Heather Allen

There’s a list for everything, and for everything there’s a list. It’s that time of year when every publication known to man starts ranking this and that. We thought we should join in, because we love lists too. Maybe some of these won’t make any official ‘best of’ countdowns, but we at 80 Books loved them all.

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi — A woman named Boy runs away from home and settles in a New England town during the 1950’s. She marries a man who has been passing as white. His daughter from a previous marriage is named Snow, who sees Boy as the evil stepmother. When Boy gives birth to her daughter, Bird, she realizes that her husband is black because her daughter is not light skinned. Reads like a Toni Morrison novel with a fairy tale twist. (Riverhead Books, March 2014)

A Case of Possession (A Charm of Magpies #2) by KJ Charles —…