We asked our reviewers to send in their favourite reads of 2023. Some will be those they read for review, but others might not be.
Here are the first two. Any links are to reviews of the books on the Reading Time website. Happy holidays.
Susanne Gervay
Her Majesty’s League of Remarkable Young Ladies by Alison D. Stegert is a Victorian romp. There’s interesting information like the first ever fax machine and Queen Victoria’s antics, but overall is a fun read especially for the heroines of the past. Good reads for 10-12. (not released in Australian until March 2024)
The Book of Wondrous Possibilities by Deborah Abela. Love, love, love it. Arlo Goodman lives with his Uncle Avery in a run-down flat above their bookshop. He has no friends, except for his pet mouse, Herbert. But when a girl called Lisette bursts into the shop and begs him to hide her from a murderer, Arlo’s life changes forever. He has to battle a great enemy, who threatens to destroy everything he loves. Crammed full of magic, adventure, mystery, danger, and amazement it a perfect Christmas read for 10-12.
Margot Hillel
The Pickpocket and the Gargoyle by Lindsay Eager. I love the fact that it is a multi-layered book with changes in narrator, place and time. It’s about loyalty and choices and about what makes a family. The characters are real and easy to relate to, even the book is set in the past. One of these, the gargoyle of the title, is, even though anthropomorphic and narrating parts of the story in the first person, is also believable and evokes sympathy from the reader. The story revolves around a gang on homeless children who hustle, thieve and pickpockets in order to stay alive.
We could be Something is the latest work from Will Kostakis. I was delighted to see that it has been shortlisted for the 2024 Victorian Premier’s Awards. It is a complex and moving book following the intertwined lives of two boys. The book explores multiple themes, including what makes a family – the two boys live in very different families. I love the authenticity of the narrative voices and the way the book effortlessly explores themes of coming out and coming of age as well as love, friendship, sexuality and illness. And as is always true with Kostakis’s work, his characters are strongly drawn, multi-layered and convincing.
The English Understand Wool is a novella by Helen de Witt. This is an adult book though I am sure many YA readers would enjoy it. It was published in 2022 but I only had the pleasure of reading it this year. It is an absolutely delightful tale – a mixture of satire, character study and mystery. It centres around Marguerite, a seventeen year-old who is writing a memoir of her rather bizarre childhood where the most important thing to her mother seems to be avoiding mauvais ton (bad taste) something she instils in Margeurite. But in fact we find that her mother is not at all what she seems and Margeurite is left alone in a London hotel room meeting not her mother, but a detective.
