Pop’s Best Reads of 2023
When I was five, I begged my parents to teach me to “weed”. I couldn’t pronounce my r’s. Teasingly, my dad took me into the garden to show me how to weed. I cried, “No! Not that weed. Weed books.” That would have to wait until I entered kindergarten. When the mystery was decoded, I read non-stop and continue to this day, seven decades later.
In 2023 I read and reviewed 17 books for Pop’s Blog. The themes of the books vary from science fiction, time travel, and books about the deaf experience. The six books listed below were the best of 2023.
124 pages
YA
Pop’s full review: https://michaelthal.com/a-time-travel-christmas/
in A Time Travel Christmas Elizabeth stumbles down an icy incline near her hotel, gets lost in a ferocious blizzard, and eventually stumbles upon her grandmother’s home. But the person answering the door is 10-year-old Dodie caring for her baby sister, Betsy. Their mother is at the airport picking up dad, but they can’t return home due to the ferocity of the storm. A nearby newspaper provides Elizabeth with a startling revelation: it’s Christmas Eve, but the year is 1957.
McQuestion does a wonderful job of playing readers’ heartstrings as we watch Elizabeth and Dodie try to save the life of little Betsy, who is burning up with fever as the blizzard knocks out phone and power lines throughout Wisconsin. Their only hope is a doctor who lives nearby, but who could survive in such a storm to even reach him?
2. Deaf Utopia: A Memoir—and a Love Letter to a Way of Life by Nyle DiMarco
Ages: Adult
331 pages
Pop’s Full Review: https://michaelthal.com/a-memoir-about-deafness/
Throughout Deaf Utopia DiMarco shows his personal history and how it was influenced by deaf historical events that affected him. However, most importantly, little Nyle had an amazing mother. College educated; Donna DiMarco wanted the best for her boys. When Lexington School for the Deaf in Queens, New York insisted her boys wear hearing aids to school, Nyle revolted. Educators wanted the boy to hear what they were saying, but to Nyle, the aids were a distraction. Eventually, Donna pulled her boys out of the school and found a better one in Texas. She moved the family to Austin and the Texas School for the Deaf where ASL was the language of instruction, not English. After she uncovered the abuse her husband was unleashing against her sons, she divorced him and moved the family to Maryland where the DiMarco boys attended the Maryland School for the Deaf in Frederick, Maryland.
Deaf Utopia is an inspiring memoir that celebrates Deaf culture and its unique language, ASL. If you have an interest in learning more about this culture, its history and language, this memoir should be on the top of your reading list.
3. Find Me in Time: Meeting Columbus by LT Caton
For Ages: 8-10, Middle Grade
97 pages
Pop’s Full Review: https://michaelthal.com/meet-the-real-christopher-columbus/
Find Me in Time opens when middle graders Harry, Keith, Aaron, Emma, and Ashley are playing in the nearby forest when Harry discovers a small treehouse that can transport the friends through time. On their first trip, Find Me in Time tells the truth about the devil who discovered America, so Governor DeSantis, you better add it to your book-ban list. I just hope future Find Me in Time books are as historically accurate and enjoyable reads as this one.
4. Heart of Pangaea by Lindsey Kinsella.
434 pages
Ages 10-Adult
Pop’s Full Review: https://michaelthal.com/pangaea-land-of-the-dinosaurs/
Twelve-year-old Robyn as a powerful imagination and is also an expert in paleontology. Her fantasy is so vivid, she creates her own best friend, Ed, the Dimetrodon. Other than Ed, she has no friends and is bullied unmercifully by Hannah. So to escape her troubles, she creates her own land—Pangaea.
Robyn learns the unimaginable—her mother, Carol, is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Perhaps she can find a cure in Pangaea where the ancestor of every living thing today—the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) resides. During Robyn’s quest for a cure for her mother we meet many different types of dinosaurs with enough information about each to whet the appetite of paleontologists young and old.
5. Love From Mars by JP Cawood.
188 pages
Ages 18-Adult
Pop’s Full Review: https://michaelthal.com/love-from-mars/
The Martian Six, the ultimate reality show, pits men and women against each other as they struggle to remain on the show and become Mars’ first colonists. As the novel opens, Emma Davis, a writer for the Sentinel, meets the six heroes at a press conference. There she greets Ryan Clarke, the defacto leader of the six, and falls helplessly in love with the charismatic astronaut.
Love From Mars: A Novel is an extraordinary love story where author JP Cawood beautifully illustrates Ryan and Emmas’s love story showing their joys and hardships, emotional and spiritual passions embedding in the reader’s mind the real meaning of true love.
6. The Secrets She Learns by Jacqueline Diamond.
274 pages
Ages: Adults
Pop’s Full Review https://michaelthal.com/small-town-secrets/
The Secrets She Learns is book 4 in Jacqueline Diamond’s romantic series, A Better Late Romance (Sisters, Lovers, and Second Chances). In the previous three books we meet Gavin Everly, a narcissistic misogynist who vanishes from Rancho Allegro without a trace. For four year the police, headed by Jonathan Trimbel, searches for the man for cheating his elderly victims of their life savings. The man has no conscience. He impregnates Anni Leffler’s friend Sara and refuses to admit paternity. On top of that, on his wedding day to her friend Kiri, he seduces the maid of honor, Eden. They get caught, so he marries Eden instead, and the poor woman struggles for years in an abusive marriage.
The Secrets She Learns will rivet readers to a plot that is filled with twists, turns, and surprises. If you love a good mystery, a love story, and family dirty secrets rolled into one, this novel won’t disappoint.
Pick a book or two and start 2024 right and weed (oops: read) as many books as you can. Pop’s Blog is one special place to look for the most enjoyable.
Happy New Year
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