2021 Faves

As announced on yesterday's post, today's Top Five Wednesday topic is Favorite Books of 2021. This might be somewhat difficult since yesterday I got up into November. Finding 5 more books might be difficult. I might have to go back through the year again. Let's see what happens.

In the Wild Light by Jeff Zentner - Zentner's books are just so easy to read! They pretty much all take place in Appalachia, which is a setting we don't get a lot of fiction from. What's great about them is you get a feeling for the area and the culture, but the kids are just normal kids. Appalachia has a rep for being backwoods and hillbilly. These books show where that comes from but also shows the lie.

XOXO by Axie Oh - I have no idea why I liked this book so much. The premise is far-fetched at best and it's basically just a romance, but I enjoyed it a heck of a lot. Jenny has a typical Asian tiger mom. Jenny should focus on cello and school and nothing else. One night she meets a random boy from Korea and they run around a Korean festival together having a great time. Then he disappears. Stops answering her texts. She decides to forget him. Then she has to move to Korea so her mom can take care of her grandmother. She gets in to a tony arts school and guess who goes there? Cute boy from L.A. And guess what? He's in a KPOP band. And he's not allowed to date. Chaos ensues.

Dustborn by Erin Bowman - This is set in a dusty, dry, desert of a land. While Delta is taking her sister to the healer, raiders take her camp and either kill or kidnap all the pack members. She sets out to find and save them. Secret: she has a map on her back that supposedly leads to the Verdant, but nobody can read the map. This is why her pack was raided. The bad guys want the map. Thus begins an adventure of epic proportions including a tyrant leader who drugs his workers, a settlement comprised mostly of women, and a boy from her past.

Ace of Spades by Faridah Abike-Iyimide - I started this one in November, and then got side-tracked by library books. But when I got back to it, I read 75% of it in one day! At Niveus school there are only two black kids. They are both seniors. The girl is at the top of the social ladder and has been voted Head Prefect. The boy prefers to stay out of the limelight and under the radar. Suddenly, their secrets are being exposed to the whole school through mass texts from somebody calling themself Aces. The twists and turns in this book are well-placed, even if I saw some of them coming. Others I did not. I obviously really enjoyed it since I couldn't put it down.

This is where I have to go back through the year to see if one more book could possibly make my best of list.

Broken (in the best possible way) by Jenny Lawson - It's hard to say you enjoyed a book about anxiety and depression, but Lawson is so funny, you just can't help it. I like to listen to her books and boost the speed. She's even funnier twice as fast. I went through my list of books a couple of times and kept coming back to this one, so it officially made the list.

So there we have it! My favorite books of 2021.