The minute I finished CIRCE (weeping, in a crowded Starbucks) I needed to talk to someone about it and have not stopped since. This is a gorgeously written, deeply feminist retelling of the myth of Circe, who you may remember as the witch who turned men into pigs in THE ODYSSEY (for good reason, as you’ll find out). It’s too rare to read a book where every single female character has such incredible depth and nuance and is just beautifully, painfully real, but this book does that and more. In Circe’s words, “Would I be skimmed milk or a harpy? A foolish gull or a villainous monster? Those could not still be the only choices.” In this book, they’re not, and Miller’s complex, empowering story is exactly what I need to be reading in 2019.
MANHATTAN BEACH’s standout main character, Anna, is a young, independent woman who works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II. Through her cunning and will, Anna becomes the first and only female civilian diver and manages to convince a gangster to reveal her missing father’s fate. Anna values her independence and is confident enough to know that she has every right to occupy a space as anyone else. In the end, this willpower and wit enable her to hold on to her independence and live the life she chooses instead of a life of unhappy domesticity.
All Mitza Maric wanted was to be taken seriously for the skilled mathematician that she was. She enters school as one of the first and only females in her math department and instantly begins to show up the other pupils with her quick skill and decisive thinking. When a young classmate with wild hair and a love of classical music begins to call on her, Mitza is flattered but remains focused on her education. After much time, she succumbs to the flirtations of Albert Einstein and not long after the two are wed. While Einstein continues to tinker with his Theory of Relativity, Marie Benedict paints a picture of the woman behind the man. Adding her layers to the theory papers, Mitza provides much of the backup that would shape the now-famous think piece. When the paper is published, her name is glaringly missing from the acknowledgments. It is an omission that will test Mitza’s resolve, character, and ultimately the strength of her marriage. Benedict writes a succinct yet enthralling novel that begs the question: Where on Earth would he be without her?
After her mother’s death, Poornima cares for her siblings and awaits an arrangement of marriage. And then Savitha enters their home and Savitha is independent, fun, and everything a woman is traditionally not. When Savitha leaves suddenly, Poornima sets out to find her friends and leave this claustrophobic life behind.
Colson Whitehead received copious attention for his 2016 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel set in the antebellum South, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD. We follow Cora, a third-generation slave on a Georgia cotton plantation who has been abandoned by her mother. When Cora meets Caesar, a new arrival from Virginia, and he tells her of a free North, they hatch a plan to escape together.
Taking place over the course of three days, the book is at once tightly, anxiously focused on the arrival of the Führer and the tensions that will come to a head with his visit, and yet has an epic sprawl, covering three generations of experience. Powerful, utterly mesmerizing, and deeply personal, Werner’s perspective on World War II is a complicated one, which is what makes it all the more important.
Eilis Lacey is a young woman who abandons small-town Ireland and the comfort of her mother’s home for the anonymous shores of New York City. In Brooklyn, she finds a city in flux—a city where immigrants from Ireland and Poland live amongst Jewish and black communities. Just as she is beginning to fall in love with a young man, devastating news from Ireland threatens the promise of her new life.
