What I Read in January
A month of sibling feuds, magical realism, and the harrowing legacies of colonialism.
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So far, 2025 has been—or at least felt like—a marginally more prolific reading year than 2024, at least in that I am reading instead of just thinking about reading. The choices feel more dynamic and diverse. And what I wrote above about this month’s tally is no exaggeration: of the four novels I read, two included some element of magical realism (more specifically, an anthropomorphic animal character), while three featured generation-spanning dysfunctional relationships between siblings, and (at least) two more grappled with the physical, environmental, and emotional legacies of colonial governance. They were novels about end-times, or intimate moments that feel like personal end-times, and the long arc of history, which can be harrowing to think about at a time when real life feels like the brink of an end-time, or some moment in an alternate history. But perhaps they’re also a reminder that the arc of history does bend.
Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe (Ecco, 2024)
In this reimagining of a Chinese folk tale, it’s been centuries since a magic ritual transformed Emerald and Su from snakes into human women when the estranged sisters finally reunite in Singapore. But as Su’s carefully constructed human facade begins to clash with Emerald’s free-spirited approach to immortality, the sisters find their shared history may be too massive to conceal. Koe’s story emerges where the sardonic gore of Mona Awad and Ainslie Hogarth meets Brit Bennett or Kamila Shamsie’s pensive reflections on sisterhood as a lifelong entanglement—that is to say, it’s deservedly sentimental while remaining delightfully out of left field.
Poor Deer by Claire Oshetsky (Ecco, 2024)
An enchanting, intimate folk tale told from the inside, Claire Oshetsky’s second novel is simultaneously a coming-of-age tale that comes too early and a story about forgiveness that comes too late. In rural New England, four-year-old Margaret Murphy spends her days in a world of her own making, usually accompanied by her best friend, Agnes Bickford. Then Agnes is killed in a tragic accident for which Margaret is responsible—except, only Margaret knows that last part. Haunted by a guilt she can’t fully understand and alone in a world not suited for her vivid imagination, Margaret soon finds herself accompanied by a new companion: Poor Deer, a (seemingly) living, breathing manifestation of her secret. Poor Deer is a quietly devastating, dozen-year magical realist odyssey through Margaret’s grief.
Private Rites by Julia Armfield (Flatiron, 2024)
The apocalypse brewing in Private Rites creeps up on you. It appears in tiny details—architecture designed to accommodate an endless flood, a passing reference to the absence of fresh meat and produce—until all at once, it overwhelms the story completely.
Julia Armfield’s arresting second novel is a sisterhood tale that pays homage to genre classics like How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and Little Women without merely rehashing the same dynamics. (In that sense, it accomplishes much of what Coco Mellors’ Blue Sisters was going for, without the bioessentialist musing.) Set in an apocalyptic London where mass flooding has become the default, Private Rites sees three estranged sisters—high-strung Isla, volatile Irene, and listless Agnes—reunite after the death of their cruel, distant architect father. But as they sort his estate and reckon with the massive legacy he left behind, the sisters learn there was more to their curious upbringing than their enigmatic parents let on.
Private Rites is less horror-oriented—and significantly longer—than Armfield’s debut, Our Wives Under the Sea, but it maintains the haunting, sometimes apocalyptic tone and coy, hesitant pacing that made the first novel such a success. Textually spare but emotionally labyrinthine, Private Rites is an elegy for sisterhood in the age of the apocalypse.
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, translated by Natasha Wimmer (Riverhead, 2024)
How fitting it was to step into the imagined consciousness of long-dead Spanish conquistadores the same week their countrywoman showed the world their legacy was alive and well in her mind and heart.
In You Dreamed of Empires, Enrigue (an author long fascinated by the faces of Spanish expansion) paints a vivid, surreal image of Tenochtitlan at the brink of colonization. But it’s hardly an elegy for the real-life destruction that followed. Oscillating between perspectives and realms, Enrigue reconstructs the fateful meeting between Hernan Cortes and Moctezuma—cast here as an ambitious, overconfident coward and a fast-fading political genius—largely through the perspectives of those on the sidelines, waiting anxiously to see what will come of the New World. You Dreamed of Empires flows seamlessly between political thriller, fantastical dream odyssey, and brutal alternate history; and, with the weight of real history on his shoulders, Enrigue writes with a trance-like sense of looming dread that—like his characters—expertly conceals what’s brewing underneath.
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Collage by the author.
