The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey
In the same way Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble with Sheep and Goats left me captivated and shaken to my core, this coming-of-age tale touched me deeply. While set around the Yorkshire murders in the late 1970s, it is a tale for our times. What two preteens find when they begin to observe carefully is a world more complex and frightening. Revealing the power of friendships and the hidden stories around us with spot-on emotional resonance, this is a book to be swept up in and to reflect on.
The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey, (List Price: $17.99, Sourcebooks Landmark, 9781464249051, December 2025)
Reviewed by Jan Blodgett, Main Street Books in Davidson, North Carolina
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I first saw a bog body in the British Museum, and I just thought, How amazing. This is a real person who lived and breathed 1000s of years ago, and I can still see him, and we can learn so much about him and his life, from his body and from studying him. And his people buried him in this place where I think they knew that he would be preserved, and I can imagine them, you know, hoping that maybe we would understand them. One day, I visited the bog where he was found. I really learned so much from that landscape, which today is quite degraded from its former state, but it’s still breathtaking to see, and there are spots of real biodiversity that could come back if protected properly. So I really got obsessed with bogs themselves and with the moss that creates the bogs, and the way it can operate as a colony, not as a single organism. And I really wanted in this book to talk about the non human world. I think that people tend to think that we always drive events on the earth, but there are many other organisms here that have huge impact on us, in our lives, and I really wanted to share that too. 
