Top Ten Tuesday -- Best Books YTD

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted at The Broke and the Bookish. This week's topic: the best books I've read so far in 2013.

The first 2 were 5 star reads. The rest were top 10 in no particular order.

1. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
2. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
3. A Land More Kind Than Home by Wiley Cash
4. Bitter Brew by William Knoedelseder
5. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
6. The Art Forger by B. A. Shapiro
7. An Unsuitable Attachment by Barbara Pym
8. The Merry Heart by Robertson Davies (read, but didn't write up yet)
9. Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
10. Death Comes to Pemberley by P. D. James

Review: A Land More Kind Than Home

A Land More Kind Than Home
by Wiley Cash

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This story of two young brothers in a small southern town is told in such a way that it is as if the reader is spying on the story through various cracks and peepholes. Multiple narrators each give us their own little slice of the story and it takes quite a while before it is clear who the good guys are and who the bad guys are (except one who seems pretty much bad from the get-go). Very well crafted and much better than the jacket copy ("a mesmerizing literary thriller about the bond between two brothers and the evil they face in a small western North Carolina town.") makes it sound. I think it is really much more a story about how each person's weaknesses and strengths--and the choices those lead them to--color the lives of those around them.