Blue Elephant Staff Picks: Favorites of 2009

Our Favorite Books of the Year...

Dog On It
by Spencer Quinn

Riding along with the partners in the Little Detective Agency (Bernie, human, and Chet, canine with mismatched ears) as they try to solve the disappearance of a teenage girl is great fun, with a little hair-raising thrown in. Chet is a charming narrator — loyal, brave, and true, but utterly lovable.
—Laura

Shut Up, You're Fine!
by Andrew Hudgins

My favorite book of poetry this year is Shut Up, You're Fine! — Poems for Very, Very Bad Children by Andrew Hudgins. With titles like "Dead Things I Have Seen," "Our Neighbors Little Yappy Dog," and "Daddy, Are We Meat?" it's a deliciously cynical antidote for adults to the syrupy light verse of traditional children's doggerel. Take the first stanza of one of my favorite selections, "The Starving Kids in Africa": The starving kids in Africa, / would love the processed meat, / canned beats, and cold asparagus / that you're too good to eat. Hudgins is a previous finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and he clearly had fun creating these mutant poetic offspring of Ogden Nash and Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies.
—Kimberly

The Gates
by John Connolly

When Samuel Johnson and his dog go trick-or-treating three days before Halloween, he has no idea that he will witness the opening of the gates of Hell. Now it's up to Samuel to save the world, but how will he do that if nobody believes him? It's a good thing he's no ordinary boy. Mixing in physics lessons for common folk (including hilarious footnotes), Connolly has created a delightful comic novel about the age-old battle between good and evil.
—Teresa

The Confederate General Rides North
by Amanda Gable

Amanda Gable has given us an unforgettable character in 11-year-old Civil War scholar Kat McConnell. As the navigator for her beautiful, but volatile, mother's escape northward from Marietta, Georgia, Kat plots their course to hit every major battlefield. As Kat imagines the scenes of desperation and despair from those old battles, we see the ones occurring in her world and love her for her fierce intelligence, loyalty, and bravery.
—Laura

Last Night in Twisted River
by John Irving

The story begins in a lumber mill in 1950s New Hampshire, as we follow a father, his son, and their best friend. The characters are vintage Irving—slightly to hugely eccentric.
—Linda W.

We Never Talk About My Brother
by Peter Beagle

Best known as the author of the fantasy classic The Last Unicorn, legendary writer Peter S. Beagle is a master of short fiction as well. The stories in this collection range in setting from surreal sea voyages to the scruffy working-class Brooklyn of the 1940s. A soldier in medieval Japan falls in love with a woman with no past; slacker academics duel to the death, their weapon awesomely bad poetry. All of the stories are funny and sad and haunting, as only Beagle can be.
—Kimberly

Little Bee
by Chris Cleave

A cascade of events brings together a young Nigerian girl and an affluent young British woman, with life-changing consequences for both of them. Cleave touches on issues like greed, violence, government policy, but the true story is connection—or lack thereof—between people.
—Laura

The Help
by Kathryn Stockett

The Help by local author Kathryn Stockett is the best debut novel I have ever read! This story about three very strong and courageous women in Mississippi in 1962 captures the hardships and charms of the South beautifully. I cannot praise it enough and encourage you to experience it for yourself.
—Teresa

The City & the City
by China Miéville

When a woman is brutally murdered in Besźel, a politically striated city-state on the edge of post-Soviet Europe, Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Besźel Extreme Crime Squad is on the case. But Borlú's investigation leads him deep into conspiracy within Besźel's exotic sister-city and rival, the nearby but foreign Ul Qoma—divided from Besźel in people, language, and culture, but overlapping in shared geography. With echoes of divided Jerusalem and of East and West Berlin, New Weird favorite Miéville questions the nature of statehood and loyalty within a tense and satisfying speculative urban mystery.
—Kimberly

A Most Wanted Man
by John Le Carre

A Most Wanted Man by John Le Carre is now in paperback. This is how the world of spies works in the 21st century.
—Linda W.

Darling Jim
by Christian Moerk

When a reclusive woman and two twentysomething sisters are found dead in the woman's house, an introverted postal worker tries to solve the crime using one sister's diary found in a dead letter bin. The answers to these questions will unravel the mystery: How was the existence of the sisters unknown to all in this small Irish town, what is the relationship of the sisters to the older woman, and where is the third sister?
—Teresa