Putting together this post was slightly more challenging for me than in past years, for the reason that I did very little reviewing in 2019 aside from a quick paragraph or two on Goodreads now and then—so most of it had to come from scratch and from memory.
As is customary for me, as late as autumn I was wondering whether I could come up with enough standout titles for a good list—I did a lot of re-reading old favorites this year, and where new-to-me titles were concerned I was facing a crowd of options that I’d found enjoyable but not super-outstanding. But then, three of the very best books featured in this post ended up tumbling in during the last couple months of the year! And I had my list…as I always do in the end. I’m linking up with Top Ten Tuesday, as I also customarily do.
The staggering thing about this list is that a full half of the titles are by living authors—most definitely a first for me! Here it is, in the order read:
The Piper on the Mountain by Ellis Peters
This was one of my favorites in the Felse Investigations series. While a group of college students, including series regular Dominic Felse, are on holiday in Czechoslovakia, one of them mounts a surreptitious inquiry into her stepfather’s suspicious death there a short time before. This one has a little more of a romantic-suspense flair than traditional whodunit structure—in fact it’s rather more reminiscent of Mary Stewart than other, lesser books that have been billed as “like Mary Stewart.”
The Huguenots: Their Settlements, Churches, and Industries in England and Ireland by Samuel Smiles
I had always assumed, from France’s being a predominantly Catholic country down through the centuries, that the Protestant Reformation had comparatively little effect there. I had a basic knowledge of who the Huguenots were and the fact of their persecution; but this book blew me away with the breadth and scope of their saga and its effect on the culture and economy of more than one nation. Smiles’ primary focus is on what the exiled Huguenots brought to England and Ireland in the way of art, trade, industry, learning, et cetera (hint: a lot), but he also grounds it in a comprehensive overview of the zero-tolerance policy pursued by the French Catholic monarchy that drove the Huguenots to flee their homeland. I came away marveling at how Americans are taught so little of what is a big part of our heritage by extension as well; and also with a much clearer understanding of how the Huguenot persecutions contributed to the conditions that led to the French Revolution—a comprehensive portrait of a nation cutting off its nose to spite its face if there ever was one.
They Saddled the West by Lee M. Rice and Glenn R. Vernam
Okay, yes, this is probably one of the most niche things you’ll see on anybody’s top-ten list this year! I never expected a book on the history of saddlemaking to be so fascinating. I picked it up purely on a whim, but I was captivated by the way the history of the American frontier and the development of the Western saddle and the entire saddlemaking industry were entwined on every page. Review here.
Girl Waits With Gun by Amy Stewart
This book pleasantly surprised me because it wasn’t what I thought it might be from the cover and some descriptions of it, a heavy-handed feminist screed. It’s more the story of a determined woman doing whatever she has to do to protect her family and discovering in the process that she’s more capable than she realized; and when she does need to do things that are a little unconventional, it’s not to the tune of every other character fainting in exaggerated horror. I’m picky about the tone and slant of historical novels, and I think Girl Waits With Gun does a good job of showing characters whose ways of thinking and acting fit the time they live in, but also letting them appear as normal human beings without constantly emphasizing how different or strange their ways are.
Children of the Desolate by Suzannah Rowntree
Fantasy set in 7th-century Syria is about as far from my typical reading habits as you can get, but Suzannah’s writing is so good, and I just loved what she does with the relationships between a family of characters in this novella (a prequel to her historical-fantasy series set in the Crusader States, which I haven’t begun yet). Review here.
Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque
I feel a little funny rating a how-to book so highly before I’ve actually tried out the methods and suggestions laid out in it, but I’m still doing it just because this book’s advice is so much more specific than most other books and articles I’ve read. To give just one example, you’ll hear “write a good onboarding sequence” just about everywhere, but Newsletter Ninja actually explains in detail what ought to be in a good onboarding sequence and the order in which you should arrange it. I highlighted the daylights out of this while reading it on my Kindle and I’m looking forward to applying what it teaches to my own author newsletter very soon.
A Desperate Fortune by Susanna Kearsley
I picked this one up in the cause of looking for historical romantic-suspense comp titles, and though I ultimately decided Kearsley isn’t exactly a fit for me in this regard (since A Desperate Fortune is apparently the only one of her novels without a supernatural or time-travel element), I enjoyed the book a lot. It does have a dual timeline, and the modern one was okay, but it was the historical half that I liked best (surprise, surprise). The story of the daughter of an exiled Jacobite family drawn into espionage in 18th-century France, it does a fine job evoking the time and place, and the relationship between the two central characters is subtly developed to a lovely conclusion.
Stepsons of Light by Eugene Manlove Rhodes
This one jostles The Trusty Knaves for the position of my favorite Rhodes novel. The plot encompasses a crisp and simple tale of crime and detection which is organically grounded in its setting, a wonderfully lifelike portrait of cowboy and ranch life in New Mexico of the 1880s and ’90s. Rhodes is just so totally unique among early Western authors for his lively, literate style and sense of humor and his quixotic championship of his corner of the cattle country and its people. The one knock on him is that he couldn’t write romantic subplots or female characters very well, and it’s a fair one; but the “love interest” in Stepsons of Light is small enough not to have a great effect on the overall story. And contrary to what most readers might say, one of my favorite parts is where Rhodes brings the whole story to a halt to devote a full chapter to an energetic, insouciant tilt against the bleak “realistic” fiction becoming fashionable in the early 20th century; to which I felt like giving three cheers.
The Enchanted Sonata by Heather Dixon Wallwork
Oh, my word. This was the Nutcracker retelling I didn’t know I needed. With a delightful Russian-esque candyland of an imaginary kingdom for setting, a pair of flawed but lovable protagonists, many cleverly re-imagined elements from the original story as well as a few tiny nods to other fairytales, The Enchanted Sonata is fun and heartwarming and was the perfect Christmas read.
The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig
Finally got around to this one after having it on my to-read list for ages. In 1910 Montana, a widowed homesteader with three young boys answers a quirky newspaper advertisement for a housekeeper. Not only is the housekeeper somewhat more than they bargained for, but she arrives with an unexpected brother in tow, who makes a vivid impression on the community when he takes over as emergency substitute teacher in the one-room schoolhouse. Gorgeously written, delightful characters—it would have been near-perfection if it wasn’t for a very frustrating ending. But I still enjoyed the bulk of it enough to warrant a top-ten inclusion. Brief review, with spoilerish consideration of the ending, here.
Stepsons of Light and The Huguenots are in the public domain—the latter not easily available digitally, though; I trekked my way through a jungle of typos in a scanned edition from Internet Archive. Children of the Desolate is available free exclusively when you sign up for the author’s newsletter; Newsletter Ninja and The Enchanted Sonata were Kindle purchases; and the rest were library borrows.
