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🧲 Books like this

Snow in August

Pete Hamill · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

BaseballMentor RelationshipReligious IdentityNew York City
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The Last Days of Summer

Steve Kluger · 360 pages

BaseballMentor RelationshipNew York CityTeen Protagonist
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Stone Junction

Jim Dodge · 420 pages

Stone Junction is a novel about Daniel Pearse, an orphaned child who is taken under the wings of the AMO - Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws. An assortment of sages sharpen Daniel's wide-eyed outlook until he has the concentration of a card shark Zen master, via apprenticeships in meditation, safecracking, poker, and the art of walking through walls. This unconventional education sets Daniel on t

Mentor RelationshipMagical RealismSingle MotherLiterary Fiction
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The Power of One

Bryce Courtenay · 518 pages

Follows Peekay, a white British boy in South Africa during World War II, between the ages of five and eleven, as he survives an abusive boarding school and goes on to succeed in life and the boxing ring, with help from a chicken, a boxer, a pianist, black African prisoners, and many others.

Mentor RelationshipBullyingRacismHistorical Fiction
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The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell

Robert Dugoni · 448 pages

BullyingRacismReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction
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A Painted House

John Grisham · 465 pages

Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres. But racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder cause Luke to grow up before he's ready.

BaseballRacismTeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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Billy Bathgate

E.L. Doctorow · 484 pages

Mentor RelationshipNew York CityLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Prentice Alvin

Orson Scott Card · 342 pages

Alvin returns to his birthplace to become the blacksmith's apprentice and also to learn--hopefully with the help of the Torch-girl--to be a Maker.

Mentor RelationshipMagical RealismRacismHistorical Fiction
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A Monster Calls

Patrick Ness · 224 pages

A brilliant, graphic novel written by young but promising Patrick Ness. This is the story about 13 year old Conor and his mother who is dying of cancer. Conor has to face the cruelty of real life and learn to let his close and dearest go. When no human can help him Monster appears...

Magical RealismBullyingSingle MotherTeen Protagonist
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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

BullyingMentor RelationshipSingle MotherTeen Protagonist
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Mr. Vertigo

Paul Auster · 293 pages

In Mr. Vertigo, his dazzling eighth novel, Paul Auster introduces a quintessentially American hero who, early in his life, masters the art of the unimaginable, and then must live out his days long after the magic has been lost and forgotten. It is 1927, the year of Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh - and of Walter Claireborne Rawley, a streetwise orphan from Saint Louis who becomes "Walt the Wonder

Mentor RelationshipMagical RealismLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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The Ninth Hour

Alice McDermott · 247 pages

On a dim winter afternoon, a young Irish immigrant opens the gas taps in his Brooklyn tenement. In the aftermath of the fire that follows, Sister St. Savior, an aging nun, appears, unbidden, to direct the way forward for his widow and his unborn child. In Catholic Brooklyn, in the early part of the twentieth century, decorum, superstition, and shame collude to erase the man's brief existence, and

Single MotherReligious IdentityNew York CityLiterary Fiction
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Body & Soul

Frank Conroy · 464 pages

As A Boy, Claude Rawlings looks up through the grated window of his basement apartment to watch the world go by. Poor, lonely, supported by a taxi-driver mother whose eccentricities spin more and more out of control, he faces the terrible task of growing up on the margins of life, destined to be a spectator of that great world always hurrying out of reach. But there is an out-of-tune piano in the

Mentor RelationshipSingle MotherNew York CityLiterary Fiction
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Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah

Richard Bach · 144 pages

Wonderfully written, a glimpse into faith, self-reliance and friendship, witty and thought provoking. Barnstorming pilot meets a messianic man who has misgivings about his purpose. His scripture is captured in a greasy spiral bound notebook and he changes the lives of all he meets.

Mentor RelationshipMagical RealismReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Beloved

Toni Morrison · 288 pages

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in

Magical RealismSingle MotherRacismHistorical Fiction
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Disgraced

Ayad Akhtar · 88 pages

New York. Today. Corporate lawyer Amir Kapoor is happy, in love, and about to land the biggest career promotion of his life. But beneath the veneer, success has come at a price. When Amir and his artist wife, Emily, host an intimate dinner party at their Upper East Side apartment, what starts out as a friendly conversation soon escalates into something far more damaging.

Religious IdentityNew York CityRacismLiterary Fiction
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The Land of Decoration

Grace McCleen · 305 pages

Judith and her father don't have much but Judith sees the world with the clear Eyes of Faith, and where others might see rubbish, Judith sees possibility. Bullied at school, she finds solace in making a model of the Promised Land - a world of wonder that Judith calls The Land of Decoration. Perhaps, she thinks, if she makes snow indoors there will be no school on Monday. Sure enough, when Judith o

BullyingReligious IdentityMagical RealismLiterary Fiction
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The Way of the Warrior

Chris Bradford

Mentor RelationshipBullyingHistorical FictionTeen Protagonist
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The Housekeeper and the Professor

Yoko Ogawa · 208 pages

He is a brilliant maths professor with a peculiar problem - ever since a traumatic head injury some seventeen years ago, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is a sensitive but astute young housekeeper with a ten-year-old son, who is entrusted to take care of him. Each morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are reintroduced to one another, a strange, beautiful rel

BaseballMentor RelationshipSingle MotherLiterary Fiction
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A Diamond in the Desert

Kathryn Fitzmaurice · 258 pages

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, thirteen-year-old Tetsu and his family are sent to the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona where a fellow prisoner starts a baseball team, but when Tetsu's sister becomes ill and he feels responsible, he stops playing.

BaseballRacismTeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · 639 pages

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar

Magical RealismNew York CityLiterary FictionReligious Identity
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Handbook for Boys

Walter Dean Myers · 217 pages

Jimmy and Kevin could really use a guide to life. Their activities almost land them in juvenile detention until Duke employs them in his Harlem barbershop. Duke has rules for everything. But is he offering good advice or just more aggravation? In the groundbreaking tradition of the award–winning Monster and Bad Boy: A Memoir, Walter Dean Myers fashions a complex, layered novel about the rules fo

Mentor RelationshipNew York CityRacismTeen Protagonist
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The Skin I'm In

Sharon G. Flake · 171 pages

Thirteen-year-old Maleeka, uncomfortable because her skin is extremely dark, meets a new teacher with a birthmark on her face and makes some discoveries about how to love who she is and what she looks like.

BullyingMentor RelationshipRacismTeen Protagonist
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A Lesson Before Dying

Ernest J. Gaines · 256 pages

In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white

RacismMentor RelationshipReligious IdentityLiterary Fiction




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