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Hi hello and welcome to my first post of 2023! This is not only my first blog post of the year but a celebration of my 9th year of blogging! I cannot believe that it has been almost a decade since I've been a part of the book blogging community. I've had some ups and downs throughout the years but I have never lost my love of blogging about books. I hope that 2023 is much easier on me so that I can continue to blog and share even more amazing posts with the community. Thank you so much if you've ever commented, read, shared, or anything in between. I can't wait to see what this year has in store and I hope you'll stick around to see! Now, for today's post, I'll be sharing the best books that I read in 2022. I read 92 books (which is incredible for me) but I'll be talking about my top 10 favorites. Let's get started!
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Just as a side note before I begin, these aren't in any particular order until the top 3!
From Claire C. Holland, a timely collection of poetry that follows the final girl of slasher cinema - the girl who survives until the end - on a journey of retribution and reclamation. From the white picket fences of 1970s Haddonfield to the apocalyptic end of the world, Holland confronts the role of women in relation to subjects including feminism, violence, motherhood, sexuality, and assault in the world of Trump and the MeToo movement. Each poem centers on a fictional character from horror cinema, and explores the many ways in which women find empowerment through their own perceived monstrousness.
It should have been the perfect summer. Sent to stay with her late mother’s eccentric family in London, sixteen-year-old Joan is determined to enjoy herself. She loves her nerdy job at the historic Holland House, and when her super cute co-worker Nick asks her on a date, it feels like everything is falling into place. But she soon learns the truth. Her family aren’t just eccentric: they’re monsters, with terrifying, hidden powers. And Nick isn’t just a cute boy: he’s a legendary monster slayer, who will do anything to bring them down. As she battles Nick, Joan is forced to work with the beautiful and ruthless Aaron Oliver, heir to a monster family that hates her own. She’ll have to embrace her own monstrousness if she is to save herself, and her family. Because in this story, she is not the hero.
Bexley Laughtery lives a very unassuming life in Old Oaks, where secrets fast become dangerous. Unease grows as women are found murdered. Trails run cold for Detective Bishop as he is cuffed with bureaucracy trying to piece the city back together. While some believe they know the party responsible, every new answer leads to further questions. Bexley and other students keep a watchful eye as they participate in fraternity games and social politics. When she finds herself in the camera’s flash, Bexley soon discovers everything comes at a price when the monster they're looking for lurks closer than she could ever imagine. The game is survival. Things get complicated when romance, friendship, and loyalty get involved – and they aren’t playing fair.
After suffering a tragic loss, eleven-year-old Ollie who only finds solace in books discovers a chilling ghost story about a girl named Beth, the two brothers who loved her, and a peculiar deal made with "the smiling man"--a sinister specter who grants your most tightly held wish, but only for the ultimate price. Captivated by the tale, Ollie begins to wonder if the smiling man might be real when she stumbles upon the graves of the very people she's been reading about on a school trip to a nearby farm. Then, later, when her school bus breaks down on the ride home, the strange bus driver tells Ollie and her classmates: "Best get moving. At nightfall they'll come for the rest of you." Nightfall is, indeed, fast descending when Ollie's previously broken digital wristwatch begins a startling countdown and delivers a terrifying message: RUN. Only Ollie and two of her classmates heed these warnings. As the trio head out into the woods--bordered by a field of scarecrows that seem to be watching them--the bus driver has just one final piece of advice for Ollie and her friends: "Avoid large places. Keep to small."
Claire Kovalik is days away from being unemployed—made obsolete—when her beacon repair crew picks up a strange distress signal. With nothing to lose and no desire to return to Earth, Claire and her team decide to investigate. What they find at the other end of the signal is a shock: the Aurora, a famous luxury space-liner that vanished on its maiden tour of the solar system more than twenty years ago. A salvage claim like this could set Claire and her crew up for life. But a quick trip through the Aurora reveals something isn’t right. Whispers in the dark. Flickers of movement. Words scrawled in blood. Claire must fight to hold onto her sanity and find out what really happened on the Aurora, before she and her crew meet the same ghastly fate.
Delilah Green swore she would never go back to Bright Falls—nothing is there for her but memories of a lonely childhood where she was little more than a burden to her cold and distant stepfamily. Her life is in New York, with her photography career finally gaining steam and her bed never empty. Sure, it’s a different woman every night, but that’s just fine with her. When Delilah’s estranged stepsister, Astrid, pressures her into photographing her wedding with a guilt trip and a five-figure check, Delilah finds herself back in the godforsaken town that she used to call home. She plans to breeze in and out, but then she sees Claire Sutherland, one of Astrid’s stuck-up besties, and decides that maybe there’s some fun (and a little retribution) to be had in Bright Falls, after all. Having raised her eleven-year-old daughter mostly on her own while dealing with her unreliable ex and running a bookstore, Claire Sutherland depends upon a life without surprises. And Delilah Green is an unwelcome surprise…at first. Though they’ve known each other for years, they don’t really know each other—so Claire is unsettled when Delilah figures out exactly what buttons to push. When they’re forced together during a gauntlet of wedding preparations—including a plot to save Astrid from her horrible fiancé—Claire isn’t sure she has the strength to resist Delilah’s charms. Even worse, she’s starting to think she doesn’t want to.
Sixteen-year-old Georgia Richter feels conflicted about the funeral home her parents run--especially because she has the ability to summon ghosts. With one touch of any body that passes through Richter Funeral Home, she can awaken the spirit of the departed. With one more touch, she makes the spirit disappear, to a fate that remains mysterious to Georgia. To cope with her deep anxiety about death, she does her best to fulfill the final wishes of the deceased whose ghosts she briefly revives. Then her classmate Milo's body arrives at Richter--and his spirit wants help with unfinished business, forcing Georgia to reckon with her relationship to grief and mortality.
And now, let's talk about my top 3 books of 2022!
Florence Day is the ghostwriter for one of the most prolific romance authors in the industry, and she has a problem—after a terrible breakup, she no longer believes in love. It’s as good as dead. When her new editor, a too-handsome mountain of a man, won’t give her an extension on her book deadline, Florence prepares to kiss her career goodbye. But then she gets a phone call she never wanted to receive, and she must return home for the first time in a decade to help her family bury her beloved father. For ten years, she’s run from the town that never understood her, and even though she misses the sound of a warm Southern night and her eccentric, loving family and their funeral parlor, she can’t bring herself to stay. Even with her father gone, it feels like nothing in this town has changed. And she hates it. Until she finds a ghost standing at the funeral parlor’s front door, just as broad and infuriatingly handsome as ever, and he’s just as confused about why he’s there as she is. Romance is most certainly dead . . . but so is her new editor, and his unfinished business will have her second-guessing everything she’s ever known about love stories.
When I picked this book up, I assumed it would just be a cute romance, maybe with some ghosts or something. What I didn't expect was that I would find one of my new all-time favorite books and one of my favorite books of the year. When I say that I loved this book, I mean it with my whole heart. It was exactly what I thought it would be, which is a cute romance. But it tackled things like loss and finding who you are and what your voice is, as well. The Dead Romantics was an absolutely beautiful book and it actually made me cry several times! I can't even remember the last time I cried over a book, but this one got me. There were so many quotes/lines in here that felt like they were written just for me to read, and I'd love to share some of them.
"Love was putting up with someone for fifty years so you'd have someone to bury you when you died."
"Love was a high for a moment that left you hollow when it left, and you spent the rest of your life chasing that feeling."
"There's a certain smell to death."
"I'd always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing. But I was wrong. Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost- it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn."
"I'd always written how grief was hollow. How it was a vast cavern of nothing. But I was wrong. Grief was the exact opposite. It was full and heavy and drowning because it wasn't the absence of everything you lost- it was the culmination of it all, your love, your happiness, your bittersweets, wound tight like a knotted ball of yarn."
"Because loneliness was the kind of ghost that haunted you long after you were dead. It stood over your plot in the cemetery where a lone name sat carved in marble. It sat with your urn. It was the wind that carried your ashes when no one claimed your body."
"There were no happily ever afters between an undertaker's daughter and her ghost."
"There were no happily ever afters between an undertaker's daughter and her ghost."
"Love wasn't a whisper in the quiet night. It was a yelp into the void, screaming that you were here."
"She told me that you don't ever lose the sadness, but you learn to love it because it becomes a part of you, and bit by bit, it fades. And, eventually, you'll pick yourself back up and you'll find that you're okay. That you're going to be okay. And eventually, it'll be true."
"Ghost stories never had happy endings."
"Because ghost stories were just love stories about here and then and now and when, about pockets of happiness and moments that resonated in places long after their era. They were stories that taught you that love was never a matter of time, but a matter of timing."
Laila's a bubbly waitress at a small-town diner. Jeremy's a rogue supernatural hunter with a dark past. When they meet, sparks don't just fly but catch aflame. Her sunshine merges with his dark sky, and it's as though the rest of the world disappears. But he can't rope a human girl into his dangerous life. No matter how much he wants her, no matter how much she wants him, he can't risk her life. Except... Maybe she isn't the defenseless little flower he thought she was.
Okay, okay, hear me out. I know this should be one book, but this is my list. I came across a TikTok from an author earlier in 2022 who was searching for ARC reviewers, and she mentioned Charlie Nottingham was also looking for reviewers. I got approved to read an ARC of Spades by Charlie and instantly fell in love with her writing and world-building! So of course, like any sane person, I started my journey of reading every previous book that she had published. I also got an ARC of Raven's Cry, which is set in the same world as all of her other books, and devoured it immediately. I read through her entire backlog of books and am happy to say that I have found a new favorite author. I just fell so in love with her writing and the world she has built and these books mean the absolute world to me in so many ways. I have a ton of quotes saved from all of these books (seriously, there are so many books) so I won't share a ton, but maybe these will allow you to see a glimpse of why these books are so amazing.
"But that’s how every pivotal moment starts out. Just another day. You never know when your entire world is about to change."
"To grow, to be strong, we have to survive the storms. We hate the rain as it falls, but without it, everything that grows will wilt."
"It’s funny how when something awful happens, people view us as the result of something awful instead of the powerful, badass survivor the awful forced us to become. They act like we’re something to be pitied and cared for. But we don’t want pity. We don’t want thoughts or prayers. We don’t want to hear people say, “I’m sorry you had to go through that.” We want people to say, “I’m glad you lived to tell the tale.” And then to shut their god damned mouths."
"You’re a writer, you have to write. Passions give us purpose and if you’re forgetting what that is, put the pen to paper and you’ll remember. Even if you think you don’t want to, once you start, you know you won’t want to stop."
"It’s funny how when something awful happens, people view us as the result of something awful instead of the powerful, badass survivor the awful forced us to become. They act like we’re something to be pitied and cared for. But we don’t want pity. We don’t want thoughts or prayers. We don’t want to hear people say, “I’m sorry you had to go through that.” We want people to say, “I’m glad you lived to tell the tale.” And then to shut their god damned mouths."
"You’re a writer, you have to write. Passions give us purpose and if you’re forgetting what that is, put the pen to paper and you’ll remember. Even if you think you don’t want to, once you start, you know you won’t want to stop."
"You wish you were as strong as me. You wish you had a fraction of the strength women have. That’s why you degrade us down to a single organ."
"Love is like a gaseous compound in the empty wonders of outer space. It can’t be limited to one small box because it expands endlessly in every direction. There’s always infinite room for it to grow. It doesn’t in any way lessen the love that’s already taking up space. That love simply morphs together to create something larger, complex, and even more beautiful."
"Love is like a gaseous compound in the empty wonders of outer space. It can’t be limited to one small box because it expands endlessly in every direction. There’s always infinite room for it to grow. It doesn’t in any way lessen the love that’s already taking up space. That love simply morphs together to create something larger, complex, and even more beautiful."
"It occurred to me that trauma isn’t just the moment that it occurs, it’s damage to the way your mind works every day for the rest of your life afterwards."
"Experiencing trauma does not excuse inflicting the same on others."
"But love is not always simple. Love can be complicated. Love can cause wars. Love can save nations. Love is at the root of all things—good and evil. Sometimes it’s a sweet tale. Sometimes it’s one of heartbreak. Sometimes it is one of intricacy. It has no bounds. It has no rules. There are standard ideas of what we expect love to be, but it is different for everyone who feels it."
"But love is not always simple. Love can be complicated. Love can cause wars. Love can save nations. Love is at the root of all things—good and evil. Sometimes it’s a sweet tale. Sometimes it’s one of heartbreak. Sometimes it is one of intricacy. It has no bounds. It has no rules. There are standard ideas of what we expect love to be, but it is different for everyone who feels it."
All Rob wanted was a normal life. She almost got it, too: a husband, two kids, a nice house in the suburbs. But Rob fears for her oldest daughter, Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her too much of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice. Callie is worried about her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely and speaks of past secrets. And Callie fears that only one of them will leave Sundial alive. The mother and daughter embark on a dark, desert journey to the past in the hopes of redeeming their future.
This may or may not be a surprise but Sundial is my favorite book of 2022. I was initially hooked by the cover (I mean, how could you not be, it's stunning) and the synopsis definitely had me interested. And then I read it. And I struggled. And by the time I finished, I was in tears because I knew I had just read something special. I don't experience the feeling that I had once I finished reading Sundial very often, so I knew that this was the book that would end up being not only my favorite read of the year but a new all-time favorite. What's crazy is I initially gave this a 4-star rating because I struggled at the start. This is easily a 5-star read, if only because I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since I read the final word. The writing was some of the most beautiful and effective writing that I've read in quite some time, and some of my favorite quotes I've ever read have come out of this book. Sundial is not for the faint of heart as it deals with some intense topics such as animal abuse/torture/death, loss of pregnancy, and abuse, but it's also an incredibly beautiful book. As soon as I finished, I told my mom that she had to read it when it came out because, beneath the carefully built layers that make up this book, this is a story about a mother reconnecting with her daughter. It's brutal, horrifying, and bloody at times. But it's also heartbreaking, memorable, and strangely hopeful.
"I don't know what it's like for other people but love and nausea are often indistinguishable to me."
"Living is enough. It is so intense and painful."
"It's cold inside the MRI machine. Narrow, cold and full of noise like ghosts knocking on your coffin."
"It's possible to feel the horror of something and to accept it all at the same time. How else could we cope with being alive?"
" Everyone has one story that explains them completely. I thought I knew what mine was. I was wrong- I am in it, here and now. This will be the choice that defines me. The decision tree unfolds before my eyes, the terrible fruit at the end of each branch."
"Everything comes around the dial in the end."
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"Living is enough. It is so intense and painful."
"It's cold inside the MRI machine. Narrow, cold and full of noise like ghosts knocking on your coffin."
"It's possible to feel the horror of something and to accept it all at the same time. How else could we cope with being alive?"
" Everyone has one story that explains them completely. I thought I knew what mine was. I was wrong- I am in it, here and now. This will be the choice that defines me. The decision tree unfolds before my eyes, the terrible fruit at the end of each branch."
"Everything comes around the dial in the end."
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And that's it for my top 10 books of 2022! I know this post is a little late, but I'm really happy to finally get to share these with you. Having read almost 100 books in 2022 was such a wonderful experience and narrowing it down to only 10 was definitely a challenge, but these books are some of my all-time favorites now and I feel so lucky to have been able to experience them. I'd love to know what some of your top books of 2022 were so leave me a comment below and share a few! Did you read any on this list and if so, what did you think of them?
Before I go, I just wanted to thank you once again. Doing this for nine years has been such a treat and I am so grateful for any and all support that I've had from the amazing book community. I hope to be able to continue doing this for ten more years and I can't wait to see what 2023 has in store.
Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you in the next chapter!
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