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I've read only two of these, The Great Divide and The Frozen River. Much as I enjoyed these two, I'm going to take a wild guess that the ultimate winner for 2024 will be Kristin Hannah's The Women. It has a 4.63 rating and, most importantly, 88,160 reviews already on Goodreads. Nothing else comes close in terms of review numbers. But even though the novels on this grid with fewer than 1000 reviews don't stand much of a chance against very popular books, Goodreads remains a very useful tool for book discovery, and if you want more readers to get their eyes on a book that you highly recommend, have your say and vote for it, in hopes that it will make it through to the final round.
Kristin Hannah's historical novels always fare well in this competition, but her previous novel, The Four Winds, lost to Taylor Jenkins Reid's Malibu Rising (which had more overall reviews) in 2021.
Also, take a look at the initial picks for debut novels, since you'll find historicals there that didn't make the main category, like Ashton Lattimore's All We Were Promised, Ferdia Lennon's Glorious Exploits, Eve J. Chung's Daughters of Shandong, Elba Iris Pérez's The Things We Didn't Know, and O. O. Sangoyomi's Masquerade.
Also, take a look at the initial picks for debut novels, since you'll find historicals there that didn't make the main category, like Ashton Lattimore's All We Were Promised, Ferdia Lennon's Glorious Exploits, Eve J. Chung's Daughters of Shandong, Elba Iris Pérez's The Things We Didn't Know, and O. O. Sangoyomi's Masquerade.
In the fantasy category are Rose Sutherland's A Sweet Sting of Salt, set in 1830s Nova Scotia; Katherine Arden's WWI novel The Warm Hands of Ghosts; Leigh Bardugo's Spanish Golden Age fantasy The Familiar; Yangsze Choo's The Fox Wife, set in early 20th-century Manchuria; and Ann Liang's mythological Chinese retelling A Song to Drown Rivers. There's strong reader interest in historical fantasy genre-blends. The horror category has historical novels in it too, namely Del Sandeen's This Cursed House and C. J. Cooke's The Book of Witching.
I don't vote for books I haven't read, so my choice for historical fiction went to Ariel Lawhon's The Frozen River. We'll see how far it gets in the process. New books frequently get introduced for the final round, so I'll be curious to see those, too.
I'm going to vote for Percival Everett's James -- which was a finalist for the Booker and National Book awards and already won the Kirkus Award. It's just an amazing stylistic feat. We're spoiled for choice in the fantasy category (I loved The Warm Hands of Ghosts, The Familiar, and The Bright Sword), but I wish Minsoo Kang's luminous The Melancholy of Untold History had made the list as well.
ReplyDeleteAnd Glorious Exploits was also a delight -- glad to see it recognized!
ReplyDeleteJames will rank highly in the end, I'm sure!
DeleteI should have added: the HF opening round works well for library collection development purposes, too. I've acquired many of these for our bestseller collection.
Glorious Exploits is on my list to read!