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🧲 Books like this

Hope in a Ballet Shoe: Orphaned by war, saved by ballet: an extraordinary true story

Michaela DePrince, Elaine DePrince · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

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❤️

Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption

Katie J. Davis, Beth Clark · 264 pages

What would cause an eighteen-year-old old senior class president and homecoming queen from Nashville, Tennessee, to disobey and disappoint her parents by forgoing college, break her little brother’s heart, lose all but a handful of her friends (because the rest of them think she has gone off the deep end), and break up with the love of her life, all so she could move to Uganda, where she knew only

AdoptionHopefulOrphansMemoir & Biography
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A Long Way Home

Saroo Brierley · 280 pages

AdoptionOrphansHopefulUplifting
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Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War

Leymah Gbowee, Carol Mithers · 253 pages

In a time of death and terror, Leymah Gbowee brought Liberia's women together--and together they led a nation to peace. As a young woman, Gbowee was broken by the Liberian civil war, a brutal conflict that tore apart her life and claimed the lives of countless relatives and friends. As a young mother trapped in a nightmare of domestic abuse, she found the courage to turn her bitterness into action

AutobiographyWar ZoneMemoir & BiographyHopeful
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I Am Malala: The Story of the Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban

Malala Yousafzai, Christina Lamb · 311 pages

When the Taliban took control of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, one girl spoke out. Malala Yousafzai refused to be silenced and fought for her right to an education. On Tuesday, October 9, 2012, when she was fifteen, she almost paid the ultimate price. She was shot in the head at point-blank range while riding the bus home from school, and few expected her to survive. Instead, Malala's miraculous re

HopefulAutobiographyUpliftingMemoir & Biography
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Nujeen: One Girl's Incredible Journey from War‐Torn Syria in a Wheelchair

Nujeen Mustafa · 312 pages

This book tells the inspiring true story of a remarkable young hero: Nujeen Mustafa, a teenager born with cerebral palsy, whose harrowing journey from war-ravaged Syria to Germany in a wheelchair is a breathtaking tale of fortitude, grit, and hope that lends a face to the greatest humanitarian issue of our time, the Syrian refugee crisis.For millions around the globe, sixteen-year-old Nujeen Musta

AutobiographyUpliftingMemoir & BiographyWar Zone
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I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity

Izzeldin Abuelaish · 239 pages

Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish - now known simply as "the Gaza doctor" captured hearts and headlines around the world in the aftermath of horrific tragedy: on January 16, 2009, Israeli shells hit his home in the Gaza Strip, killing three of his daughters and a niece. By turns inspiring and heartbreaking, hopeful and horrifying, this is Abuelaish's account of a Gazan life in all its struggle and pain. A Pa

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyHopefulUplifting
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The Lost Boy

Dave Pelzer · 272 pages

Imagine a young boy who has never had a home. His only possessions are the old torn clothes he carries in a paper bag. His only world is isolation and fear. Although this young boy has been rescued from his alcoholic mother, the real hurt is just beginning-he has no place to call *home*. This is the first paragraph on the back of the book. While I feel it sums up the book pretty well, I think some

AutobiographyHopefulAdoptionMemoir & Biography
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Three Little Words: A Memoir

Ashley Rhodes-Courter · 320 pages

Ashley spent nine years in foster care after being taken away from her mother. She endured many caseworkers, moving from school to school and manipulative, humiliating and abusive treatment from one foster family. See how she survives and eventually thrives against the odds.

AdoptionAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyHopeful
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Becoming

Michelle Obama · 432 pages

In this adaptation of her autobiography for younger readers, Michelle Obama presents an account of her life, and, in telling of her own personal evolution, stresses the need for people to realize that no one is perfect, that the process of "becoming" is what really matters.

AutobiographyHopefulUpliftingMemoir & Biography
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The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom

Corrie ten Boom, John Sherrill, Elizabeth Sherrill · 241 pages

The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom by Corrie ten Boom, John Sherrill, Elizabeth Sherrill (Goodreads Author) "At one time Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that there would ever be a story to tell. For the first fifty years of her life nothing at all out of the ordinary had ever happened to her. She was an old-maid watchmaker living contentedly with her spinster sister a

AutobiographyUpliftingHopefulMemoir & Biography
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Courage to Soar: A Body in Motion, A Life in Balance

Simone Biles · 250 pages

In Courage to Soar, the official autobiography from US Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, Simone presents the story of how she overcame early childhood challenges to become the most decorated US female gymnast and the only female gymnast to ever win three consecutive World Championship titles.

AdoptionAutobiographyUpliftingMemoir & Biography
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Choosing to SEE

Mary Beth Chapman · 292 pages

From the beginning, Mary Beth Chapman's life was not how she planned. All she wanted was a calm, peaceful life of stability and control. Instead, God gave her an award-winning singer/songwriter husband, crazy schedules, and a houseful of creatively rambunctious children. And then, she experienced the tragedy she never could have imagined. In Choosing to See, Mary Beth unveils her struggle to allow

AdoptionAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyHopeful
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Yes, Chef

Marcus Samuelsson · 327 pages

"It begins with a simple ritual: Every Saturday afternoon, a boy who loves to cook walks to his grandmother's house and helps her prepare a roast chicken for dinner. The grandmother is Swedish, a retired domestic. The boy is Ethiopian and adopted, and he will grow up to become the world-renowned chef Marcus Samuelsson. This book is his love letter to food and family in all its manifestations. Mar

AdoptionAutobiographyUpliftingMemoir & Biography
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I Am the Central Park Jogger

Trisha Meili · 257 pages

The woman dubbed in the headlines "the Central Park Jogger," who was raped and brutally beaten in 1989 while jogging in New York's Central Park, recounts her assault and recovery and describes how the event changed her life.

AutobiographyUpliftingHopefulMemoir & Biography
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AdoptionOrphansUpliftingMemoir & Biography
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The Bite of Mango

Mariatu Kamara, Susan McClelland · 216 pages

AutobiographyWar ZoneMemoir & BiographyHopeful
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Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust

Immaculee Ilibagiza · 215 pages

Immaculee Ilibagiza grew up in a country she loved, surrounded by a family she cherished. But in 1994 her idyllic world was ripped apart as Rwanda descended into a bloody genocide. Immaculee's family was brutally murdered during a killing spree that lasted three months and claimed the lives of nearly a million Rwandans. Incredibly, Immaculee survived the slaughter. For 91 days, she and seven other

AutobiographyHopefulWar ZoneMemoir & Biography
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Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman: 90,000 Lives Changed

Hawa Abdi · 246 pages

"The ... memoir of one brave woman who, along with her daughters, has kept tens of thousands of her fellow Somali citizens safe, healthy, and educated for more than twenty years"--Dust jacket flap.

AutobiographyHopefulWar ZoneMemoir & Biography
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A House in the Sky

Amanda Lindhout, Sara Corbett · 373 pages

"The spectacularly dramatic memoir of a woman whose curiosity about the world led her from rural Canada to imperiled and dangerous countries on every continent, and then into fifteen months of harrowing captivity in Somalia--a story of courage, resilience, and extraordinary grace. At the age of eighteen, Amanda Lindhout moved from her hardscrabble Alberta hometown to the big city--Calgary--and wor

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyHopefulWar Zone
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I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness, to The Blind Side, and Beyond

Michael Oher · 261 pages

250 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm1130L Lexile

AdoptionAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyUplifting
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Tramp for the Lord

Corrie ten Boom · 202 pages

For the past twenty years Corrie ten Boom has crisscrossed the globe, slept in more than a thousand different beds, and lived out of suitcases...all to fulfill her God-given mission to tell people everywhere that Jesus Christ is reality, that He Lives, that He is Victor. This remarkable woman of eighty-one years served time in a German concentration camp during World War II for the "crime" of h

HopefulAutobiographyMemoir & BiographyUplifting
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The Pianist: The Extraordinary True Story of One Man's Survival in Warsaw, 1939-1945

Wladyslaw Szpilman · 224 pages

A Jewish pianist's real-life account of survival in World War II Warsaw. Separated in a mêlée, he fights to rejoin his family as they board the death train, but police block him. "Papa!" he cries. The father waves, "as if I were setting out into life and he was already greeting me from beyond the grave."

AutobiographyWar ZoneMemoir & BiographyHopeful
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Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood

Trevor Noah · 297 pages

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often ab

HopefulAutobiographyUpliftingMemoir & Biography
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Joni: An Unforgettable Story

Joni Eareckson Tada, Joe Musser · 224 pages

Autobiography of Joni Eareckson, who at 17 was left a quadriplegic as a result of a diving accident, and who today as an accomplished artist drawing with a pen held in her teeth, describes her struggles and her abiding faith in Christ.

AutobiographyMemoir & BiographyHopefulUplifting

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