Best Books I Read in 2020:

This year I read 59 books.  These are what I consider the best of the list (in the order I read the books).

1.     Oddkins by Dean Koontz (1988) Grand Central Publishing
Disguised as a children’s tale about a magic toy maker's death and the quest of his magic toys to find the new toy maker who is across the town.  Their adversaries include some newly awakened toys made by the previous, evil, toy maker.  At the same time, the heir of the toy maker who thought his uncle was ridiculous and wants to sell the toy shop is pursued by a man who was just released from prison who wants to buy the shop to make more evil toys.  The turning point comes when the nephew sees the magic toys on their journey being pursued by the evil toys.

2.     Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds (2017) Atheneum
Written in verse, this tour-de-force follows a boy whose brother was just shot and killed.  As he takes the elevator down from his apartment, after having retrieved his brother’s gun, he is met at each floor by ghosts of others in his family who have also died by gunshot; his uncle, a girl he knew at a playground, his father, even the young man who killed his father, and his brother.  They all ask him why he thinks he needs a gun.  And it ends with that question still open.
This book won honors from Newbery, Coretta Scott King, Prinz, and won the Walter Dean Myers Award and The Edgar for Best Young Adult Fiction.

3.     A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (2011) Candlewick Press
Frequently a book is simply better than the movie.  In this case it’s better written and so much darker.

Conor lives alone with his mother, who is dying from cancer.  She’s been getting treatments, but they’re failing to make her better.  His father lives in America with his ‘other family’.  Conor has been having nightmares every night.  In the churchyard across the field from their home is a yew tree.  One night, it comes to life and walks to Conor’s bedroom.  In the movie, it feels like an adventure.  In the book, it’s another nightmare.  Especially the fourth story, the one from Conor, the truth.

I could not read this without hearing Liam Neeson’s voice as the monster.

A note on authorship.  Mr. Ness has written a masterful work based on the idea of another writer, Siobhan Dowd, who died before she could write the book.  He could have taken all the credit, but he has made a point of citing her as originating the story.

4.     A Study in Scarlet Women by Sherry Thomas (2016) Berkley
An interesting variation on the Sherlock Holmes stories.
Charlotte Holmes has an extraordinary mind.  She has no interest in becoming married to a man.  So after her father reneges on his promise to pay for the education that she might become independent, she intentionally loses her maidenhead to a married man.  That way he cannot be forced to marry her and her worth as a prospective bride is dashed in the eyes of any other man.  Then she ‘runs away from home’ determined to establish herself.  Unfortunately things do not go as planned.  A childhood friend, who is now a Lord, tries to watch out for her, but that only brings anger.  She ‘happens’ upon an ex-actress who is a widow, whose name turns out to be Mrs. Watson.  It is she who concocts the scheme of fronting a ‘sick’ Sherlock Holmes, whose sister, Charlotte, takes messages to him.  This book highlights three murders which happen to be inter-related.  In the end, a mysterious man seems to be behind it all.  His name is Moriarity.
Well written, mixing a pure mystery with the gothic romance flavor of the late 19^th century.

5.     Egg and Spoon by Gregory Maguire (2014) Candlewick Press
A masterpiece that creeps up on you.  Two young girls in Russia – one, a peasant, Elena, whose father died trying to save a bunch of girls from a flood, her mother is dying, her brothers have been ripped from their home and there’s no food, no medicine and almost no one left in her village.  The other, Ekaterina, comes in a train that stops for a bridge to be repaired.  This one is a near-princess, part of the nobility, who has a rich Aunt, a governess, and a butler trying to rein her in, though she is bored.  The two girls become somewhat friends.  Ekaterina shows Elena a gift, a Fabergé egg, they’re taking to the Tsar, who wants to show-off his godson, Anton.  The egg has three mythical scenes: Baba Yaga’s chicken house, the ice dragon, and the firebird.  But the train lurches into motion and Ekaterina falls out of the train with the egg, while Elena falls into the train.
While Elena girl finds herself forced to hide, she ends-up having to impersonate Ekaterina in order to try to keep the butler and the governess from getting in trouble.  Meanwhile, Ekaterina is cornered by a snow tiger and herded to a bridge.  On the other side, she finds Baba Yaga’s house, but instead of eating the offered, poisonous, soup, she gives the egg to Baba Yaga.  Meanwhile, Elena, at a stop of the train, tries to escape.  She sights the Firebird and reaches to take a tail feather so she could get a magical wish granted.  But a hen, chased by a fox enters from the other side just as the Firebird becomes aware of the peasant girl and turns on her.  The hen crashes into the Firebird, grabs a feather and the fox runs off.  An explosion occurs and there is an egg left behind.  Elena grabs the egg as a possible replacement of the Tsar’s gift.
The story is narrated by a monk, who had the favor of the Tsar, then lost it by helping the girls.  All three of the children go off on an adventure with Baba Yaga, meet the ice dragon, who is causing floods and an almost non-existent winter to happen.  His teeth are used to make a fence, they turn into an army, matryoshka dolls, extra large in size come along and marry the soldiers, everyone goes home happy.
Years later, under communism, the children have grown and take care of others in a kitchen.  The monk wanders the country, still observing and bringing the end of the story to a brilliant conclusion.

6.     The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows (2008) Dial Press
Judith Ashton, a journalist and successful author of a series of comedic, light-hearted books on World War II written under a pseudonym, wants to write about something different and under her own name.  She receives a letter from Guernsey from a farmer who has acquired a book she once owned.  He tells how it led to the society on the island.  She is intrigued and writes back asking questions about the name of the society.  He writes back, telling her the story of how, on the spot, when confronted by German soldiers, a resident spun up the story, creating the society on the spot.  Back in London, Judith is pursued by a rich American publisher.  Her publisher and life-long friend, is both jealous and worried that the American will steal her away from his publishing company.
The book is written as a series of letters and tells the history of the German occupation of Guernsey without apology or lack of exposure of the tribulations of both sides.

7.     Absolute Power by David Baldacci (1996) Warner Books
This was Baldacci’s first novel.  It centers around corruption of the worst kind at the highest office in the land.  A rich old man, who was responsible for putting the president in office, goes on vacation to Jamaica.  At the last minute, his wife decides to stay behind.  Her real reason is to bed the president, who is all too willing to cooperate.
A thief, who knows a maid at the rich man’s house, enters, quiets the alarm system and proceeds to the master bedroom where behind a mirror, is a room sized safe filled with money, jewels and collections.  But before he can leave, the president and the rich man’s wife enter the bedroom.  The thief is trapped in the safe and discovers that the mirror is a one-way window and watches the scene develop.
Both the woman and the president are drunk.  When he slaps the woman too hard, she hits back, this enrages the president and he begins to beat the woman.  She grabs a letter opener and slices his arm.  He yells and his secret service men burst into the room in time to see her on top with the letter opener poised to plunge into the man.  The secret service men kill the woman.
The president’s chief of staff enters the scene, gets the secret service men and the president out of the room.  She finds the letter opener and bags it and puts it in the top of her purse.  When the secret service men come back, she has them sanitize the room, removing all evidence that the president had been there.  While doing that, they knock over the purse, and the letter opener falls behind a table to the floor.
When they leave, the thief leaves the safe, grabs the bagged letter opener for future insurance and climbs out the window.  The chief of staff realizes she left her purse behind and the secret service men go back for it.  Only once they’re in the room, they see the open window and the rope the thief used to climb down.
They give chase but fail to catch the thief before he gets away.
The local homicide detective called-in when the local patrol sees the open window, notices impossible aspects of the case.  No fingerprints anywhere, not even of the victim or her husband.  The floor has been vacuumed, the woman checked for having had sex, and a blood spatter pattern that shows something or someone was near when she was shot – and two bullet holes in her head from different directions, one still inside her head and the other already dug out of the wall.

8.     Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo, Illustrated by K.G. Campbell (2013) Candlewick Press
Flora Belle Buckman loves comics, especially The Great Incandesto.  She lives with her divorced mother, a writer of terrible romance novels, and sees herself as a natural born cynic (and defier of contracts).  She looks out her window and sees a run-away giant vacuum cleaner chasing a squirrel.
Ulysses is a squirrel who survives being sucked up in a very powerful vacuum cleaner.  Only when he is dumped out of the bag, he has become a squirrel with super powers.  He can fly, he can understand what people are saying, he’s super strong and he writes poetry.  Poorly spelt poetry and mostly non-rhyming poetry, but poetry done on a typewriter, never the less.
No one wants to believe Flora that Ulysses has super powers, even when they watch him do things a squirrel normally cannot do.  A boy across the street, pretending to be blind is even skeptical.  But Flora’s father believes her.  So does his neighbor, a very old woman from ‘the old country’, wherever that is.  So then Flora and Ulysses set out to do super-hero things and get lost.

9.     The Huntress by Kate Quinn (2019) William Morrow
A gripping thriller about the hunt for a woman, who as a Nazi killer hunted children.  The tale is told in two timelines; one about a Russian girl who wanted to fly airplanes and the other, after World War II where she and her ‘husband’ look for the Nazi killer.  The story exposes the bravery of Russian women who flew planes and bombed the enemy Germans to defend and then to drive back the invaders.  And the dangerous escape of one such woman after the government chose to imprison her over something her father said in a drunken brawl.  She then rescues an escaped British soldier, only for him to get killed by the huntress, who tried to kill them both.  But the Russian woman escaped and survived.  Later, the soldier’s brother, a journalist, finds her in a field hospital and to save her, he marries her in the field and has her sent to England.  A few years later, after the war is over, he has been chasing down Nazi criminals to bring them to justice and she appears to help him find the Huntress (who has gone to America)

10. The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson (2019) Sourcebooks Landmark
The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek must scrap for everything—everything except books, that is.  Thanks to Roosevelt's Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome's got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter.
Cussy's not only a book woman, however, she's also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else.  Not everyone is keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and a Blue is often blamed for any whiff of trouble.  If Cussy wants to bring the joy of books to the hill folks, she's going to have to confront prejudice as old as Appalachia and suspicion as deep as the holler.
Inspired by the true blue-skinned people of Kentucky and the brave and dedicated Kentucky Pack Horse library service of the 1930s, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek is a story of raw courage, fierce strength, and one woman's belief that books can carry us anywhere—even back home.

11. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The life of Cora, a runaway slave living in Georgia– who rails against the man who has become her ‘owner’ in the 1840s.  Her mother ran away and left her behind as a child (near the end of the book we learn that she was on her way back to get her child but was bitten by a cotton-mouth and died in the swamp).  This is a bitter memory for Cora, who took over her mother’s little plot of ground as a garden.  When a new slave, a big man, took over her cabin and ruined her garden to build a house for his dog, Cora busted-up the doghouse and hurt the dog and its owner.  This got her branded as crazy by the other slaves.  But a new man secretly plots with her to run away.  When they leave, they find their way to the underground railroad.  On the way slave hunters try to capture them.  Cora kills one, fighting for her life.  On the railroad, they get a choice to stop in South Carolina or go on.  This is a different kind of life where negros are educated and given health care.  Only it turns out to be insidious.  Because the doctors are studying eugenics and want to operate on the women, so they won’t have children.  One day, slave hunters come to town looking for Cora and her man.  Cora escapes back to the underground railway station.  Her man never arrives.  She catches the next train, run by a boy who was told the stations were closed.  He drops her off at the end of the line, it is blocked by a cave-in after that.  The station master does not expect her and things have gotten bad in his town.  He takes her home and hides her in the attic.  No one in the town is allowed to have slaves.  But this is not a town of tolerance.  On the way to the town, she saw a seemingly endless row of trees with former slaves hanging from the branches.  She lives in the attic for months.  Each week she watches as a runaway slave is brought to the town square, denounced, and sometimes the white family that harbored the slave is also put on a platform, ridiculed and then all hanged.  Cora has no escape.  One night the town constabulary knocks on the door and drags Cora, the station master and his wife out.  But Cora is not hanged.  The slave hunters came to town looking for her.  They have a commission in Tennessee to return a slave.  On the way, the hunter gets tired of hearing that slave sing, off-key, and kills him.  They switch direction toward Georgia to return Cora and are hijacked.  Cora is freed and runs with two new black men who tell her they are not slaves.  They take her to a farm in Indiana where the owner is black and quite a few runaway slaves.  Life on the farm is good.  Cora discovers the owner has a library and spends a good amount of her time there when she isn’t helping on the farm.  But life is not idyllic.  There are people on the farm who resent the runaways from sharing in what they have built.  One man contacts the slave hunters, thinking they will come and remove the runaways peacefully.  It results in a massacre.  Cora is captured, but the slave hunter wants to see where the underground station is so he can report it and have it destroyed.  But on the way down the ladder, he insists on holding on to Cora.  She falls, pulling him with her.  She lands on top and he dies.  She uses a handcart and pumps her way to another station.  Where she comes out seems to be in the middle of nowhere.  A small wagon train passes here and the last wagon is driven by an old black man who offers her a