There are some books that you go into knowing that you’re going to give them five stars (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, for example). There are others where you know basically from page 1 that it’s going to be a five star read (Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda). And there are others that sneak up on you. That you didn’t see coming at all. And that steal your heart or blow your mind when you’re not expecting it. So let’s talk about some of THOSE books, shall we?
Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
Based on the cover of this, I was expecting a typical YA book about two boys falling in love. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. This is the story of seven LGBTQIA+ boys in one small town in middle America and how their lives are changed by two of them attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the longest kiss.
But it’s narration that sets this book apart. It’s narrated by a Greek chorus of the dead of the AIDS generation, and it breaks my heart into a million pieces every time I read it. It’s only 200 pages long and I cried five times reading it. It’s such a beautifully told and beautifully written book and I love it so much that I can barely talk about it without crying. I may have cried a little when I met David Levithan as a result…
Harry Potter: A History of Magic by The British Library
It is honestly one of the biggest heartbreaks of my life thus far that I left London mere weeks before the Harry Potter exhibition opened at The British Library last year. Luckily, my brother bought me this for Christmas, which was almost as good as seeing the exhibition in person. I definitely didn’t expect this to be as incredible as it was, but with its combination of actual history, magical world history and literal Harry Potter history, it blew me away. Honestly, it’s an amazingly beautiful book that does a great job of demonstrating just how much real world history J.K. Rowling poured into her books, and it’s astonishing.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
I’ve always said that I’m not a big fan of 20th century classics, that I far prefer the 19th century. And this remains fairly true – I don’t like Gatsby or Catcher in the Rye. I’m meh about Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway. So when I got to this one on my Classics Club TBR, I must admit that I was left wondering why I’d bothered to include it.
But this book freaking blew me away. The writing was incredible, the characters were wonderful, and I was hooked from start to finish. Add in a shocking ending and I LOVED this book.
Refugee by Alan Gratz
This is a low YA/upper middle grade book that I talked about a few days ago in a weekly wrap up post. It’s the story of three generations of refugee kids – one Jewish in WWII, one Cuban in the 90s, and one Syrian in the present day. When I first started reading, I thought it would be a pretty standard story about children in wartime. But it blew me away. Yes, the writing is very simplistic. But it’s effective as hell.
Sweetpea by C.J. Skuse
This has to be one of my favourite books of this year. And yet when I first started reading it, I thought it was going to be a pretty generic thriller. But no. It shocked me time and time again and I loved basically everything about it. As I said the other day, I still haven’t braved the sequel, but I’ll get there soon.
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
This is a non-fiction book that I picked up on a whim at the end of last year after seeing it on the Goodreads Choice Awards list. The blurb was intriguing, but I didn’t expect it to be anything particularly special. AND YET. This is a compelling, horrifying, and heartbreaking story, while also providing me with a lot of new information about a time and place I knew very little about prior to reading this. Highly recommended. (Also, I saw this week that apparently it’s being turned into a movie starring Leonardo Dicaprio???)
Uncle’s Story by Witi Ihimaera
I’d read The Whale Rider prior to reading this book and ugly cried my way through it, so I was really looking forward to picking up another of Ihimaera’s works. And this one killed me, time and time again. It’s the story of a young Maori man, who’s having a difficult time with his family since coming out. He finds out that he had an uncle he never knew about, who fought in Vietnam and fell for an American soldier. It says so much about the relationships that soldiers forge in wartime, while also delving deep into the way LGBTQIA+ members of Indigenous groups are treated by their communities and it broke me into a million pieces.
Because of You by Pip Harry
This book was on the CBCA Book of the Year for Older Readers shortlist this year, and I remember looking at the cover and thinking that it looked like the most boring book in the world. The blurb did nothing to change that opinion. But within a handful of chapters, I was completely hooked and I desperately wanted to know how Tiny ended up homeless and whether Nola would come to accept/embrace her family situation. I loved every single second of it, and I see it being one that I reread over and over.
What are some of your unexpected 5 star reads?
The Tea is Also Cursed 