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Prayers and Lies

Sherri Wood Emmons · 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

Include books by the same author
❤️

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

Domestic AbuseFamily SecretsFemale FriendshipWomen's Fiction
❤️

The Story of a New Name

Elena Ferrante · 480 pages

In 2012, Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend introduced readers to the unforgettable Elena and Lila, whose lifelong friendship provides the backbone for the Neapolitan Novels. The Story of a New Name is the second book in this series. With these books, which the New Yorker’s James Wood described as “large, captivating, amiably peopled...a beautiful and delicate tale of confluence and reversal,” F

Domestic AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistFemale FriendshipMultigenerational Family
❤️

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.

Domestic AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistFamily SecretsComing of Age
❤️

The Boston Girl

Anita Diamant · 322 pages

A story "about family ties and values, friendship and feminism told through the eyes of a young Jewish woman growing up in Boston in the early twentieth century. Addie Baum is The Boston Girl, born in 1900 to immigrant parents who were unprepared for and suspicious of America and its effect on their three daughters. Growing up in the North End, then a teeming multicultural neighborhood, Addie's in

Working-Class ProtagonistComing of AgeFemale FriendshipMultigenerational Family
❤️

The Book of Ruth

Jane Hamilton · 328 pages

"I learned slowly, that if you don't look at the world with perfect vision, you're bound to get yourself cooked." Having come within an inch of her life, Ruth Dahl is determined to take a good look at it - to figure out whether, in fact, she's to blame for the mess." Pegged the loser in a small-town family that doesn't have much going for it in the first place. Ruth grows up in the shadow of her

Domestic AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistFamily SecretsComing of Age
❤️

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

Domestic AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistFamily SecretsComing of Age
❤️

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

Domestic AbuseFemale FriendshipMultigenerational FamilyWomen's Fiction
❤️

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.

Family SecretsFemale FriendshipMultigenerational FamilyWomen's Fiction
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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.

Working-Class ProtagonistComing of AgeMultigenerational FamilyFamily Secrets
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The Bean Trees

Barbara Kingsolver · 240 pages

Taylor, a poor Kentuckian making her way west with an abandoned baby girl, stops in Tucson where she finds friends and discovers resources in apparently empty places.

Female FriendshipWorking-Class ProtagonistWomen's FictionComing of Age
❤️

The Pearl That Broke Its Shell

Nadia Hashimi · 464 pages

In Kabul, 2007, with a drug-addicted father and no brothers, Rahima and her sisters can only sporadically attend school and rarely leave the house. Their only hope lies in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young Rahima to dress and be treated as a boy until she is of marriageable age.

Domestic AbuseWomen's FictionMultigenerational FamilyComing of Age
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Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Kate Atkinson · 381 pages

The story of Ruby's own life is told in thirteen chapters, all written in the first person, documenting key periods in Ruby's life from 1951 to 1992. In between each chapter are (non-consecutive) flashbacks that tell the story from the point of view of one of the other (mostly female) members of Ruby's family—including her great-grandmother Alice, her grandmother Nell and her mother Bunty.

Family SecretsComing of AgeWomen's FictionMultigenerational Family
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Sisterland

Curtis Sittenfeld · 528 pages

When the strongest earthquake in U.S. history occurs just north of their St. Louis home, Kate and Jeremy find the disaster further complicated by Kate's self-proclaimed-medium twin's prediction about a more powerful earthquake, a situation that places Kate under public scrutiny and reveals her own psychic abilities.

Women's FictionMultigenerational FamilyFemale FriendshipFamily Secrets
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Malas

Marcela Fuentes · 375 pages

Family SecretsMultigenerational FamilyFemale FriendshipComing of Age
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The Silver Star

Jeannette Walls · 304 pages

Two motherless sisters--Bean and Liz--are shuttled to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in their family for generations. When school starts in the fall, Bean easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz becomes increasingly withdrawn. Then something happens to Liz and Bean is left to challenge the injustice of the adult world.

Working-Class ProtagonistFamily SecretsComing of AgeEmotional
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The One & Only

Emily Giffin · 582 pages

Centering her life on the successful Walker family, into which she plans to marry, Shea struggles to end her affair with a less-than-stellar boyfriend only to have her entire existence placed in question by the death of the family's mother.

Family SecretsWomen's FictionEmotionalComing of Age
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The Art of Mending

Elizabeth Berg

Family SecretsWomen's FictionMultigenerational FamilyEmotional
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The Island

Elin Hilderbrand · 407 pages

It's the perfect summer getaway-- but some secrets are hard to escape... When her elder daughter abruptly cancels her engagement, and her lavish wedding, Birdie takes both daughters and her cousin to Tuckernuck Island. There dramatic truths are uncovered, old loves are rekindled, and new loves make themselves known.

Women's FictionFemale FriendshipFamily SecretsMultigenerational Family
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Heaven

V.C. Andrews · 440 pages

Casteel Series Of all the folks in the mountain shacks, The Casteels were the lowest -- the scum of the hills. Heaven Leigh Casteel was the prettiest, smartest girl in the backwoods, despite her ragged clothes and dirty face... despite a father meaner than ten vipers... despite her weary stepmother, who worked her like a mule. For her brother Tom and the little ones, Heaven clung to her prid

Working-Class ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyWomen's FictionEmotional
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Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng · 384 pages

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules. Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in thi

Family SecretsFemale FriendshipMultigenerational FamilyWomen's Fiction
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Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

Beth Hoffman · 313 pages

When Camille Sugarbaker Honeycutt, the pretty but crazy 1951 Vidalia Onion Queen dies, her twelve-year-old daughter CeeCee has barely a hope in the world. To her rescue arrives Great Aunt Tootie in the most magnificent car CeeCee has ever seen, and she is whisked away to the city of Savannah. Among the sweet scent of magnolias and the loving warmth of Tootie and her colourful collection of friends

Women's FictionFemale FriendshipComing of AgeFirst Person Narrator
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The Sound of Gravel

Ruth Wariner · 352 pages

The true story of one girl's coming-of-age in a polygamist family. Ruth Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father's forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities turn a blind eye to the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world

Domestic AbuseWorking-Class ProtagonistMultigenerational FamilyComing of Age
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Henry's Sisters

Cathy Lamb · 475 pages

"Ever since the Bommarito sisters were little girls, their mother, River, has written them a letter on pink paper when she has something especially important to impart. And this time, the message is urgent and impossible to ignore--River requires open-heart surgery, and Isabelle and her sisters are needed at home to run the family bakery and take care of their brother and ailing grandmother. Isabe

Family SecretsWomen's FictionMultigenerational FamilyEmotional
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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.

Family SecretsMultigenerational FamilyWomen's FictionEmotional

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