Kage Baker -- Best Literature Picks of 2007

I have to say the best book I read in 2007 was The New Moon's Arms by Nalo Hopkinson, both for sheer writerly craft and unsettling subject matter. The overtly fantastic element in the story is a lost child, who may or may not be supernatural in origin, found by a woman who has lost nearly everything else in her life. But there is more going on in the story than is ever said aloud. The heroine, Calamity, is impatient, outspoken and brash; she loves deeply but has managed to alienate everyone she ever loved, and finds herself alone on the shore of middle age. And then... lost things start cycling back into her life. Forgotten toys from childhood, a long-broken friendship, a drowned orchard miraculously reappearing on dry land.

There is always a shock when a writer manages to put into words something universal that hasn't yet been said, a shout of recognition from the heart. No one else I know of has yet treated of that eerie time in life when your present is lost, not in the future you expected, but in pieces of the past that come bobbing up like icebergs. I was moved to the point of uneasiness; almost wanted to email Hopkinson to ask, How the hell did you know? Have you been through this, too? I thought it was just me!  When a book can do that to you, the writer is on to something. Five stars.