AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Heart of Palm

Laura Lee Smith · 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

Hide books by the same author
❤️

We Were the Mulvaneys

Joyce Carol Oates · 464 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilySmall TownCharacter-Driven
❤️

Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Rebecca Wells · 383 pages

The antics of a group of women in a small town where they were expected to raise babies, not Cain. The story is recounted by a mother to a daughter, the daughter thinking she is so much better because she got out of that town and is now a theater producer. The moral: mothers too were once rebels.

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilyAmerican SouthCharacter-Driven
❤️

Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

Multigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenSmall TownAmerican South
❤️

Beach Music

Pat Conroy · 784 pages

An American living in Rome with his daughter after his wife's suicide tracks a classmate who went underground as a Vietnam protester and never resurfaced.

Multigenerational FamilyToxic Family DynamicsAmerican SouthContemporary Fiction
❤️

Maine

J. Courtney Sullivan · 394 pages

Three generations of women converge on the family beach house in this wickedly funny, emotionally resonant story of love and dysfunction.

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilyContemporary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

A House with Good Bones

T. Kingfisher · 247 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilyAmerican SouthCharacter-Driven
❤️

Road Ends

Mary Lawson · 311 pages

Edward Cartwright, struggling to escape the legacy of a violent past; Emily, his wife, cloistered in her room with yet another new baby, increasingly unaware of events outside the bedroom door; Tom, their eldest son, twenty-five years old but home again, unable to come to terms with the death of a friend; and capable, formidable Megan, the sole daughter in a household of eight sons, who for years

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
❤️

Joe

Larry Brown · 348 pages

Toxic Family DynamicsAmerican SouthCharacter-DrivenSmall Town
❤️

Because of Winn-Dixie

Kate DiCamillo · 182 pages

Ten-year-old India Opal Buloni describes her first summer in the town of Naomi, Florida, and all the good things that happen to her becauThe summer Opal and her father, the preacher, move to Naomi, Florida, Opal goes into the Winn-Dixie supermarket—and comes out with a dog. A big, ugly, suffering dog with a sterling sense of humor. A dog she dubs Winn-Dixie. Because of Winn-Dixie, the preacher tel

FloridaAmerican SouthCharacter-DrivenSmall Town
❤️

The Vacationers

Emma Straub · 372 pages

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

Fannie Flagg · 403 pages

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Ala

Multigenerational FamilyAmerican SouthSmall TownCharacter-Driven
❤️

We Only Know So Much

Elizabeth Crane

Multigenerational FamilyToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
❤️

The Casual Vacancy

J.K. Rowling · 512 pages

When Barry Fairbrother dies unexpectedly in his early forties, the little town of Pagford is left in shock. Pagford is, seemingly, an English idyll, with a cobbled market square and an ancient abbey, but what lies behind the pretty façade is a town at war. Rich at war with poor, teenagers at war with their parents, wives at war with their husbands, teachers at war with their pupils…. Pagford is no

Toxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenSmall TownContemporary Fiction
❤️

Wakulla Springs

Andy Duncan, Ellen Klages

FloridaMultigenerational FamilyAmerican SouthCharacter-Driven
❤️

Commonwealth

Ann Patchett · 322 pages

"One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly--thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families. Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilyContemporary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

Freedom

Jonathan Franzen · 579 pages

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental la

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilyContemporary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

Here I Am

Jonathan Safran Foer

Multigenerational FamilyToxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
❤️

Bastard Out of Carolina

Dorothy Allison · 309 pages

Bone, an illegitimate child in a family of social outcasts, sees her mother's happiness with her new husband and will not tell when the stepfather begins abusing her in the 1950s.

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilyAmerican SouthCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Middlesteins

Jami Attenberg · 282 pages

Two siblings with very different personalities attempt to take control of their mother's food obsession and massive weight gain to save her life after their father walks out and leaves her reeling in the Chicago suburbs.

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilyContemporary FictionCharacter-Driven
❤️

The Floatplane Notebooks

Clyde Edgerton · 282 pages

American SouthMultigenerational FamilyCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
❤️

The Shipping News

Annie Proulx · 337 pages

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a "head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips," is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing

Toxic Family DynamicsMultigenerational FamilySmall TownContemporary Fiction
❤️

Nineteen Minutes

Jodi Picoult · 586 pages

The startling and poignant story of the aftermath of a tragic high school shooting, from the bestselling author of My Sister's Keeper and The Pact.'Picoult makes us ponder the ambiguous relationships between love and lying, legality and morality; the strange ways repressed memories leak into the present.' Los Angeles TimesIntricately textured and rich with psychological and social insight, Jodi Pi

Toxic Family DynamicsCharacter-DrivenSmall TownContemporary Fiction
🙂

No One Is Coming to Save Us

Stephanie Powell Watts · 384 pages

"JJ Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can'

American SouthSmall TownCharacter-DrivenMultiple POV
🙂

Summertime

Vanessa Lafaye · 354 pages

Florida, 1935, and the residents of Heron Key are preparing for the 4th of July barbecue, little realising how much their world is about to change. Tensions simmer at the party and in the early hours of the morning, a woman is found half-beaten to death. As whites turn on blacks, the finger of suspicion points at one man. Far over the Atlantic a tropical storm changes direction and turns towards F

FloridaAmerican SouthSmall TownMultiple POV

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.