Top 11 Reads of 2020
Welp. That year was… unexpected.
In the months since the bottom dropped out of the world, upending the ordinary lives we were all leading, I’ve done a lot of reflecting. While my reflecting in particular, like 2020 in general, has proven to be more full of uncertainty than decision, I did arrive at one concrete conclusion: had someone written a book in which the events of 2020 transpired, no one would have believed it.
But, here we are. We survived the toilet paper shortage. We purchased our masks. We applied - and re-applied - our hand sanitizer.
Honestly, while 2020 didn’t go the way I would have preferred, I do think there is a lesson to be learned. I think we have all proven to ourselves just how much we can handle. We have faced unavoidable change and modified our lives to accommodates the needs of ourselves and others.
You certainly won’t be surprised to hear that one of the things that helped me make it through this year — maybe not unscathed but at least unscarred — is my library of books.
In reviewing my reads, I found so many that I will reflect upon fondly. The sheer quantity of books I adored this year made building this list even more difficult than in years past.
But build it I did.
Here are the 11 books released in 2020 that I think you absolutely need to check out.
Have you read any of them?
11. The Wrong Family
by Tarryn Fisher
Release Date - December 29, 2020
Publisher - Graydon House
Genre - Domestic Thriller
Juno lives a cozy life, but not a solitary one. Though she technically lives alone, her residence is snuggled up next to the stately Seattle home of the Crouch family.
To outsiders, Winnie and Nigel Crouch would appear to have it all. They, along with their teenage son, Sam, make up a happy family of three — at least that’s what Juno assumed when she first made their acquaintance. But living in such close proximity has proven her initial impressions incorrect.
Now Juno knows how fractured Winnie and Nigel’s marriage really is. She hears them argue in the night. And the more she surreptitiously listens in to what they almost certainly assume are private moments the more certain Juno becomes that the couple is hiding deeper, darker secrets that even she has yet to unearth.
Why You’ll Love It: Overflowing with authentically surprising twists and delightfully flawed characters, this novel is absolutely unputdownable.
10. The Happy Ever After Playlist
by Abby Jimenez
Release Date - April 14, 2020
Publisher - Forever
Genre - Contemporary Romance
It’s been two years since Sloan’s fiance, Brandon, died unexpectedly and she has spent almost every minute of it in a purgatory of her own making.
She’s tried to move on. She’s tried to build a life that, while different from the one she had planned, is still fulfilling. But her efforts have proven fruitless. She simply can’t get past her loss. Though she doesn’t want to forget Brandon, the pain associated with remembering him is paralyzing.
But then, just as unexpectedly as she lost Brandon, a new man enters her life. Or his dog does, at least. While sitting in traffic, a pup that is adorable as he is incorrigible pops drops through her sunroof and into her life.
Though Sloan’s initial attempts at reaching the dog’s owner are met with failure, she does ultimately connect with Jason, the puppy parent who was out of the country and unaware of his dog’s disappearance.
When Jason pops back into the picture, Sloan expects to hand off the doggy — to whom she has, unfortunately, grown attached — but things don’t work out quite so tidily. It only takes a little bit of texting — and a lot of relatively shameless flirting — for the pair to realize that they share more in common than just a love for this now co-owned dog.
But there is a truth about Jason that Sloan doesn’t know yet. A truth that will complicate, and potentially shatter, not just the fragile relationship that they have started to build, but also Sloan’s recently reassembled heart.
Why You’ll Love It: Like The Friend Zone, Jimenez’s debut and the first novel in this series, The Happy Ever After Playlist is somehow both hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. Readers will root for Sloan and Jason as they navigate the realistic challenges that threaten to rob them of the happy ending they so deserve.
9. The Boy From The Woods
by Harlan Coben
Release Date - October 20, 2020
Publisher - Grand Central
Genre - Domestic Thriller
Wilde knows nothing about his early history. He knows only that he was found, alone, in the woods in 1986.
Officials could only guess at his age, placing him between six and eight years old. And Wilde himself could be of no help. Though he could speak and he was able to read, he knew neither how he acquired those skills nor how he came to live in the woods.
All he knew was that, as long as he could remember, he had been scavenging off the land and breaking into homes, providing for himself in a way that no young child should have to.
Fortunately, Wilde had a friend to help him transition into living in structured society. A boy he had met and played with in the woods prior to his discovery, named David.
David’s mother, Hester, a powerful though not yet prominent attorney, was understandably reluctant to believe her son’s tales of his friend in the woods. So she was as surprised as anyone when the boy her son had spoken of materialized and the mystery of his origins came to light.
Though it has been 30+ years since Wilde was found, the bond he built with David never weakened. So when David died in a tragic car accident, leaving behind a widow and a son, Matthew, Wilde understandably felt honor-bound to watch over them.
For Matthew, the difficulty of growing up fatherless has been tempered by the presence of both Wilde, a surrogate father, and Hester, a brash grandmother who tells it like it is everywhere — including on her cable news TV show Crimstein on Crime.
So when a classmate, Naomi, goes missing, Matthew knows immediately to whom he should turn. And when he shows up in his grandmother’s TV studio, she can tell something is seriously wrong.
Knowing that it must be important if Matthew is coming to her for help, she enlists the assistance of the eponymous Boy From The Woods, Wilde. Though much has changed in the three decades since he was plucked from the woods, Wilde remains an incredibly intuitive, uniquely skilled individual who can see clearly what others cannot.
But as Hester and Wilde work in tandem to find out what happened to Naomi, they discover that nothing is as it seems. Yet they persist, despite the powerful forces working against them and the inherent danger associated with continuing to ask questions that someone doesn’t want you to have the answers to.
Why You’ll Love It: In typical Coben style, this novel is easy to devour. Adding to its charm is the ripped-from-the-headlines feel of this plot, which borrows from some of the real-world drama that applied tensions this year.
Check out our full review, here.
8. Hide Away
by Jason Pinter
Release Date - March 1, 2020
Publisher - Thomas & Mercer
Genre - Domestic Thriller
We meet Rachel Marin on the worst day of her life: the day she loses her husband.
Following this loss, we immediately fast forward half a decade.
Despite the passage of time, Rachel isn’t healed.
She’s changed — forever, probably — by this loss.
In the intervening years, she’s done her best to raise her two children as the single mother she never planned to be. When she wasn’t doing that, she was developing herself.
Changing herself from the soft, feminine, passive woman her husband knew to the hard, muscled, selectively aggressive woman she feels she must become in order to prevent another disaster from befalling her family.
Along with changing herself, Rachel relocated her family, leaving behind the ritzy Connecticut suburb in which she previously lived and moving to a far-flung suburb of Chicago.
In moving, she wanted not only a fresh start, but also a new, safe place to raise her children. But her confidence in the town’s safety is tested when Constance Wright, the former mayor, is found dead under a bridge, her body shattered on the hard frozen ice that, in just a few months, would be flowing water that may have cushioned her fall.
Rachel quickly realizes that, though this looks like a suicide, it’s likely anything but. And, newly obsessed with the concept of justice and the very Quantum-Leap-y idea of putting right what once went wrong, she gets involved.
But her involvement isn’t welcome.
The detectives assigned to the case, seasoned and world-worn John Serrano and his partner, acerbic and brutally honest Leslie Tally, certainly don’t want a civilian anywhere near their investigation.
Despite their attempts to steer Rachel back into her lane, she won’t be dissuaded.
She knows that someone murdered Constance.
She knows that that someone is still out there.
And she knows that, without her help, this case might go cold before the killer is ever found.
She’s so driven to solve the case, in fact, that she never stops to ponder whether finding Constance’s killer is really worth putting her family at risk all over again.
Why You’ll Love It: Rachel Marin is a bad-ass protagonist who sets this novel apart in a market packed full of thrillers. Her rich backstory, sassy personality, and drive to protect the family she has left make her impossible not to root for and result in a book that is hard to put down.
Check out the full review, here.
7. Tiny Imperfections
by Alli Frank and Asha Youmans
Release Date - May 5, 2020
Publisher - G.P. Putnum’s Sons
Genre - Women’s Fiction / Contemporary Romance
In her youth, Josie Bordelon had positioned herself on an upward trajectory, intrepidly leaving behind the comfortable life she shared with her Aunt Viv is San Francisco and coast-hopping all the way to NYC to attend college.
Once there, she was quickly talent-scouted and recruited as a model.
A dream come true, really.
But life can turn on a dime, Josie learns first hand, when she unexpectedly finds herself pregnant.
This complication eventually results in her returning to San Francisco and taking on a very new — though still fulfilling — life working at the private school for which was one of the two poster brown children for the many years she attended.
Though Josie still finds a thrill in her job — she still loves the kids and cherishes the strong community she is instrumental in building — she’s finding herself increasingly disillusioned with her life. This disillusionment is amplified in no small part by her complete lack of love life and her impending empty-nester status — as her daughter, a senior, will soon be off leaving her own mark on the world.
So she must redefine her life.
Reimagine her world without her daughter such an ever-present figure in it.
Realize, once and for all, what she really wants.
And, perhaps most essentially, prepare herself to let loose the daughter whose very existence has defined so many aspects of her life.
Like many of the quests in her life, this is one she never signed up for. But at 39, she’s far too young to be put out to pasture. Fortunately for Josie, this year — while still rife with the minitua of education she has become so competent in managing — will be full of (mostly) wonderful surprises.
Why You’ll Love It: This surprisingly sweet story about love and life and family will surprise and delight readers — and speak specifically to the hearts and frustrated souls of educators — it isn’t one to miss.
Check out the full review, here.
6. The Other People
by C.J. Tudor
Release Date - January 28, 2020
Publisher - Ballantine Books
Genre - Domestic Thriller
As Gabe drives home from work one day, he finds himself preoccupied with worry. He is going to be in trouble with his wife, he knows. He had promised to get home early enough to spend quality time with his daughter, Izzy, but now thanks to traffic — and to other factors outside of his control — he won’t be.
But then, he sees something that changes everything.
In a beat-up, bumper-stick-plastered, car in front of him he spots a young girl.
She looks scared.
She looks helpless.
She looks like his daughter.
Gabe’s concern amplifies quickly when he decides that the little girl he has spotted doesn’t just look like his daughter, she is his daughter.
And she sees him, too.
And she’s saying something.
“Daddy.”
His cellphone nearly dead and no charger in sight, he tries to follow the car, weaving dangerously through the London traffic, determined not to let the vehicle in which his daughter is trapped escape.
All too quickly, though, it becomes clear that, despite his best efforts, he won’t be able to keep up with this car. So, against his better judgement, he pulls off at a rest area and calls for help.
But there will be no help that day.
Or for years.
And now, three years later, Gabe is doing all he can think to do: traveling up and down the stretches of highway that surround metropolitan London, stopping at rest areas and hunting for answers that it seems increasingly likely he will never find.
Though his quest seems futile, even to Gabe himself, he continues, certain that, eventually, he will find something.
And then, he does.
A cryptic figure who Gabe knows only as “The Samaritan” directs Gabe to a lake.
A lake in which Gabe finds the car that he failed to catch all those years ago.
And, in that car, there is a body.
Why You’ll Love It: In a marked departure from her previous two novels, Tudor layers mystery upon mystery in this tightly written thriller. With uncertainty abounding, readers will be kept in suspense until the very last page.
Check out the full review, here.
5. The Sun Down Motel
by Simone St. James
Release Date - October 20, 2020
Publisher - Berkley Books
Genre - Psychological Thriller
Though Viv Delaney had her sights set on New York City when she left home, pretty much penniless and entirely without a plan, she only ever made it as far as upstate New York.
It’s not surprising, really, given everything working against her. A young woman, on her own, without money, in the technology desert that was 1982, the odds were certainly not in her favor.
Determined not to go home, she takes a job working overnights at The Sun Down Motel, an ill-conceived highway-side lodging option nestled against the sleepy upstate town of Fell, New York. Though, in 1982, The Sun Down is relatively new, it’s already had a storied history.
Deaths.
Disasters
Disappearances.
The Sun Down has seen it all.
And at night, when the lights are low and the outside spookily calm, Viv sees it, too.
Braver than most, Viv doesn’t allow these apparitions to scare her away from The Sun Down. Quite the contrary, she somehow finds herself drawn even closer to this spooky motel.
They can’t hurt her, she thinks.
She doesn’t realize how wrong she is, until the night she disappears.
Now, over thirty years later, a new young woman — very much like Viv — arrives in town.
Prompted by the recent death of her mother — Viv’s sister — Carly has abandoned her life and her plans and come to upstate New York to do something she didn’t feel like she could do when her mother was alive: find out what happened to the aunt she has never known.
Desperate for answers that are certainly not forthcoming, Carly takes a job at The Sun Down, working the same shift her aunt worked all those years prior.
One thing she learns quickly is that Fell, New York, in general, and The Sun Down in particular, are rich in secrets.
There are, clearly, truths someone is desperate to keep hidden.
And the closer she gets to finding the answers she seeks, the more she begins to realize that, if she keeps pushing, she might suffer the same fate as Viv did all those years ago.
Why You’ll Love It: This creepy, atmospheric novel is equal parts thriller and ghost story. This intoxicating combination makes it incredibly memorable and impossible irresistible.
Check out the full review, here.
4. You Can Go Home Now
by Michael Elias
Release Date - June 23, 2020
Publisher - Harper
Genre - Psychological Thriller
If cop-centric TV and novels are to be believed, everyone who becomes a cop has some serious baggage. And Nina Karim is no exception.
Long before becoming a homicide detective in Queens, Nina lived in upstate New York. Her youth was relatively idyllic. Until the day when, while sitting at the dinner table with her brother, Sammy, she witnessed her father take a sniper’s bullet to the brain.
It wasn’t just her father that died on that day, it was also the comforting sense of normalcy that had typified her childhood.
Now bent on ensuring that justice is served for everyone — and, most specifically, for the “cowardly bastard” who shot her father, a man for whom she still searches — Nina immerses herself fully in her work. So logically when, while going through cold case files and discovering what may very well be a murderous trend, she digs deeper.
With her instincts finely tuned, Nina notices what no one else noticed: a pattern in the seemingly patternless pile. With some minor digging, she finds that a number of the murder victims in these long-gone-cold cases had a history of inflicting abuse on their romantic partners. And their battered significant others all sought shelter at a well-hidden, closely guarded sanctuary called Artemis.
Could it be, Nina wonders, that someone in Artemis is just as set on vengeance as she is?
There is only one way to know, she decides.
She has to go in.
Why You’ll Love It: While the plot is definitely compelling, it’s the writing itself that sets this novel apart. A soothing sea of surprisingly lyrical prose, readers will want to sink deep into this Elias novel.
Check out the full review, here.
3. Pretty Things
by Janelle Brown
Release Date - April 21, 2020
Publisher - Random House
Genre - Thriller
Nina was, perhaps, born to be a grifter. The daughter of a woman who never met a fool she couldn't scam, it was grifting that put food on the table during Nina’s childhood.
Nina’s mother, Lily, initially tried to shield her daughter from the harsh ways of the world. But by the time Nina reached adolescence, Lily knew that keeping her illicit occupation secret from her daughter wasn’t a realistic goal.
Fortunately for Nina, it was around this time that Lily was invited to the principal’s office and informed that her daughter was special.
Nina was gifted.
She was deserving of extra attention.
She had profuse potential that, if harnessed properly, could allow her to have a life the likes of which Lily could never dream.
Newly committed to setting her daughter up for a life far different from her own, Lily arranged to move to the Pacific Northwest. There, Lily told her daughter, was a school that would help Nina fully realize her capabilities.
So the pair relocated to the ritzy and seasonal Lake Tahoe.
And it was in Lake Tahoe that Nina met Benny, the only son in a wealthy family who lived in an impressive and expansive mansion called Stonehaven.
Though his wealth might have been what Lily would have noticed first, Nina just noticed that, like her, Benny Liebling was different. And it was this mutual deviation from the norm that induced the pair to form an ill-fated and tenuous friendship.
Unfortunately, it was to be short-lived. Before Nina knew it, she would leave Tahoe. And along with abandoning the town, she would abandon any aspirations of grandeur Lily might have temporarily instilled in her.
Though she’s changed a lot since her youth, Nina has never stopped thinking of the Lieblings.
She’s tried to keep up with the family. And Benny’s older sister, Vanessa, makes it easy by oversharing her life on social media.
It’s because of Vanessa’s oversharing that Nina knows both that Benny’s father has died and that Vanessa is now living in Stonehaven, the grandiose mansion that has retained the enigmatic draw it had all those years ago.
And it is also because of Vanessa’s oversharing that Nina, now a grifter herself, knows just how to acquire the money she needs to pay for the expensive cancer treatments that the now-terminally ill Lily needs to extend her life: by going back to Lake Tahoe and stealing from the Lieblings.
But Vanessa won’t be the easy mark Nina expects her to be. Her life hasn’t been as perfect as it seems. She isn’t the spoiled little rich girl, easily tricked and thrown aside, that Nina was hoping would be the only thing standing between her and the Leibling fortune.
In the end, it will be a battle of wills between these two distinctively different through decisively strong women.
And it is unclear who will be victorious.
Why You’ll Love It: This novel read like one of those Netflix originals that you hope never ends. Readers will delight in become immersed in the rich world that Nina and Victoria inhabit and will find themselves torn between these two robust protagonists.
Check out the full review, here.
2. Followers
by Megan Angelo
Release Date - January 14, 2020
Publisher - Graydon House
Genre - Women’s Fiction
You’re just shouting into the void if you don’t have followers.
This is a lesson that aspiring writer, Orla, learns — in a rather more abrupt fashion than I did — when she moves to New York City in the early 2000s and tries to make a go at crafting a literary career.
Although she aspires to write a novel — and works to achieve this goal with a medium-level commitment — she also has to pay the bills. So she takes a job as a blogger for a women's blog — Lady-ish.
It's not long into her tenure as a hard-hitting reporter, publishing exposes on important topics like Which Celebrity Maybe Got Lipo (according to a doctor who has neither treated nor met them) and Which Kardashian is Most Likely to Actually Spit on a Panhandler, that she comes to a realization. Suddenly she sees that it’s less critical that you be important than it is that you appear important.
As luck would have it, about the same time, she starts rooming with Florence — or, “Floss” as she likes to be called, because given names are for bitches.
Floss has moved to NYC with one goal: to become significant.
And, towards this end, she spends all of her waking time — which, for the record, is usually between the hours of 6pm and 5am — attending parties in outfits that cover as little of her body as possible and making herself visible to the people who, in her perception, matter most.
When Orla realizes that her CraigsList-selected roommate has this goal she rather rapidly comes to the realization that their relationship could be a symbiotic one.
So Orla and Floss start working in tandem.
When Floss goes out, Orla reports on it.
When Floss posts a video, Orla amplifies it.
And when Floss’s followers start to grow, Orla celebrates it.
But this is just half of our story.
In the temporally distant future — more than 4 decades after Orla and Floss began their dual effort to make Floss famous — lives Marlow.
Marlow has, from a very young age, lived in Constellation, California.
And, in Constellation, only one thing really matters: your followers.
Everyone in Constellation is a personality, followed in real-time by people around the globe.
Their lives are choreographed, their relationships planned, their stories pre-determined by writers who sit in a room, sipping stale coffee while they literally fucking play God.
Because Marlow has never really known a different life, she’s never thought to push back against the forces that try to keep her on her prescribed path.
But when a new plot-point is thrown into her story — one that will irrevocably change Marlow’s life — she feels stifled, suffocated, surrounded by people less concerned with her as a human and more concerned with her as a product.
Suddenly Marlow is no longer satisfied to play her prescribed role. She needs to escape from it all. But, when the whole world thinks they know who you are, can you ever really break free from that image?
Why You’ll Love It: A fiction novel with surprising depth, this fiction debut will leave readers contemplating the connections that strip us of our anonymity.
Check out the full review, here.
1. Truths I Never Told You
by Kelly Rimmer
Release Date - April 14, 2020
Publisher - Graydon House
Genre - Domestic Thriller / Women’s Fiction
A new mother to a child for whom she subjected herself to infertility treatments, Beth should be happier than she's ever been. But, like too many new mothers, she isn't.
Instead, she finds herself struggling with what decades ago would have been minimized as the “baby blues” but what we now know is a serious, debilitating, medical condition, postpartum depression.
As it would turn out, Beth isn't the first female in her lineage to suffer from postpartum depression. In fact, her own mother — a woman of whom she has few memories, having lost her when Beth was young — also struggled profoundingly at the hands of this frustrating psychological condition.
Beth doesn’t know this, though. Nor do her three siblings, all of whom missed their mother following her death in a car accident, but felt lucky to be raised by such a strong, competent father.
Now, though, their time with their father — the only parent they have ever really known — is drawing to a close. Not only is he in the throws of heart failure, but also his mental condition is rapidly deteriorating, leaving him unable to care for himself.
Though Beth has enough on her plate, she is desperate for anything to distract her from the dissatisfaction she feels in her role as a mother. So, when their father relocates to a nursing facility, she latches on to an opportunity to busy herself and volunteers to tackle the daunting task of cleaning out their childhood home.
It isn’t long into the project that Beth realizes she’s in for more than just sifting through abandoned memorabilia and decades outdated clothes.
Several days into the task, she finds that the attic, a cavernous space that her father had always kept tidy, isn’t as she’d remembered it. Not only has her father, in his unnoticed descent into dementia, left the space almost impassably messy, he’s also accidentally abandoned some things she’s never seen. In fact, they are things that her father never wanted her to see.
Scattered around the attic, she finds notes from her mother. After reading them, she’s left with more questions than answers as the messages written on these tattered bits of yellowed paper strongly suggest everything she and her siblings believed to be true about their mother, in fact, isn’t.
Why You’ll Love It: Exploring complex and controversial issues with heart and honesty, this Rimmer read might be her best to date and definitely deserves a place on your 2021 TBR.
Check out the full review, here.
