Surprise Me!

I find it easy to find mood specific reads when it’s based on a genre or trope, but lately I’ve been craving something that I can’t really search for.

I want to be surprised by a book.

But not with a cheap shocking twist—I’ve read so many that the thrill is currently not thrilling, bordering on annoying and actually boring. Instead, I want something that feels fresh/new/different.

The last book that did surprise me was the first book I picked up this month—a book already on my Fave of 2025 list—and it was the narrative structure that felt unique. I was not only invested in the character and story but the story’s unfolding through its structure was clever in its relation to the theme, rather than feeling like an author trying to trick the reader for shock value. It left me thinking about the other books I’ve loved with unique narrative structures so that’s what I’m sharing this week. Whether you just want a great read or are looking for something that feels in some way different I think any of these books are worth your reading time.

Draft After Draft of a Suicide Note

We Could Be Rats by Emily Austin

When it was announced I immediately tossed this book onto my TBR and never even looked at what it was about since I’d enjoyed Emily Austin’s previous book, Interesting Facts About Space, so much. So I was very surprised to find myself immediately in the main character’s life as she’s writing a suicide letter. The thing about Emily R. Austin’s writing is that she has a very specific voice, which talks about very real and serious topics without it being trauma porn or feeling like you’re being sunk with the heaviness of the subject. It isn’t flippant, but it’s in the category of how many people living on the struggle bus use dark humor as a part of their survival tool kit. I loved how this novel unfolds so I don’t want to say much about it but for minimum context it starts with Sigrid drafting suicide note after suicide note which slowly brings her life, past and present, into focus and her relationship with her sister from childhood up to the current moment’s events. It’s about a lot of things including how multiple views and feelings of the same childhood can reach far into the future.

Job Counseling Sessions

How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz

This is a book whose character I carry around with me, and will forever think about and wonder how they’re doing. You not only get to know Cara Romero’s current life situation, but her life through the years, and her past and present relationships through job counseling sessions that she’s attending. All one-sided. Literally, the novel is her meeting with a job counselor after being laid off and somehow she can’t stick to just answering the questions and instead gives updates on her life, how she’s feeling, and tells stories. It’s an exceptionally voiced book that is hilarious, and heartbreaking, and everything in between the way a long, hard lived life is.

One-Sided Phone Calls

Oye by Melissa Mogollon

Speaking of one-sided conversations, this time we have a much younger protagonist but instead of job interviews it’s one-sided phone calls to her sister. It’s a family drama with equal heart, drama, and laughs that follows a Colombian American family in Miami as high school senior Luciana keeps calling her sister, who is away at college, to recount everything happening. It starts with a hurricane prediction that her abuela refuses to leave for and her mom’s reaction to her liking girls but things turn when her abuela gets sick and her estranged tia-abuela becomes part of the family bringing all the dark family secrets with her.

Told Backwards

The Borrowed by Chan Ho-Kei, Jeremy Tiang (translator)

This is a translated Chinese procedural, with puzzle mysteries, that is told backwards! It not only has plenty of tropes for mystery fans, and twisty mysteries to solve, but it also gives a historical look at social/political changes in Hong Kong. And it moves backwards in time! You follow the same detective, Kwan Chun-dok, starting with his current mystery, and move back in time over his thirty year career with a hundred percent success rate!

Epistolary, With Alphabet Letters Literally Disappearing

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn

It may not be that unique for a novel to be made up of correspondence—epistolary is a narrative category after all—but it is certainly uncommon for the actual alphabet letters in said letters to start disappearing the further you get into the text. The novel is smart and funny—though reading it in our current political landscape made it more of a holyshitwtf for me—and follows Ella Minnow Pea, a girl living on an island off of South Carolina where the council starts to ban letters of the alphabet from being used because they start falling off of the statue of their founder. It’s all very clever and fun (when the actual government you’re living under isn’t leaning into totalitarianism).

Trapped Inside of Slack

Several People Are Typing by Calvin Kasulke

I absolutely love anything that is delightfully weird, dark humor, and absurd, which is this novel. Slack is a messaging/chat app that many businesses use for employees to communicate throughout the work day with each other. In this novel a public relations firm employee gets his subconscious literally sucked into Slack. Gerald, said man, is clearly freaking out and trying to get people to believe him about what is happening, but in a world obsessed with work productivity is the company going to care if he’s suddenly more efficient? Hello, late-stage capitalism!

Do you have any favorite book(s) that have surprised you?