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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold · 368 pages
This deluxe trade paperback edition of Alice Sebold's modern classic features French flaps and rough-cut pages.Once in a generation a novel comes along that taps a vein of universal human experience, resonating with readers of all ages. The Lovely Bones is such a book - a phenomenal #1 bestseller celebrated at once for its narrative artistry, its luminous clarity of emotion, and its astoniishing p
The Education of Dixie Dupree
Donna Everhart · 352 pages
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
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.
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.
Iqbal
Francesco D'Adamo · 120 pages
A true story about a real person, Iqbal, and a reality for thousands of children in today's Pakistan. Iqbal, from a poor Pakistani family, was sold as a child to work in a carpet factory. Living with other desperate and exploited children, Iqbal decided to take action. He organised brilliant acts of resistance and sabotage, until he finally escaped. I read this book 10 years ago, but I think of it
The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963
Christopher Paul Curtis · 239 pages
The ordinary interactions and everyday routines of the Watsons, an African American family living in Flint, Michigan, are drastically changed after they go to visit Grandma in Alabama in the summer of 1963.
Summer of my German Soldier
Bette Greene · 230 pages
When her small hometown in Arkansas becomes the site of a camp housing German prisoners during World War II, 12-year-old Patty Bergen learns what it means to open her heart. Although she's Jewish, she begins to see a prison escapee, Anton, not as a Nazi--but as a lonely, frightened young man with feelings not unlike her own, who understands and appreciates her in a way her parents never will. And
Me And Emma
Elizabeth Flock · 301 pages
In many ways, Carrie Parker is like any other eight-year-old—playing make-believe, dreading school, dreaming of faraway places.But even her imagination can't shut out the realities of her impoverished North Carolina home or help her protect her younger sister, Emma.As the big sister, Carrie is determined to do anything to keep Emma safe from a life of neglect and abuse at the hands of their drunke
The Darkest Child
Delores Phillips · 392 pages
Pakersfield, Georgia, 1958: Thirteen-year-old Tangy Mae Quinn is the sixth of ten fatherless siblings. She is the darkest-skinned among them and therefore the ugliest in her mother, Rozelle’s, estimation, but she’s also the brightest. Rozelle—beautiful, charismatic, and light-skinned—exercises a violent hold over her children. Fearing abandonment, she pulls them from school at the age of twelve an
A Death in the Family
James Agee · 339 pages
Forty years after its original publication, James Agee's last novel seems, more than ever, an American classic. For in his lyrical, sorrowful account of a man's death and its impact on his family, Agee painstakingly created a small world of domestic happiness and then showed how quickly and casually it could be destroyed. On a sultry summer night in 1915, Jay Follet leaves his house in Knoxvill
Where Women Are Kings
Christie Watson · 342 pages
Elijah is seven years old, with a history of disruptive behaviour. His adoptive mother Nikki believes that she and her husband Obi are strong enough to accept his difficulties - and that her being white will not affect her ability to raise a black son. Deborah, Elijah's birth mother, is ever present, and her on-going love for her son is a constant reminder for Nikki of something she's not part of,
Winter Birds
Jim Grimsley · 209 pages
On a snowy Thanksgiving day in North Carolina along a stretch of rural highway, a dreamy eight-year-old named Danny Crell is caught in the middle of a violent quarrel between his parents. Danny's father, Bobjay Crell, has been at the mercy of doctors, unforgiving landlords, and cruel farm bosses ever since he lost an arm in a farm accident. His subsequent fits of rage and drunken jealousy have ta
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 274 pages
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula
The Assembler of Parts
Raoul Wientzen · 334 pages
While in heaven reviewing her short life with the help of the Assembler of Parts, 8-year-old Jess, who was born with a syndrome of birth defects, discovers the true meaning and purpose of her life after her death unleashes events beyond her control.
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,
The Warsaw Anagrams
Richard Zimler · 329 pages
Warsaw, 1941--an exhausted and elderly psychiatrist named Erik Cohen makes his way home to the Jewish ghetto after being interned in a Nazi labor camp. Yet only Heniek Corben can see him and hear him. Heniek soon realizes that Cohen has become an ibbura spirit.
Girlchild
Tupelo Hassman · 275 pages
Obsessively following the edicts of the Girl Scouts Handbook in spite of her lack of a troop, young Rory longs to escape the Reno trailer park where she lives with her bartender mother.
Lotería
Mario Alberto Zambrano · 272 pages
Using a deck of Lotería cards as her muse, eleven-year-old Luz Castillo, a ward of the state who has retreated into silence, finds each shuffle sparking a random memory that, pieced together, brings into focus the events that led to her present situation.
Flora
Gail Godwin · 278 pages
Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. Their relationship and its fallout, played against a backdrop of a lost America will haunt Helen for the rest of her life.
A Map of the World
Jane Hamilton · 402 pages
In the tradition of The Good Mother by Sue Miller and Before and After by Rosellen Brown, A Map of the World is the riveting story of how a single mistake can forever change the lives of everyone involved - in ways that are beyond imagination. One unremarkable June morning, Alice Goodwin is, as usual, trying to keep in check both her temper and her tendency to blame herself for her family's sho
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner · 250 pages
Written in stream-of-consciousness style with multiple narrators, the story follows a journey wherein the family of a dead woman try to transport her body to her birthplace in Mississippi in accordance with her wishes. When a ford across a river is flooded they are forced to take a roundabout route and it becomes a desperate race to complete their mission before the body begins to decompose.