What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
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Sapphire · 176 pages
Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old, has up until now been invisible: invisible to the father who rapes her and the mother who batters her and to the authorities who dismiss her as just one more of Harlem's casualties. But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and highly radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment as
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.
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison · 181 pages
Each night Pecola prayed for blue eyes. In her eleven years, no one had ever noticed Pecola. But with blue eyes, she thought, everything would be different. She would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting. Her father would stop drinking. Her brother would stop running away. If only she could be beautiful. If only people would look at her. When someone finally did, it was her fath
Gemma
Meg Tilly · 272 pages
After Hazen Wood kidnaps 12 year-old Gemma Sullivan, the two embark upon a cross-country journey that tests the limits of Gemma's endurance. In graphic scenes of physical and sexual violence, Hazen tries to destroy the young girl's will. It is only Gemma's childlike resilience and fertile imagination that protect her from the worst of the abuse she suffers. And in the end, the healing power of unc
Nicholas Dane
Melvin Burgess · 408 pages
When Nick's mother dies unexpectedly, the 14 year old is sent straight into a boy's home. There he learns that violence and intimidation keep order. The deputy head Mr Creal grooms Nick with sweets and solace until he can take no more and escapes into a life of crime with a modern Fagin and cheeful boy named Rasta.
Try
Dennis Cooper · 199 pages
**From Goodreads:** Ziggy is the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers, from whose obsessive attentions he flees into the weird world of his uncle, an amoral man who makes violent pornography. As scenes of fierce sex and sadistic oppression take place around him, Ziggy falls improbably in love -- with his best friend, a junkie. Dennis Cooper, author of the gay horror classic Fris
Mystic River
Dennis Lehane · 487 pages
When they were children, Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle were friends. But then a strange car pulled up to their street. One boy got into the car, two did not, and something terrible happened -- something that ended their friendship and changed all three boys forever. Twenty-five years later, Sean is a homicide detective. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a corner store. And Dave is trying to
The Education of Dixie Dupree
Donna Everhart · 352 pages
Gather the Daughters
Jennie Melamed · 341 pages
Just before the country was incinerated to wasteland, ten men and their families colonized an island off the coast. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers-- chosen male descendants of the original ten-- are allowed to cross to the wastelands. At the first sign of puberty, their daughters face thei
Tricks
Ellen Hopkins · 627 pages
Five teenagers find themselves stuck in a horrifying wold of sexual slavery
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages
Back Roads
Tawni O'Dell · 352 pages
"Harley Altmyer, the heartbreaking and lovable hero of Tawni O'Dell's debut novel, should be in college drinking Rolling Rock and chasing girls. He should be freed from his stifling coal town, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he's marooned in the Pennsylvania backwoods caring for his three beloved but unruly younger sisters. He has, at best, a shaky hold on the vicissitudes o
Such a Pretty Girl
Laura Wiess · 224 pages
Haunted by flashbacks, fifteen-year-old Meredith learns that three years in prison has not changed the abusive father who molested her.
White Oleander
Janet Fitch · 390 pages
Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes-each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learned-becomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.
A Stolen Life
Jaycee Dugard · 273 pages
In the summer of 1991 I was a normal kid. I did normal things. I had friends and a mother who loved me. I was just like you. Until the day my life was stolen. For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible
My Absolute Darling
Gabriel Tallent · 464 pages
A brilliant and immersive, all-consuming read about one fourteen-year-old girl's heart-stopping fight for her own soul.Turtle Alveston is a survivor. At fourteen, she roams the woods along the northern California coast. The creeks, tide pools, and rocky islands are her haunts and her hiding grounds, and she is known to wander for miles. But while her physical world is expansive, her personal one i
Gerald's Game
Stephen King · 400 pages
An erotic game with handcuffs between husband and wife. One of them won't make it through the night. For the survivor, death would have been a blessing.
Mouthing the Words
Camilla Gibb · 238 pages
"Thelma is not yet six years old at the outset of this freshly imagined, adroitly narrated tale, and already the world shows no promise of accommodating itself to her desires. Still, Thelma tries by asking practically every adult she meets to adopt her. Not that she has been orphaned. But her parents fall dysfunctionally short of anybody's ideal."--Jacket.
Fifth Born
Zelda Lockhart · 210 pages
**Fifth Born** When Odessa Blackburn is three years old, she sees her grandmother for the last time, and so begins her story as the fifth born of eight children in a troubled family. Molested by her father, Odessa is also the sole witness to a murder he commits. Her mother guards both secrets and joins her husband in ostracizing their fifth born from the rest of her siblings. As Odessa grows,
What Lies Between Us
Nayomi Munaweera · 315 pages
"In the idyllic hill country of Sri Lanka, a young girl grows up with her loving family; but even in the midst of this paradise, terror lurks in the shadows. When tragedy strikes, she and her mother must seek safety by immigrating to America. There the girl reinvents herself as an American teenager to survive, with the help of her cousin; but even as she assimilates and thrives, the secrets and sc
Ham on Rye
Charles Bukowski · 288 pages
In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye of
A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley · 377 pages
This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s *King Lear* centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, *A Thousand Acres* takes on t
Never Mind
Edward St. Aubyn · 154 pages
Now a 5-Part Limited Event Series on Showtime, Starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe Danner Never Mind, the first installment in Edward St. Aubyn's wonderful, wry, and profound Patrick Melrose Cycle, follows five-year-old Patrick through a single day, as the Melrose family awaits the arrival of guests. Bright and imaginative, young Patrick struggles daily to contend with the searing cruel