My 10 Favorite Books & Series of 2024
As 2024 comes to an end, I am once again reflecting on all the great books I read. This has been a blog tradition since 2019 when I wrote my first best books post. As always, it was no easy task to choose only ten books for this list, and for the first time since starting this yearly tradition, I am including two honorable mentions.
This year's reading was frequently interrupted. At the start of the year, I was neck deep in my teacher certification course. Now, I'm neck deep in a gifted endorsement course. There have also been some personal struggles sprinkled throughout the year including sickness and deaths that detracted from my usual reading habits.
This year's best books list includes fantasy, romance, mystery, and historical fiction picks. It includes four books from this year's One Woman Book Club, and six of the books/series made an appearance on my half-yearly 10 best books so far list.
Many of these books are available via Kindle Unlimited and/or have an Audible version.
My 10 Favorite Books & Series of 2024
Author: S.E. Babin
This was hands down my favorite series of 2025. I rarely pick one to be my top favorite, but this series was everything I needed to get through the second half of the year. There are eight books total, and I awaited the releases of the last two with baited breath. I didn't want this one to end, y'all! According to the author's note in the final book, she's not done with these characters either and has plans to develop stories around some of the other characters.
Violet is a Brewer, or a potions master, running a bar-slash-library in New Orleans. When she's approached by a fallen archangel about becoming the Guardian of the New Orleans' portal, which is essentially a gate to Hell, she turns him down cold. She has a big secret to protect - she's the daughter of the archangel Michael and the first demon Lillith. When Michael finds out she survived his attempts to destroy her, he decides Violet will be useful in his plan to take over Earth.
Author: Lindsay Marcott
This was my October book club pick, but I did not read it until December (for various reasons). That's actually my only regret with this book - not reading it when I had planned. Although it is set during the summer months, this book would have been an excellent choice for October. It is a retelling of Jane Eyre and reminded me greatly of Colleen Hoover's Verity.
Dare I say it? I'm gonna say it. This book is better than Verity in my opinion. (It's been too long since I read Jane Eyre for me to make that statement about the classic original.) For me, it had what Hoover's did not - a satisfying, definitive ending. I enjoyed Verity and recommended it to several people. In fact, it made my list of the best books and series in 2021. But by the end of the book, I still was not 100 percent sure what the actual truth was. I can't say that about Mrs. Rochester's Ghost. I also really enjoyed the fact that we got the perspective of the supposed victim, crazy as it was.
Author: Sarah Wilson
I don't typically choose the first book in a series for my book club, but I made an exception for this pirate romance, and I'm so glad I did. This Bluebeard-inspired story was one of the most unique fae romance stories I've ever read. I enjoyed this unpredictable epic love story immensely.
Bluebeard, a.k.a. the Arrow, has been stealing brides from the mortal realm for centuries and using their magic to compete in the Fae games. Those games determine not only the fate of the fae realm but also of the mortal world. Izolda is wife number sixteen, and she changes everything. Finally, the end of Bluebeard's curse is in sight, but will Izolda survive to tell the tale?
Author: J. Gabriel Gates
There was no way this series wasn't going to make my end-of-the-year list. I only talked about it half a dozen times this year. Aggie and her mom get sucked into the world of Luck magic when an experiment goes wrong. Mother and daughter are dosed with an overflow of luck, but only Aggie receives the good kind. Aggie goes on to join the love-dealing suit of Hearts, also known as the Valentines. Aggie's mom becomes the Queen of the newly-resurrected Spades, or Morbuses, who deal in death. Now the mother-daughter duo find themselves on the opposite sides of a cause that's being controlled by a much higher power that has been working from the shadows for centuries. Rounding out the deck of luck are the Diamonds who deal in wealth (good luck) and the Clubs who deal in brutality (bad luck).
Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid
I absolutely love what Taylor Jenkins Reid does with historical fiction. This book is not a traditional novel. It's written as a series of interviews with former band members, managers, and family members of Daisy Jones and The Six. These interviews are woven together to tell the story of the rise and unexpected fall of the band. There is no prose in this book whatsoever. It's literally only the answers to interview questions arranged in chronological order. The band is loosely based on Fleetwood Mac - very loosely based. There are actually very few parallels, but I found this to be an interesting read. It was almost like reading one of those docuseries they show about famous people.
Author: Lynda Rutledge
When I first reviewed this book, I predicted it would make this list. It was so good and thought-provoking. It's set in a small Texas town in the summer of 1964, the height of the Civil Rights Movement but before Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. The main character is Corky, is a 13-year-old tomboy whose father owns the only drugstore in town. She befriends America, the teenage daughter of her mother's new black housekeeper. Corky's brother, Mack, home from college for the summer with lots of new ideas about how the world should be, agrees to coach the Baptist girls' softball team. He and Corky convince America, the fastest girl they've ever seen, to join the team, which creates controversy and leads to events that will forever change the town.
Author: Alex Landragin
This is one of the most interesting books I've read. Crossings is three seemingly unconnected stories that all tell one larger story .It was written in a way that you can read the book two different ways - either straight through front-to-back or by jumping around. No matter which way you choose to read, the story is essentially the same. I chose to read front-to-back, but because of the way my brain works, I was able to fill in all of the first two parts' missing puzzle pieces as I was reading part three.
This reads like a love story, but it really isn't. It's about a lost soul that keeps jumping from life to life, never remembering what got him there, and the one who does remember following after him in an attempt to correct the cycle of a mistake made so long ago. But there is another soul that has discovered this secret and will stop at nothing to prevent this from happening.
Author: Sulari Gentill
This was my book club pick for March, and it was one of the best mystery books I'd read in awhile. It's about a murder mystery author who is writing her next book and sharing chapters with a fan who lives in the city in which the book is set. The fan gives her suggestions and insights to improve the story and make it seem more authentic, but when this fan begins sharing photos of actual crime scenes, the feds get involved. The author agrees to continue sharing her chapters with the fan, who authorities now believe is a serial killer.
This book is chapters of the author from the story's book interwoven with the responses from the fan-slash-serial-killer. As the book progresses, you see the author work in the fan's suggestions and even include the fan in her book. Every time I thought I had figured things out, she would throw something in there to make me second guess everything. It literally kept me guessing until the end.
Author: Gian Sardar
I hesitated before including this book in my end-of-the-year list because I know it isn't for everyone. I'm actually not sure if my mother ever actually finished it, but for me it really was one of the best things I read this year. I loved the journalistic aspect of the book. It was heartbreaking and heartwarming all at once, something that many authors struggle to do successfully.
Olivia is an aspiring photojournalist working at a Los Angeles newspaper as a secretary in 1979. When the paper announces a contest to choose their next photojournalist, Olivia decides to enter, and when her Kurdish-American boyfriend is invited to a wedding back home, she convinces him to take her with him. Olivia just knows that's where she will take the perfect photo to win her dream job. However, Delan hasn't been home in years and no longer has a true understanding of the situation in his home country which is now under the control of Iraq. When they arrive, they find the Kurdish people being brutally oppressed, and their trip is fraught with struggles. While this book definitely covers tough subjects, I found the themes of family and overcoming obstacles to be the glue that held it all together, and it really did have a happy ending.
Author: Janice Hallett
This book was so interesting, and I really felt like I was part of the story. The premise is that two young lawyers have been given a huge file of evidence to go through ahead of an appeal. Their client confessed and was convicted of murder, but her attorney is convinced that she lied in order to protect someone else. Now, his underlings must read through a collection of communication to determine who actually did the deed.
As for the murder, it all happened at the Fairway Players theater. This group of local actors is spearheaded by the Haywards, the matriarch of which is always the star of whatever play they're putting on at the moment. When their granddaughter gets sick, the entire theater group rallies behind the family to raise money for a life-saving cure, but for one of the newest members, who works in the medical field, this miracle cure is a little too good to be true. She begins poking around, trying to save the family from heartbreak and financial ruin, but when she gets a little too close to the truth, she winds up dead.
Honorable Mention
And now for the two series that only didn't make my best of list because they're not incomplete so I don't know how they end.
Author: Adaline Winters
I've read the first four books and am eagerly awaiting book 5, which right now has a publish date of October 2025. Okay, so Cora is a witch with an unusual power. She can relive a person's final moments before death just by touching their body. She's also the granddaughter of the head of The Order, the governing body of all witches. Her grandmother is scheming to expose supernaturals to humanity and start a war that ends with her in charge of everything. If she discovers Cora's secret, she'll do whatever it takes to have Cora under her control to guarantee her success.
The Blood Witch & The Potion Witch (The Coven: Vampire Magic)
Author: Chandelle LaVaun
I told myself I would not start this series until she had finished it because I hate having to wait to find out what happens, but I'm a member of the author's Facebook group and keep stumbling across spoilers. So I caved...after rereading the first three series in the saga to refresh my memory. Essentially, Lilith is trying to break the barrier between Hell and earth, and the Coven and its allies are trying to prevent it from happening while also preparing for war. Frankie's story, while incomplete, is intriguing...and definitely more grown up than the first three series. The Coven is growing up! I believe, however, that there is an alternate version of these books that omit the spicy scenes.
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