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Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm

Mardi Jo Link · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Rescue

Nicholas Sparks · 446 pages

One of America's bestselling authors returns with a tale about the greatest commitment of all: loving someone forever. When a near-fatal car crash brings Taylor McAden together with Denise Holden, a new resident of Edenton, North Carolina, he must look into his past to see if it's not too late to take a chance on the future.

Single Parent ProtagonistStarting OverSingle MotherHopeful
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Gather

Kenneth M. Cadow · 325 pages

Publisher Annotation: A resourceful teenager in rural Vermont struggles to hold on to the family home while his mom recovers from addiction in this striking debut novel.

Single Parent ProtagonistSingle MotherRural FarmHopeful
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The Four Winds

Kristin Hannah · 472 pages

Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on the brink of a new and optimistic era. But for Elsa Wolcott, deemed too old to marry in a time when marriage is a woman’s only option, the future seems bleak. Until the night she meets Rafe Martinelli and decides to change the direction of her life. With her reputation in ruin, there is

Single Parent ProtagonistSingle MotherRural FarmHopeful
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The one plus one

Jojo Moyes · 480 pages

Single Parent ProtagonistStarting OverSingle MotherHopeful
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The Friday Night Knitting Club

Kate Jacobs · 384 pages

Gathering for their weekly knitting club at a small yarn shop on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a group of friends shares such challenges as raising children, navigating the ups and downs of their careers, and pursuing uncertain relationships.

Single Parent ProtagonistStarting OverSingle MotherHopeful
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All Over But the Shoutin'

Rick Bragg · 329 pages

This haunting, harrowing, gloriously moving recollection of a life on the American margin is the story of Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in northeastern Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times. It is the story of Bragg's father, a hard-drinking man with a murderous temper and the hab

Single MotherRural FarmMemoir & BiographyHopeful
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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

Single MotherStarting OverMemoir & BiographyHopeful
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Pigs in Heaven

Barbara Kingsolver · 363 pages

A phenomenal bestseller and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, Pigs in Heaven continues the story of Taylor and Turtle, first introduced in The Bean Trees.

Single Parent ProtagonistSingle MotherStarting OverHopeful
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About a Boy

Nick Hornby · 288 pages

Nick Hornby's second bestselling novel is about sex, manliness and fatherhood. Will is thirty-six, comfortable and child-free. And he's discovered a brilliant new way of meeting women - through single-parent groups. Marcus is twelve and a little bitnerdish: he's got the kind of mother who made him listen to Joni Mitchell rather than Nirvana. Perhaps they can help each other out a little bit, and b

Single Parent ProtagonistSingle MotherStarting OverHopeful
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Under the Tuscan Sun

Frances Mayes · 287 pages

Now in paperback, the #1 San Francisco Chronicle bestseller that is an enchanting and lyrical look at the life, the traditions, and the cuisine of Tuscany, in the spirit of Peter Mayle's *A Year in Provence*. Frances Mayes entered a wondrous new world when she began restoring an abandoned villa in the spectacular Tuscan countryside. There were unexpected treasures at every turn: faded frescos b

Starting OverMemoir & BiographyHopefulRural Farm
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Kisses from Katie: A Story of Relentless Love and Redemption

Katie J. Davis, Beth Clark · 264 pages

What would cause an eighteen-year-old old senior class president and homecoming queen from Nashville, Tennessee, to disobey and disappoint her parents by forgoing college, break her little brother’s heart, lose all but a handful of her friends (because the rest of them think she has gone off the deep end), and break up with the love of her life, all so she could move to Uganda, where she knew only

Single MotherMemoir & BiographyHopefulStarting Over
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The Feast Nearby: How I lost my job, buried a marriage, and found my way by keeping chickens, foraging, preserving, bartering, and eating locally (all on $40 a week)

Robin Mather · 266 pages

"A charming ode (with recipes) to eating well and locally, on $40 dollars per week, from a recently unemployed food-journalism veteran. In 2009, Robin Mather found herself unemployed. She consequently moved to rural Michigan, where she committed to eating three home-cooked, seasonal, and local meals a day. In essays that chronicle a year of her ambitious project, Mather explores the confusion su

Starting OverMemoir & BiographyRural FarmForaging
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Gather Together in My Name

Maya Angelou · 224 pages

Single Parent ProtagonistSingle MotherMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World

Vicki Myron · 277 pages

The story of Dewey the celebrated library cat is now available for the youngest of readers in this new, fully-illustrated picture book adventure. When Librarian Vicki Myron finds a young kitten abandoned in the Spencer Library return box, she nurses him back to health, deciding then and there that he will be their library cat, and naming him, appropriately, Dewey Readmore Books. Dewey loves his ne

Single MotherMemoir & BiographyHopefulStarting Over
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We Bought a Zoo

Benjamin Mee · 261 pages

A former British newspaper columnist describes how he uprooted his family to the English countryside and purchased a dilapidated zoo, home to more than two hundred exotic animals, which he planned to refurbish and reopen as a family business, a scheme complicated by a lack of money, skeptical staff, family tension, and his wife's devastating illness.

Single Parent ProtagonistStarting OverMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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Dirty Chick: Adventures of an Unlikely Farmer

Antonia Murphy · 335 pages

"An uproarious memoir chronicling the misadventures of a San Franciscan woman who leaves city life to become an artisan farmer in New Zealand"-- "Antonia Murphy, you might say, is an unlikely farmer. Born and bred in San Francisco, she spent much of her life as a liberal urban cliche, and her interactions with the animal kingdom rarely extended past dinner. But then she became a mother. And when

Starting OverRural FarmMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

Kristin Kimball · 276 pages

When Manhattan writer Kristin Kimball arrived to interview an organic farmer called Mark on a Pennsylvanian farm, she was wearing high heels and a crisp white shirt and had been vegetarian for thirteen years. That evening, she found herself helping him to slaughter a pig. By the next morning she was tucking into sizzling homemade sausages drizzled with warm maple syrup, and within a few months she

Starting OverRural FarmMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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The Sweetest Thing

Cathy Woodman · 389 pages

"Jennie Copeland thought she knew the recipe for a happy life: marriage to her university sweetheart, a nice house in the suburbs and three beautiful children. But when her husband leaves her, she is forced to find a different recipe. And she thinks she's found just what she needs: a ramshackle house on the outskirts of the beautiful Talyton St George, a new cake-baking business, a dog, a horse, c

Single Parent ProtagonistStarting OverSingle Mother
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Letters of a Woman Homesteader

Elinore Pruitt Stewart · 281 pages

The book is comprised of a series of letters written by a young widow from Denver to her friend and former employer about the experience of homesteading in rural Wyoming in the early 20th century. She describes the people who inhabited this harsh landscape with empathy and humor, including migrants from the US and abroad, orphans, newlyweds and hermits. These people were settling the frontier at

Single Parent ProtagonistRural FarmMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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Rurally Screwed: My Life Off the Grid with the Cowboy I Love

Jessie Knadler · 324 pages

A former New York City magazine editor describes the radical change in her life after she met a young bull rider while on assignment covering a rodeo and impulsively gave up her city life for a more authentic rural life.

Starting OverRural FarmMemoir & BiographyNonfiction
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Wilde Like Me

Louise Pentland · 391 pages

When single mom Robin Wilde decides to change her life, new opportunities are soon on her horizon.

Single Parent ProtagonistSingle MotherStarting OverFunny
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'Tis A Memoir

Frank McCourt · 512 pages

Starting OverMemoir & BiographyHopefulNonfiction
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A Good Year for the Roses

Gil McNeil · 340 pages

Single Parent ProtagonistSingle MotherStarting OverFunny
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The Lost Husband

Katherine Center · 358 pages

Crazy Aunt Jean has offered Libby an escape from her hypercritical mother--a job and a place to live on her farm in the Texas Hill Country. Life on Aunt Jean's goat farm is both more wonderful and more mysterious than Libby could have imagined.

Single Parent ProtagonistStarting OverRural Farm
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