Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh, TP $22.00

I’m going to confess something… I didn’t like this book at first. It made me angry, and a little sad. But days, and even weeks after I finished the last words, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. This is a book about isolation and loneliness — two things that have become all too familiar to many of us over the past year and a half. Don’t get me wrong, the last thing I want is to sit in those feelings any more than I have to. But Moshfegh is able to put into words all of the things that I cannot. I’ve read several of her other books and I can say with certainty that one of her greatest strengths is her ability to delve deep into her characters’ minds, to speak out loud the thoughts we can’t even admit to ourselves. In this book the reader lives there — inside the main character’s thoughts. We get to know her not by what she puts out into the world, but by what she hides from it. This book is dark, scary, and at times a little gross. It’s a book about a murder that may not have even happened; about a mystery that might not be a mystery at all. It’s about what we make of the world around us and how we build our own realities. It’s been months since I read it and something about it won’t leave me. Somehow, in all of the isolation of this year, this story made me feel better about my own reality. And while I know it won’t be for everyone, it turned out to be the perfect book for me this year.