The Best Book I Read This Month: West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge

The best book I read this month was an unexpected delight. Lynda Rutledge’s West with Giraffes is a fictional account of the cross-country journey of the San Diego Zoo’s first two giraffes. I was looking for something light(er) to read after finishing a particularly intense mystery (The Broken Girls by Simone St. James, in case you’re interested in that sort of thing). West with Giraffes fit the bill perfectly.

Set primarily during the Great Depression, with a frame story set in the very near future, Rutledge’s book follows the adventures of Woodrow Wilson Nickel. Displaced by the Dust Bowl, young Nickel is looking for his place in the world when he stumbles across two giraffes being offloaded from a ship that survived a hurricane at sea. Nickel is captivated. When he hears that they are being sent to San Diego, he decides he must go with them, that his destiny lies in California. What follows is part mad-cap chase, part buddy road trip, part coming of age, and entirely full of heart.

The story is narrated by Nickel, who is 105 years old in the frame story. He’s just heard that giraffes are about to become extinct and he’s desperate to tell the story of the two giraffes that changed his life.

Nickel’s voice is colorful and conversational, which made the book an easy, enjoyable read. I may have even laughed out loud in some places. If you’re interested in a light, fun read, this could be just what you’re looking for.

The Best Book I Read This Month: Horseman by Christina Henry

It’s spooky season, so it’s fitting that the best book I read this month had a spooky bent. Horseman by Christina Henry is not so much a retelling of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as it is an imaginative sequel. I adored Henry’s Alice in Wonderland retellings, and this one didn’t disappoint, either.

The story follows Ben Van Brunt, grandchild of the original Legend’s Brom Van Brunt and Katrina Van Tassel. Ben wants nothing more than to be just like brave, bombastic Grandpa Brom, but that determination is put to the test when two village children turn up dead and mutilated. Ben knows a monster killed the boys, but Sleepy Hollow’s residents want something human to blame—something like Ben.

Henry has crafted a story in which nothing is quite what it looks like—not Ben, not the murderous monster, not even the legendary horseman. I loved that. And while I can’t imagine a sequel to this book, I would happily read anything else set in this world.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Secrets We Kept by Laura Prescott

The best book I read this month was a spy story, but one that had far more depth and nuance than any James Bond tale. Laura Prescott’s The Secrets We Kept tells the story of the novel Doctor Zhivago but from the perspectives of women: Pasternak’s mistress tells the story of its publication and women who work at the CIA as typists and spies tell the story of how it was smuggled back into the Soviet Union.

In these stories, we get a sense of life on both sides of the Cold War during the 1950s. The lives of Irina and Sally in the United States feel like technicolor compared to that of Olga in the Soviet Union, and I found the story of Irina and Sally’s friendship the most compelling part of the book.

I admit there were times I wasn’t sure at first who was narrating a particular chapter, even with the clues in the chapter titles, but I found the story engaging and I especially appreciated the female perspective on what has traditionally been a male genre.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

I read some very good books this month, but the best of them was The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James. The story is a dual timeline ghost story/murder mystery. A while back, I read and reviewed another book by St. James—The Haunting of Maddy Clare—and this one is so much better. It’s clear that St. James has grown as a writer and honed her craft.

The Sun Down Motel tells the story of two young women, Vivian Delaney in 1982 and her niece, Carly Kirk, in 2017. Viv disappeared in 1982 while working the night shift at the Sun Down Motel in a small town called Fell, NY. Thirty-five years later, Carly is determined to find out what happened to her.

Not much happens in the first six pages—it’s just Viv sitting in her car—but it was some of the spookiest writing I’ve ever read. I’ve been working on a spooky story myself, and I reread those first six pages multiple times as a master class. The rest of the book isn’t as spooky, even with the ghosts that populate it, but it is gripping and a very solid mystery. (Two mysteries, actually, but I don’t want to spoil anything.)

With this book, Simone St. James became one of my favorite writers, and I’ve added two more of her books to my TBR (to be read) list.

The Best Book I Read This Month: The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue

I wasn’t sure I was ready to read a book set in a pandemic, seeing as we’re still in the middle of one ourselves, but I did and it turned out to be the best book I read this month.

Emma Donoghue’s The Pull of the Stars is set in Ireland during the 1918 flu pandemic, over three days at the end of October 1918—when the Irish were fighting not only the flu pandemic but also World War I. For the characters in the story, neither had any end in sight. (The war ended on November 11, 1918, almost two weeks after this story concludes. The flu pandemic lasted two more years.)

The main character, Julia Power, is a nurse assigned to a special hospital ward for pregnant mothers who have the flu. The flu has left the hospital short-handed, and Julia struggles to balance her now-overwhelming duties with the care of her brother, a veteran suffering from PTSD.