The Best Book I Read This Month: The Lost Village by Camilla Sten

This month, I escaped real-life horrors by reading a horror story set in Sweden. Camilla Sten’s The Lost Village centers on a small mining town in Sweden whose population disappears without explanation.

The story is told in dual timelines. In one timeline, a young woman in the present leads a documentary team into the abandoned village for an investigation. In the other, the young woman’s great-grandmother narrates the events that lead to the disappearance. At times, this structure added to the tension. At times, it gave away information. In reflection, I think I would have preferred the story told in a single timeline (the modern one) and the characters work harder to get the information that the reader needs.

There were some holes in the story, too. Paranormal events early in the story are never given even a hint of explanation. A character lives for years in a town without food—again, without explanation.

Still, I found the story engaging. I did enjoy the paranormal touches and the exploration of groupthink and mental illness. Camilla Sten is an author I would read again.

The Best Book I Read This Month: Agrippina by Emma Southon

I waffled about my choice for the best book I read this month. I couldn’t decide between the science fiction that made me cry (The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal) or the history that ruffled my book club’s feathers (Agrippina by Emma Southon). Ultimately, I chose the latter.

The full title of Southon’s book is Agrippina: The Most Extraordinary Woman of the Roman World. Agrippina was the granddaughter of Rome’s first emperor (Augustus), the sister of an emperor (Caligula), the niece—and wife—of an emperor (Claudius), and the mother of an emperor (Nero). Every member of her immediate family predeceased her. For a time, she ruled the Roman Empire behind the scenes. All of this in a time and place in which women were expected to be invisible—not seen and definitely not heard. The label extraordinary fits.

Southon begins her biography with a historiographical note that won me over very quickly. Southon’s writing has personality. Like other historians of ancient Rome, she addressed the issues of the sources from the time (namely, their unreliability), but she did it with humor. Case in point: she described Suetonius’s writings as an “off-brand badly-cited wiki page.” History with humor? I’m in!

The humor continued through the biography. Southon’s tone had an irreverence to it and an earthiness. My book club was bothered by that. More than one member was bothered by Southon’s use of colorful language and discussion of sex in Rome, calling it vulgar and unnecessary. Clearly, they preferred a more serious approach.

My book club also took issue with the frequency of assumptions and inferences in Southon’s account. I’m not sure they realized or accepted that Southon had to read and work between the lines because of the dearth of sources from the time period. Women were just not written about, unless and until they did something scandalous. That did not bother me, and I appreciated Southon being honest and upfront about when she was assuming or inferring something, as well explaining why she drew the conclusions she did.

As a reader and a history nerd, I found the book enjoyable and satisfying.

The Best Book I Read This Month: Micro Activism by Omkari L. Williams

The best book I read this month was short and powerful: Micro Activism by Omkari L. Williams.

Monday’s presidential inauguration left me feeling helpless. The subsequent executive orders overwhelmed me. I wanted to do something. I needed to do something. But what? I have limited time, finite resources, and no connections. How would I even begin?

Enter Omkari Williams’s Micro Activism. I’ve had it in my TBR pile for a while, and thank goodness I did. I pulled it out and read it in one night. It was just what I needed.

Micro Activism is an accessible, practical handbook for figuring out what each of us can do to improve our community, our country, our world. The idea is that we don’t have to do big things. We can make a difference by doing focused small things, as long as we do them consistently.

I found Williams’s advice very down-to-earth and her exercises very helpful in making my own plan. I discovered that things I’ve been doing for other reasons, like volunteering with a local animal rescue, are in fact activism. I found that discovery rather comforting. Equally comforting was Williams’s advice to take care of ourselves and to focus our efforts on one or two causes so we don’t burn out. There is a lot of work to do, and it’s going to take a long time to do it. We need to sustain ourselves so we can make it through the long haul.

I highly recommend this book. It’s helpful in finding a path to activism, and it’s validating for those who are already in the fight.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Collective by Alison Gaylin

Of all the books I read this month, the one I’m still thinking about is The Collective by Alison Gaylin. The story follows Camille Gardener, who finds a group called the Collective in her search for justice after the death of her teenage daughter. Ostensibly a support group for grieving mothers, the Collective quickly proves to be much more.

The story required a bit more suspension of disbelief than I could muster, but I still found it intriguing. Camille’s experiences as a grieving mother—the experiences of all the grieving mothers in the story—say something about our society’s expectations of grief. Namely, that society’s expectations of grief are unrealistic. Nobody gets over the death of a loved one, especially the death of a child, quickly. Yet society expects the grief-stricken to “move on” within a matter of weeks. No wonder the mothers in this story find solace in the Collective. It’s the one place they feel understood, the one place their grief is valid.

There were parts of the book that did not ring true for me, but it was the food for thought in the premise that made this the best book I read this month.

Countdown to the Cover

#5 Hodd by Adam Thorpe

This was my least favorite of the Robin Hood retellings, for a couple of reasons. First, Robin Hood appears in less than 30% of the book, which really tells the life story of the narrator—a boy called Much. (It’s not a happy story.) Second, this Robin Hood is over the top evil—cruel, violent, selfish, delusional. There isn’t even a seed of the “steal from the rich and give to the poor” tradition, yet we’re supposed to believe the people of Nottingham hail this evil Robin Hood as a hero.

#4 Nottingham by Nathan Makaryk

Nottingham by Nathan Makaryk is a sweeping epic that begins in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade and ends in Sherwood Forest. It has a cast of thousands—or rather, it felt that way—and I had a hard time keeping track of some of them. There were two aspects of this story that I really liked. One, that there is no single Robin Hood. Instead, Robin Hood is a persona created to win the support and loyalty of the local residents. At different parts of the story, different characters assume the persona. Second, there are no moral absolutes in the story. The Robin Hoods are not always good or right. The sheriff is not always bad or wrong. I found this sheriff to be one of the more sympathetic ones I’ve encountered in Robin Hood lore, a man torn between a rock (the king) and a hard place (the people). Having said all that, I did struggle with this one. I found it be plodding, and between that pace and the massive number of characters, I sometimes struggled to stay engaged.

#3 The Outlaws of Sherwood by Robin McKinley

I enjoyed this traditional take on Robin Hood. It has the expected cast of characters—main and supporting—and the expected plot lines. The Robin Hood character seemed rather passive. He hid in his cave for much of the book, letting the others do all the work. He didn’t get involved in anything until near the end. But this book is meant for a younger audience and had I read it at a younger age (and without my writer experience), I might not have noticed or cared about that.

#2 Travelers Along the Way by Aminah Mae Safi

I adored this book. Of all the retellings I read, this one did the best job of capturing the humor of the Robin Hood legend. It also was the most imaginative of the retellings. Set during the Third Crusade, Travelers Along the Way imagines Robin Hood as a young Muslim woman defending the Holy Land against the Christian invasion. The Merry “Men,” who are mostly young women, are a diverse group: Robin Hood’s warrior sister, a Mongolian horsewoman, an Andalusian Jew, a chaplain, and a spy. It was a fun read. (And yes, it feels weird to say that about a book set during such a brutal event in history.)

#1 Hood by Stephen Lawhead

This was the first Robin Hood retelling I ever read-decades ago-and it is still my favorite. This one is the first in a trilogy that transplants Robin Hood to 11th century Wales, where Robin Hood and his Merry Men are Welsh freedom fighters resisting the Norman invasion. It is depth; it has humor; it has danger and adventure.