sprite writes
broodings from the burrow

March 3, 2020


ten one-word titles i recommend
posted by soe 1:24 am

Today’s Top Ten Tuesday at That Artsy Reader Girl asks us to share books with single-word titles. I figured I’d run through my Goodreads list and give you the books I’ve liked best with only a single moniker:

  1. Summerland by Michael Chabon: This was the first book I reviewed here on the blog oh so many years ago. It’s a middle-grade book that combines folklore and baseball and maybe needs to be reread in the near future.
  2. Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick: Selnick is a master at combining art and words in unusual ways to tell a story, making middle-grade books that are doorstoppers but also simultaneously page-turners. This particular story tells seemingly parallel stories about disability and adventure in New York City.
  3. Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell: Part Peter Pan, part A Little Princess, part Mary Poppins, this middle-grade book focuses on a little girl found floating in a cello case in the wake of a shipwreck, the kindly man who raises her, the system that wants her to conform to societal norms, and the Parisian waifs who help her pursue her dreams.
  4. Landline by Rainbow Rowell: This is the Gen X book for longtime sweethearts, but maybe particularly for those of us who feel like we’ve been the steady, introverted, unexciting half of a couple for a long time. This is one of Rainbow’s two adult novels and sort of falls into what I (but maybe not strictly abiding by the literary definition of) magical realism.
  5. Uprooted by Naomi Novik: This coming-of-age fairy tale (shelved sometimes as YA and sometimes for adults) talks about female friendship and reimagines what it is that we should really fear in the dark wood.
  6. Booked by Kwame Alexander: In this middle-grade verse tour-de-force, Alexander gives us a boy who comes to love soccer and words equally.
  7. Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: In this finale of The Illuminae Files space opera trilogy, all of our teen heroes (and our favorite formerly murderous AI spaceship) return to the place where the story began — a planet with an illegal mining operation where a gigantic militarized corporation has terrorized the population.
  8. Savvy by Ingrid Law: In this middle-grade folklore story, everyone in this family develops a magical superpower (like the ability to open locks or direct rain) on or leading up to their 13th birthday. When on the eve of her birthday, a girl’s father is suddenly hospitalized, she must figure out how to channel what she assumes is her “savvy” to save him while keeping it a secret from those who might not understand what makes her so different.
  9. Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt: The first in The Tillerman Cycle, this decades-old middle-grade novel features a teen girl who must somehow ferry her three younger siblings from Connecticut, where their mother has abandoned them, to the South (I am surprised to discover that’s southern Maryland, about an hour from here, rather than Georgia), where the grandmother they’ve never met lives.
  10. Ghost by Jason Reynolds: In the first of his four middle-grade Track novels, Reynolds introduces us to a troubled boy who excels at sprinting who happens onto a track team one afternoon. But he is being held back from success by his past and until he deals with those ghosts (with the help of his three new teammates and his ex-Olympian coach), he won’t be able to move forward.

How about you? What are the Madonna’s, Prince’s, and Beyoncé’s of your favorite reads?

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