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Knots in My Yo-Yo String: The Autobiography of a Kid
Jerry Spinelli · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorJacky Daydream
Jacqueline Wilson · 352 pages
A wonderful depiction of her own childhood which every child will want to read, from the Children's LaureateEverybody knows Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson's best-loved character. But what do they know about Jacqueline herself? In this fascinating book, discover. . . . . . how Jacky played with paper dolls like April in Dustbin Baby.. . . how she dealt with an unpredictable father like Prue in Lov
Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.
Stories I Only Tell My Friends
Rob Lowe · 344 pages
A teen idol at fifteen, an international icon and founder of the Brat Pack at twenty, and one of Hollywood's top stars to this day, Rob Lowe chronicles his experiences as a painfully misunderstood child actor in Ohio uprooted to the wild counterculture of mid-seventies Malibu, where he embarked on his unrelenting pursuit of a career in Hollywood.
Moab Is My Washpot
Stephen Fry · 368 pages
"Stephen Fry has already given readers a taste of his tumultuous adolescence in his autobiographical first novel, The Liar, and now he reveals the equally tumultuous life that inspired it. Sent to boarding school at the age of seven, he survived beatings, misery, love affairs, carnal violation, expulsion, attempted suicide, criminal conviction and imprisonment to emerge, at the age of eighteen, re
The Tender Bar
J.R. Moehringer · 384 pages
JR Moehringer grew up listening for a voice, the voice of his missing father, a disc jockey who disappeared before JR spoke his first words. As a boy, JR would press his ear to a battered clock radio, straining to hear in that resonant voice the secrets of identity and masculinity. When the voice disappeared, JR found new voices in the bar on the corner. A grand old New York saloon, the bar was a
Boy and Going Solo
Roald Dahl, Quentin Blake · 400 pages
A Girl Named Zippy: Growing Up Small in Mooreland Indiana
Haven Kimmel · 288 pages
When Haven Kimmel was born in 1965, Mooreland, Indiana, was a sleepy little hamlet of three hundred people. Nicknamed "Zippy" for the way she would bolt around the house, this small girl was possessed of big eyes and even bigger ears. In this witty and lovingly told memoir, Kimmel takes readers back to a time when small-town America was caught in the amber of the innocent postwar period - people h
The Liars' Club
Mary Karr · 320 pages
The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.
Kampung Boy
LAT (Mohammad Nor Khalid) · 141 pages
Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting
Eric Poole
Set in the Midwest of the 1970's, this memoir evokes that idyllic, old-school time before computers and cell phones, when people were horrible to one another face-to-face. From an early age, Eric Poole was obsessed with Endora of TV's Bewitched. Just days after arriving at the family's new home in St. Louis, Missouri, eight- year-old Eric had staked out the basement as his special place: a spot wh
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir
Bill Bryson · 288 pages
Bill Bryson on his most personal journey yet: into his own childhood in America's Mid-West.Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all started with his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have l
Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel
Nicolaia Rips · 272 pages
"'Hysterically droll, touching, elegant, and wise--a coming-of-age story from someone who possibly came of age before her parents' (Patricia Marx, New Yorker writer and bestselling author), Trying to Float is a seventeen-year-old's darkly funny, big-hearted memoir about growing up in New York City's legendary Chelsea Hotel. New York's Chelsea Hotel may no longer be home to its most famous denizens
The Dark Child
Camara Laye · 188 pages
"The Dark Child is a ... memoir of Camara Laye's youth in the village of Koroussa, French Guinea, a place steeped in mystery. Laye marvels over his mother's supernatural powers, his father's distinction as the village goldsmith, and his own passage into manhood. ... More than the autobiography of one boy, this is the universal story of sacred traditions struggling against the encroachment of a mod
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
A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: A Memoir of Seventh Grade
Kevin Brockmeier · 199 pages
"At age twelve, [the American novelist] Kevin Brockmeier is ready to become a different person: not the boy he has always been--the one who cries too easily and laughs too easily, who lives in an otherland of sparkling daydreams and imaginary catastrophes--but someone else altogether. Over the course of one school year--seventh grade--he sets out in search of himself"--Page 4 of cover.
To the Is-land: An Autobiography
Janet Frame · 253 pages
"From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction always toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth." Thus opens this first volume of autobiography by Janet Frame, one of the most highly regarded writers of today. Recounting her childhood in N
Small Memories
Jose Saramago · 139 pages
A personal account by the late author traces his youth in Lisbon with his parents, marked by frequent visits to his wise grandparents in the village of Azinhaga, his older brother's tragic early death, and his initial encounters with literature.
Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table
Ruth Reichl · 294 pages
For better or worse, almost all of us grow up at the table. It is in this setting that Ruth Reichl's brilliantly written memoir takes its form. For, at a very early age, Reichl discovered that "food could be a way of making sense of the world . . . if you watched people as they ate, you could find out who they were." Tender at the Bone is the story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in eq
Cider With Rosie
Laurie Lee · 259 pages
Cider with Rosie is a wonderfully vivid memoir of childhood in a remote Cotswold village, a village before electricity and cars, a timeless place on the verge of change. Growing up amongst the fields and woods and characters of the place, Laurie Lee depicts a world that is both immediate and real and belongs to a now-distant past. 'It sings in the memory' Sunday Times Laurie Lee's matchless
A Girl from Yamhill
Beverly Cleary · 279 pages
Generations of children have grown up with Henry Huggins, Ramona Quimby, and all of their friends, families, and assorted pets. For everyone who has enjoyed the pranks and schemes, embarrassing moments, and all of the other poignant and colorful images of childhood brought to life in Beverly Cleary books, here is the fascinating true story of the remarkable woman who created them.