge.
And it’s not just absence tormenting the denizens of Tawanui. There’s also suspicion. Leah was an experienced hiker who had grown up in the hills. She wasn’t likely to lose her way. Was foul play involved in her disappearance?
When illustrator Emma Kirkland returns to Tawanui to look after her father, the town’s long-time GP, as dementia claims his mind and his life, she becomes increasingly involved in solving the mystery of what happened to Leah. The teenaged Emma was the last person who saw Leah on that fateful day and her brilliant friend’s loss has always tormented her. Until there’s an answer to what happened to Leah, the townsfolk, Leah’s family, and Emma can never be free.
This is the sort of book that works through a slow build. Secrets gradually come out as Emma settles back into her childhood home. Secrets that will shock and frighten and dismay her. The ultimate solution, though, is very satisfying. If you like an intriguing read, this book is for you.
My last choice is a book that took me back to my gothic fiction-mad teenage self, who never picked up a Victoria Holt she didn’t like. The Glass House by Eve Chase (2020) has a similar brooding atmosphere to Remember Me, although this time the beautiful if rather creepy setting is the Forest of Dean in the Welsh Borders in the UK.
Multiple narrators tell a complicated and emotional story about how family can both damage and heal – and in some cases destroy. In 1971, after a mysterious London house fire, Mrs. Harrington and her children relocate to isolated and half-ruined Foxcote Manor where a lot of strange things happen, including the appearance of an unclaimed baby in the woods. Could this be fate providing Mrs. Harrington with a replacement for the infant daughter she lost just before the fire? Or are other forces at work? Through a tumultuous summer, the residents of Foxcote experience love and danger and loss and violence and undergo an ordeal that will leave them all scarred forever.
The events of that long ago summer echo down the years to the present day, but in ways that aren’t immediately apparent either to the reader or to the characters. Again, there’s lots of mystery and secrets and revelations. The threads of this one seem so tangled, I had no idea how the writer was going to solve the puzzles but she does and in such a way that I think this might be one of my best reads from last year. If you like something a bit different and full of intrigue with a really satisfying denouement, I highly recommend this one.