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Father of the Rain

Lily King · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

The Warmest December

Bernice L. McFadden · 256 pages

"Childhood can be rough. But for Kenzie growing up in the Lowe home means opening the bottom drawer of her father's dresser to choose which of the three belts coiled, waiting like snakes, she wants to get whipped with; trips to Beehive Liquors for her father's vodka; and dreaming of the day she can escape apartment 5A. She goes to school, she holds odd jobs, and develops her own craving for the bo

AddictionToxic Family DynamicsSubstance AbuseEmotional
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The Taste of Salt

Martha Southgate · 281 pages

"Josie Henderson is most at home in and around water, and as a senior-level black female scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, she is practically alone in her field. But in building this impressive life for herself, she has tried to shed the one thing she cannot: her family roots back in Cleveland. When Tick, her brother and childhood ally against their alcoholic father, arrives o

AddictionToxic Family DynamicsSubstance AbuseBittersweet
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The Spectacular Now

Tim Tharp

In the last months of high school, charismatic eighteen-year-old Sutter Keely lives in the present, staying drunk or high most of the time, but that could change when starts working to boost the self-confidence of a classmate, Aimee.

AddictionToxic Family DynamicsSubstance AbuseBittersweet
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Ellen Foster

Kaye Gibbons · 126 pages

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

Toxic Family DynamicsAddictionSubstance AbuseEmotional
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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 DynamicsAddictionBittersweetSubstance Abuse
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The Paris Wife

Paula McLain · 320 pages

Meeting through mutual friends in Chicago, Hadley is intrigued by brash "beautiful boy" Ernest Hemingway, and after a brief courtship and small wedding, they take off for Paris, where Hadley makes a convincing transformation from an overprotected child to a game and brave young woman who puts up with impoverished living conditions and shattering loneliness to prop up her husband’s career.

AddictionSubstance AbuseBittersweetEmotional
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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

Toxic Family DynamicsAddictionSubstance AbuseFirst Person Narrator
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This Is Me: A Reckoning

Hayden Panettiere · 320 pages

Hayden Panettiere’s career in entertainment began before she was old enough to walk. From early commercials to film and television roles in hits like *Remember the Titans*, her career unfolded in the public eye, resulting in tremendous success by her early teens. She had become a fixture of early-2000s pop culture, earning acclaim for performances in *Heroes, Nashville* (which earned her two Golde

AddictionToxic Family DynamicsSubstance AbuseFirst Person Narrator
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The Cider House Rules

John Irving · 573 pages

Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--obstetrician and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Clouds. It is also the story of his favorite orphan, Homer, who is never adopted.

AddictionSubstance AbuseBittersweetFirst Person Narrator
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Losing Hope

Colleen Hoover · 380 pages

"In Hopeless, Sky left no secret unearthed, no feeling unshared and no memory forgotten, but Holder's past remains a mystery. He is haunted by the little girl he let walk away from him and he has spent his entire life searching for her. He had hoped that he would finally gain closure and be able to rid himself of his guilt the moment they were reconnected. But he could not have anticipated that th

Toxic Family DynamicsSubstance AbuseBittersweetFirst Person Narrator
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Long Bright River

Liz Moore · 473 pages

A female cop begins to fear for her addicted sister. A serial murder is targeting homeless female prostitutes. Can Mickey find her sister before the killer does ?

AddictionSubstance AbuseEmotionalFirst Person Narrator
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The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · 817 pages

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra

AddictionSubstance AbuseBittersweetFirst Person Narrator
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All Fall Down

Jennifer Weiner · 441 pages

"Allison Weiss has a great job ... a handsome husband ... an adorable daughter ... and a secret. Allison Weiss is a typical working mother, trying to balance a business, aging parents, a demanding daughter, and a marriage. But when the website she develops takes off, she finds herself challenged to the point of being completely overwhelmed. Her husband's becoming distant, her daughter's acting spo

AddictionSubstance AbuseEmotionalToxic Family Dynamics
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The Joy Luck Club

Amy Tan · 332 pages

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who's telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters' futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have neve

Toxic Family DynamicsBittersweetFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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The Impossible Knife of Memory

Laurie Halse Anderson · 391 pages

For the past five years Hayley Kincain and her father, Andy, have been on the road, never staying long in one place as he struggles to escape the demons that have tortured him since his return from Iraq. Now they are back in town where he grew up so Hayley can go to a proper school. Perhaps, for the first time, Hayley can have a normal life, put aside her own painful memories, even have a relation

AddictionSubstance AbuseToxic Family DynamicsFirst Person Narrator
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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 DynamicsSubstance AbuseBittersweetEmotional
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Daisy Jones & the Six

Taylor Jenkins Reid · 400 pages

A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous break up. Everyone knows Daisy Jones & The Six, but nobody knows the real reason why they split at the absolute height of their popularity…until now. Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset St

AddictionSubstance AbuseBittersweetEmotional
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Dreamland

Sarah Dessen · 256 pages

Rogerson Biscoe, with his green eyes and dark curly hair, is absolutely seductive. Before long, sixteen-year-old Caitlin finds herself under his spell. And when he starts to abuse her, she finds she's in too deep to get herself out...

Toxic Family DynamicsSubstance AbuseBittersweetFirst Person Narrator
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Anybody Out There?

Marian Keyes · 592 pages

Life is perfect for Anna Walsh. She has the "Best Job in the World" as a PR exec for a top-selling urban beauty brand, a lovely apartment in New York, and a perfect husband - the love of her life, Aidan Maddox. Until the morning she wakes up in her mammy's living room in Dublin with stitches in her face, a dislocated knee, and completely smashed-up hands - and no memory of how she got there. While

AddictionSubstance AbuseBittersweetFirst Person Narrator
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The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender · 345 pages

The wondrous Aimee Bender conjures the lush and moving story of a girl whose magical gift is really a devastating curse. On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in t

Toxic Family DynamicsBittersweetFirst Person NarratorLiterary Fiction
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She's Come Undone

Wally Lamb · 465 pages

In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years. Meet Dolores Price. She's 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato

Toxic Family DynamicsBittersweetEmotionalFirst Person Narrator
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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 DynamicsAddictionSubstance AbuseEmotional
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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 DynamicsAddictionEmotionalEstranged Family
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My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 200 pages

"Lucy Barton is recovering slowly from what should have been a simple operation. Her mother, to whom she hasn't spoken for many years, comes to see her and a simple hospital visit becomes a portal to the most tender relationship of all--the one between mother and daughter"--

Toxic Family DynamicsBittersweetFirst Person NarratorEmotional

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