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Baby of the Family

Tina McElroy Ansa · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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The Life All Around Me By Ellen Foster

Kaye Gibbons · 218 pages

This sequel to Gibbon's beloved classic Ellen Foster stands on its own as an unforgettable portrait of a redoubtable adolescent making herself up out of whole cloth. Now fifteen, Ellen is settled into a permanent home with a new mother. Strengthened by adversity and blessed with enough intelligence to design a salvation for herself, she still feels ill at ease in the world. Her sole surviving ritu

BildungsromanAmerican SouthComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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The Whisper of the River

Ferrol Sams · 528 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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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 When school starts in the fall, Bean easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz becomes increasingly withdrawn.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.

BildungsromanAmerican SouthComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls

Anton DiSclafani · 420 pages

Exiled to an equestrian boarding school in the South at the height of the Great Depression for her role in a family tragedy, strong-willed teen Thea Atwell grapples with painful memories while acclimating to the school's strict environment.

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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Blue Hole Back Home

Joy Jordan-Lake · 303 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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The Wiregrass

Pam Webber · 352 pages

BildungsromanAmerican SouthComing of AgeFemale Lead
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Where the Crawdads Sing

Delia Owens · 384 pages

For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee · 309 pages

One of the best-loved stories of all time, To Kill a Mockingbird has been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, served as the basis for an enormously popular motion picture, and voted one of the best novels of the 20th century by librarians across the United States. A gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable tale of coming-of-age in a South poi

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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Jim the Boy

Tony Earley · 227 pages

BildungsromanAmerican SouthComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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Hill William

Scott McClanahan · 222 pages

Hill William is a novel-in-stories chronicling the life of a young boy growing up in the mountains of today's West Virginia. Going no further than a mile from his home, the reader accompanies the narrator as he discovers the universe, as well as himself.

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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Geronimo Rex

Barry Hannah · 381 pages

Harry Monroe leaves his Louisiana hometown to travel around the South of the 1950s and 60s.

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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To The Bright And Shining Sun

James Lee Burke · 232 pages

Burke brings his brilliant feel for time and place to a stunning story of Appalachia in the early 1960s.

BildungsromanAmerican SouthComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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Crum: The Novel

Lee Maynard · 262 pages

In Crum, a gritty coal town on the West Virginia-Kentucky border, the boys fight, swear, chase and sometimes catch girls. The adults are cramped in and clueless, hemmed in by the mountains. The weight of wonder, dejection, and even possibility loom over this tiny, suffocating town. This story is the tale of Jesse Stone, who doesn't know where he's going, but knows he is leaving, and whose rebellio

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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Eli the Good

Silas House

Bicentennial fireworks burn the sky. Bob Seger growls from a transistor radio. And down by the river, girls line up on lawn chairs in pursuit of the perfect tan. Yet for ten-year-old Eli Book, the summer of 1976 will go down as the one that threatened to tear his family apart. There is his beautiful and distant mother; his traumatized Vietnam vet dad; his wild and confused sister; his former war-p

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthLiterary Fiction
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The Last Picture Show

Larry McMurtry · 256 pages

BildungsromanAmerican SouthComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Mildred D. Taylor · 276 pages

Set in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, it is the story of one family's struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence. It is a story of physical survival, but more important, it is a story of the survival of the human spirit. And, too, it is Cassie's story -- Cassie Logan, an independent girl raised by a family for whom independence is primary, a family determined not t

BildungsromanComing of AgeAmerican SouthFemale Lead
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Boy's Life

Robert McCammon · 541 pages

"Zephyr, Alabama, has been an idyllic home for eleven-year-old Cory Mackenson...a place where monsters swim in the belly of the river, and friends are forever. Then, on a cold spring morning in 1964, as Cory accompanies his father on his milk route, they see a car plunge into a lake some say is bottomless." -- Back cover.

BildungsromanAmerican SouthComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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The Clay Girl

Heather Tucker · 345 pages

Follows one woman from her tumultuous childhood through the 1960's sexual revolution and drug culture.

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver · 560 pages

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in hi

BildungsromanAmerican SouthComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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The Visibles

Sara Shepard · 323 pages

Clinging to an idea introduced by a substitute biology teacher about the role of DNA in defining a person's identity and destiny, introspective teen Summer struggles to make a connection with her abandoning mother, her mentally ill father, and her obsessive brother before embarking on a career in genetics.

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Look Homeward, Angel

Thomas Wolfe · 626 pages

An elaborate and moving coming-of-age story about Eugene Gant, a restless and energetic character whose passion to experience life takes him from his small, rural hometown in North Carolina to Harvard University and the city of Boston. The novel's pattern is artfully simple--a small town, a large family, high school and college--yet the characters are monumental in their graphic individuality and

BildungsromanAmerican SouthComing of AgeLiterary Fiction
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I am Charlotte Simmons

Tom Wolfe · 682 pages

"Dupont University - the Olympian halls of learning housing the cream of America's youth, the roseate Gothic spires and manicured lawns suffused with tradition... Or so it appears to beautiful, brilliant Charlotte Simmons, a wide-eyed, bookish freshman from a strict, devout, poor and poorly educated family in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. But Charlotte soon learns, to her mounting di

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionFemale Lead
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Gifted

Nikita Lalwani · 272 pages

BildungsromanComing of AgeLiterary FictionFemale Lead

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