Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
When Kingsolver won her second Women’s Prize for this book, I have to admit that I rolled my eyes, because it was just so predictable. I don’t begrudge Kingsolver her recognition – she writes really good books – but I guess I just hate the predictable. And of course, Demon Copperhead was exceptional in a really predictable way. Demon is a boy born in the West Virginia coal mining towns to a dead father and a drug-addicted mother, and his fight for survival is heartbreaking. He is at once tender and hardened, naïve and old for his age. After his mother’s death and a distressing stint in foster care, he sets off on his own at the ripe old age of 12 to find his paternal grandmother, which changes his life forever, in ways both good and bad. His redemption is the hardest fight of his life, and an arc both unsurprising and yet still disappointing considering what was going on in West Virginia in the early 2000s – the opioid epidemic. Kingsolver has written another epic tome that is both heartrending and heartwarming, in equal measure.
Elena Knows, Claudia Piñeiro
Claudia Piñeiro is described as Argentina’s most translated author after Borges and Cortázar, no easy feat. She began with crime fiction, but with her more recent novels, including this one, she has become uncategorizable. This novel, which takes place over the course of one day, follows Elena, who suffers from advanced Parkinson’s and is trying to find out the truth about her daughter’s death. The police and everyone who knew Rita believe that she died by suicide, but Elena is convinced that it is impossible, so she sets off to the house of someone who she thinks owes her a more-than 20-year-old favor. However, she is severely constrained by her illness, and without her medicine is almost unable to move at all. After she finally arrives at her destination, she finds out that the favor she has imagined all this time does not apply, but in return receives something else to help her move forward. This novel was short but hit hard, and one can easily see how Piñeiro has become so easily liked and so well read not only among Argentinians, but also internationally as well.