Top Ten Tuesday: Has Anybody Read These Books? Anybody?

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is hidden gems. I feel like I’ve talked about that before, so I’m changing the prompt a little. Here are 10 books that I hope are hidden gems. I haven’t read any of them yet. I haven’t seen many people talking about them. They all have fewer than 100 reviews on Goodreads. Either they’re hidden gems, or they’re really terrible.

Hopeful Hidden Gems

Poetry

1. Stranger, Baby by Emily Berry

Emily Berry's Dear Boy was described as a 'blazing debut,' winning the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2013. Stranger, Baby, its follow-up, is marked by the same sense of fantasy and play, estrangement and edgy humor for which she has become known. But these poems delve deeper again, in their off-kilter and often painful encounter with childhood loss.

2. Next Door To The Dead by Kathleen Driskell

When Kathleen Driskell tells her husband that she's gone to visit the neighbors, she means something different than most. The noted poet―whose last book, Seed across Snow, was twice listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation―lives in an old country church just outside Louisville, Kentucky. Next door is an old graveyard that she was told had fallen out of use. In this marvelous new collection, this turns out not to be the case as the poet's fascination with the "neighbors" brings the burial ground back to life.

3. Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey With An Exceptional Labrador by Stephen Kuusisto

In a lyrical love letter to guide dogs everywhere, a blind poet shares his delightful story of how a guide dog changed his life and helped him discover a newfound appreciation for travel and independence.

Short Story Collections

4. Heartbreaker: Stories by Maryse Meijer

In her debut story collection Heartbreaker, Maryse Meijer peels back the crust of normalcy and convention, unmasking the fury and violence we are willing to inflict in the name of love and loneliness. Her characters are a strange ensemble—a feral child, a girl raised from the dead, a possible pedophile—who share in vulnerability and heartache, but maintain an unremitting will to survive. 

5. Deceit And Other Possibilities by Vanessa Hua

In this powerful debut collection, Vanessa Hua gives voice to immigrant families navigating a new America. Tied to their ancestral and adopted homelands in ways unimaginable in generations past, these memorable characters straddle both worlds but belong to none.

6. Age Of Blight: Stories by Kristine Ong Muslim

What if the end of man is not caused by some cataclysmic event, but by the nature of humans themselves? In Age of Blight, a young scientist's harsh and unnecessary experiments on monkeys are recorded for posterity; children are replaced by their doppelgangers, which emerge like flowers in their backyards; and two men standing on opposing cliff faces bear witness to each other's terrifying ends.

Novels

7. Sufficient Grace by Amy Espeseth

Ruth and her cousin Naomi live in rural Wisconsin, part of an isolated religious community. The girls’ lives are ruled by the rhythms of nature—the harsh winters, the hunting seasons, the harvesting of crops—and by their families’ beliefs. Beneath the surface of this closed, frozen world, hidden dangers lurk.

Then Ruth learns that Naomi harbors a terrible secret. She searches for solace in the mysteries of the natural world: broken fawns, migrating birds, and the strange fish deep beneath the ice. Can the girls’ prayers for deliverance be answered? 

8. The Parentations by Kate Mayfield

Eighteenth-century London and the lives of the sisters Fitzgerald, Constance and Verity, become entwined with the nearby Fowler household. For Clovis Fowler, whose unearthly Nordic beauty belies a ruthless thirst for power, and husband Finn, a Limehouse thief, have agreed to provide safe harbor to a mysterious baby.

The puzzling phenomenon binding them close arose unexpectedly from deep within the savage but beautiful landscape of Iceland, where a hidden pool of water grants those who drink from it endless life. But those who sip from the waterfall discover all too quickly that immortality is no gift.

To preserve the life of this strange baby from those who wish him harm means that all concerned must remain undiscovered for more than two hundred years. And, as the centuries creep thither, one in their enclave proves more menacing than those who pursue them. Worse, the life-giving pool that sustains them all, runs dry . . .

9. Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss

Teenage Silvie is living in a remote Northumberland camp as an exercise in experimental archaeology. Her father is an abusive man, obsessed with recreating the discomfort, brutality and harshness of Iron Age life. Behind and ahead of Silvie's narrative is the story of a bog girl, a sacrifice, a woman killed by those closest to her, and as the hot summer builds to a terrifying climax, Silvie and the Bog girl are in ever more terrifying proximity.

10. Fell by Jenn Ashworth

When Annette Clifford returns to her childhood home on the edge of Morecambe Bay, she despairs: the long empty house is crumbling, undermined by two voracious sycamores. What she doesn't realize is that she's not alone: her arrival has woken the spirits of her parents, who anxiously watch over her, longing to make amends. Because as the past comes back to Jack and Netty, they begin to see the summer of 1963 clearly, when Netty was desperately ill and a stranger moved in. Charismatic, mercurial Timothy Richardson, with his seemingly miraculous powers of healing, who drew all their attention away from Annette. Now, they must try to draw another stranger towards her, one who can rescue her.

Which book do you hope will be a hidden gem?