New Jersey authors: The top 10 of 2019

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

Rutgers University professor Erica Armstrong Dunbar wrote a compelling history of Harriet Tubman.

Months after I close the books, I continue to think about them.

In some cases, it was brilliant plotting. In others, characters so finely sculpted they seem real. And in one, a revealing take on history I mistakenly thought I knew.

While it’s always a tough choice to limit my best-of list to 10 books, I need to clarify that this is not a ranking, as in the first is the best or worst. Rather, these are the books — beginning with the oldest of 2019 — that do precisely what books should: Make you want to read.

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

Laura Sims’ debut novel offers a chilling account of a woman losing herself as she becomes obsessed with a neighbor who’s a celebrity.

“Looker” by Laura Sims

The debut novel by a South Orange poet is a gut-wrenching book that takes us inside the demise of a woman as her life unravels. The unnamed protagonist is obsessed with a celebrity neighbor, and here she peers into that woman’s home.

“Her aloneness is temporary; mine is infinite. Mine spreads out from the center like a puddle, muddying everything it touches. Even the cat shrinks back, slinks to dry land. But there the actress is on her cozy island, pouring a generous glass of good white wine that's been chilled just for her by some thoughtful staff member who then slipped away to leave her in peace. She takes her first sip while standing there, and then sips again, quickly, like it's too delicious to wait. When have I tasted wine like that?"

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

An elderly woman recounts her life to her grandniece, including witnessing a famed dinner.

“The Peacock Feast” by Lisa Gornick

The Princeton University alumna’s title refers to a banquet Louis C. Tiffany threw where girls, including his daughter, wore peacock headdresses. Here, Prudence, 101, reminisces about a rather insufferable man who had proposed to her.

“As he’d previously stated, his goals — the ascent of the highest peak on each of the seven continents, the mastery of Bach’s compositions for piano, the expansion of his rare-book collection, and, in general, a life of aesthetic and intellectual refinement — were not compatible with raising children.”

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

Brad Parks’ latest gripping tale shows how easily someone can convince himself to do something truly dumb.

“The Last Act” by Brad Parks

Another exquisitely plotted mystery by Parks, a former Star-Ledger writer. Money woes and trusting a childhood pal convince a Hackensack guy to plead guilty to a bank robbery he did not commit. In exchange, he is supposed to walk away wealthy.

"This wasn't the movies," Jump realizes. "New Colima wasn't a bunch of dashing Mexican guys in white linen suits, smoking cigars and drinking sangria at a picturesque seaside hacienda. They were brutal, soulless killers who placed zero value on human life. They tortured the soon-to-be-dead for the sheer terror it created in the living."

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

Harlan Coben chronicles a father’s grief as he tries to save his daughter.

“Run Away” by Harlan Coben

Ridgewood’s Coben is particularly adroit at documenting the heartbeat of a longtime marriage.

"He loved her. She loved him. Simple but there you have it. You both have careers, and you raise kids, and there are victories and defeats and you just sort of coast along, living your life, the days long, the years short, and then once in a while, you remember to pull up and look at your partner ... and you realize how much you are in this together."

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

Elizabeth Gilbert’s ninth novel is a glorious deep dive into old New York and a grand old woman.

“City of Girls” by Elizabeth Gilbert

Another long book worth every moment devoted to it. Gilbert, of Frenchtown, creates a world where Vivian reflects on a life she chose, uncommon for women born in 1920. She became a happy bohemian who designed and sewed costumes for a small theater company. This passage has her espy an old friend on a commercial.

“Scandal or no scandal, I believe that our friendship was always destined to have been momentary — a collision of two vain young girls who intersected at the zenith of their beauty and the nadir of their intelligence, and who had blatantly used each other to acquire status and turn men’s heads. That’s all it had ever been, really, and that was perfect. That’s all it had ever needed to be. I’d found deeper and richer female friendships later on in life, and I hoped that Celia had, too.”

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

Marcy Dermansky’s fourth novel explores a mother and daughter in love with the same man.

Very Nice” by Marcy Dermansky

Dermansky, of Montclair, probes the meaning of entitlement, from basic to grand. A Pakistani writer blows through his royalties and advance and expects everyone to cater to him because he is talented and sexy. Those traits spell trouble when a love triangle develops among a mother, a daughter and the writer, a maddening fellow.

"I was supposed to stop f---ing other women. More important, I was supposed to care about someone other than myself. The truth was, I didn’t love her. I thought I put a good show of it. For instance, in the time we were together, I never got caught cheating on her.”

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

A spectacular novel about women’s friendship, World War II, the Black List and the fortitude of one woman.

“The Chelsea Girls” by Fiona Davis

In a year of exceptional novels, Davis, who grew up in Wayne and Brick, shines. She set the story at the Hotel Chelsea and built around a stoic actress and playwright from just before World War II through the McCarthy hearings. Davis cites an article in Variety referred to “probing” Broadway folks for info about their “commie influences.”

“The article would certainly strike even more fear into the hearts of the theater community, everyone wondering if a rival was turning on them, if they were a target. If they’d go off to a jail and lose everything. An insidious, poisonous fog was drifting down Broadway, across stages and into producers’ offices and rehearsal rooms, making everyone suspect and scared.”

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

Tracey Baptiste, of Englewood, draws from her childhood in Trinidad and Tobago, to write another book about the spirits who guide nature.

“The Jumbie God’s Revenge” by Tracey Baptiste

Baptiste, of Englewood, tells of jumbies, the spirits of West Africa and the Caribbean. Her stories of fire, water and air paint a rich depiction of life on an island where a girl lives with her dad, who is a gentle fisherman. She understands and communicates with the spirits.

“There was a jumbie who cared for the woods, and one who lived beneath the waves who would turn anyone into stone at a glance and who ruled the mermaids in the sea. Corinne had seen them all. But worse than that, she had witnessed their power, and she understood just how easy it was to succumb to any one of them.”

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

Harriet Tubman — a nurse, abolitionist, suffragist and a spy for the Union Army — accomplished all of this while living with a disability.

“She Came to Slay” by Erica Armstrong Dunbar

Shortly before I read the Rutgers University professor’s excellent biography of Harriet Tubman, I had spent a day at the Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. Over the years, I have interviewed many civil rights leaders, read a lot and tried to understand and expose the hideousness of racism. Still, this book taught me so much. Dunbar traced Tubman’s roots to her grandmother’s passage to America.

“Lying in the belly of the wooden vessel, trying to remember when she had last seen her family, she tried to make sense of the nightmare of her life. It was as if she had stumbled into another world.”

New Jersey Authors: Top Ten of 2019

Jack is back as F. Paul Wilson spins another great yarn starring Repairman Jack in a timely book.

“The Last Christmas” by F. Paul Wilson

I bumped another book to make room for the return of Repairman Jack. A werewolf is loose in Queens, and Jack is on the case. If you (rightfully) think women over 60 are fierce, try one who doesn’t even know how many millennia old she is. Wilson weaves an intricate tale and leaves room for sequels. This stands alone well because Wilson is so deft, even with a minor character, such as this woman.

“Two years younger and still living with her mother, Tihana had grown into a flabby, slovenly pothead who’d dropped out of school, had no regular job, and no desire to find one. The only income she had was what she could cadge out of Mom and what Jelena could scrape together to pay her for babysitting.”

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