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The Last Days of Summer

Steve Kluger · 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 RelationshipWorld War IITeen Protagonist
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Good Night, Mr. Tom

Michelle Magorian · 318 pages

During World War II, an aging recluse's stony heart is softened by his friendship with a young evacuee from London.

Mentor RelationshipWorld War IIHeartwarmingTeen Protagonist
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The Big Field

Mike Lupica · 288 pages

For Hutch, shortstop has always been home. It's where his father once played professionally, before injuries relegated him to watching games on TV instead of playing them. And it's where Hutch himself has always played and starred. Until now. The arrival of Darryl "D-Will" Williams, the top shortstop prospect from Florida since A-Rod, means Hutch is displaced, in more ways than one. Second base fe

BaseballMentor RelationshipHeartwarmingMale Lead
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Snow in August

Pete Hamill · 327 pages

In Brooklyn in the late 1940s, adolescent Michael Devlin is a dutiful son to his widowed mother and a conscientious altar boy at the parish church. One day, he meets Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a chance encounter that inaugurates a friendship with vast consequences, good and bad, for both of them. Michael lost his father in the war, and the rabbi, a recent immigrant to this country, lost his wife. The thr

BaseballMentor RelationshipTeen ProtagonistHistorical 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.

BaseballWorld War IITeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows · 278 pages

"I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers." January 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject. Who could imagine that she would find it in a letter from a man she's never met, a native of the island of Guernsey,

Epistolary FormatWorld War IIHeartwarmingFunny
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Mickey & Me

Dan Gutman · 156 pages

When Joe Stoshack's dad ends up in the hospital after a car accident, he has two words to say to his son: Mickey Mantle. For Stosh has a special power -- with a baseball card in hand, he can travel back in time. And his dad has a rare card -- Mantle's valuable 1951 rookie card. "I've been thinking about it for a long time. Go back to 1951. You're the only one who can do it," Dad whispers.That nigh

BaseballWorld War IITeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky · 216 pages

Charlie writes letters to an unknown mail recipient, detailing his struggles with high school, family, and finding his place in the world. Full of beautiful quotes and written with such sincerity, this is a book that makes the reader reflect on their purpose in life, while simultaneously reminding us about the power music, friendships, and "feeling infinite" can have on our life. Read this book.

Epistolary FormatMentor RelationshipTeen ProtagonistMale Lead
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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.

BaseballHeartwarmingTeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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The Wednesday Wars

Gary D. Schmidt · 268 pages

Holling Hoodhood is really in for it. He's just started seventh grade with Mrs. Baker, a teacher he knows is out to get him. The year is 1967, and everyone has bigger things to worry about, especially Vietnam. Then there's the family business. As far as Holling's father is concerned, the Hoodhood's need to be on their best behavior: the success of Hoodhood and Associates depends on it. But

Mentor RelationshipHeartwarmingTeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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Baseball Saved Us

Ken Mochizuki · 32 pages

A Japanese American boy learns to play baseball when he and his family are forced to live in an internment camp during World War II, and his ability to play helps him after the war is over.

BaseballWorld War IIHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Fever at Dawn

Peter Gardos · 240 pages

Epistolary FormatWorld War IIHeartwarmingHistorical Fiction
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I'll Be Seeing You

Suzanne Hayes, Loretta Nyhan, Suzanne Palmieri · 313 pages

Two women forge a friendship during World War II through their letters to each other, allowing them to survive the loneliness and uncertainty of waiting on the home front and giving them the courage to face the battles raging in their very own backyards.

Epistolary FormatWorld War IIHeartwarmingHistorical Fiction
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The Tobacconist

Robert Seethaler · 234 pages

"Seventeen-year-old Franz Huchel journeys to Vienna to apprentice at a tobacco shop. There he meets Sigmund Freud, a regular customer, and over time the two very different men form a singular friendship. When Franz falls desperately in love with the music hall dancer Anezka, he seeks advice from the renowned psychoanalyst, who admits that the female sex is as big a mystery to him as it is to Franz

Mentor RelationshipWorld War IITeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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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

Mentor RelationshipHeartwarmingTeen ProtagonistFunny
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What Is Left the Daughter

Howard Norman · 243 pages

Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges--the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and cousin Tilda. Wyatt's account of the aston

Epistolary FormatWorld War IIHistorical FictionMale Lead
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The Chilbury Ladies' Choir

Jennifer Ryan · 401 pages

Letters and journals reveal the struggles, affairs, deceptions, and triumphs of five members of a village choir during World War II as they band together to survive the upheavals of war and village intrigue on the English home front.

Epistolary FormatWorld War IIHeartwarmingHistorical Fiction
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Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer · 288 pages

A young man arrives in the Ukraine, clutching in his hand a tattered photograph. He is searching for the woman who fifty years ago saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Unfortunately, however, he is aided in his quest by Alex, a translator with an uncanny ability to mangle English into new forms; a 'blind' old man haunted by memories of the war; and an undersexed guide dog named Sammy Davis, Jr, J

World War IIEpistolary FormatHistorical FictionFunny
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The Cider House Rules

John Irving · 573 pages

Set in rural Maine in the first half of this century, it tells the story of Dr. Wilbur Larch--obstetrician and director of the orphanage in the town of St. Clouds. It is also the story of his favorite orphan, Homer, who is never adopted.

Mentor RelationshipWorld War IIHistorical FictionHeartwarming
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The Monstrumologist

Rick Yancey · 441 pages

In 1888, twelve-year-old Will Henry chronicles his apprenticeship with Dr. Warthrop, a scientist who hunts and studies real-life monsters, as they discover and attempt to destroy a pod of Anthropophagi.

Epistolary FormatMentor RelationshipTeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
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The Last Flight of Poxl West

Daniel Torday · 362 pages

"All his life, Elijah Goldstein has idolized his charismatic Uncle Poxl. Intensely magnetic, cultured and brilliant, Poxl takes Elijah under his wing, introducing him to opera and art and literature. But when Poxl publishes a memoir of how he was forced to leave his home north of Prague at the start of WWII and then avenged the deaths of his parents by flying RAF bombers over Germany during the wa

Mentor RelationshipWorld War IIHistorical FictionMale Lead
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Bang the Drum Slowly

Mark Harris · 284 pages

BaseballTearjerkerMale LeadFunny
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For One More Day

Mitch Albom · 208 pages

In an inspirational debut novel by the author of Tuesdays with Morrie, Charles "Chick" Benetto, grieving over the death of his mother, uses alcohol as a crutch to deal with his loneliness, isolation, and depression and the disintegration of his life, until an encounter with his mother's ghost brings him new awareness and leads him to attempt to put his life back together.

BaseballHeartwarmingMale LeadTearjerker
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Mudville

Kurtis Scaletta · 272 pages

Welcome to Moundville, where it's been raining for longer than Roy McGuire has been alive. Most people say the town is cursed--right in the middle of their big baseball game against rival town Sinister Bend, black clouds crept across the sky and it started to rain. That was 22 years ago . . . and it's still pouring.Baseball camp is over, and Roy knows he's in for a dreary, soggy summer. But when h

BaseballHeartwarmingTeen ProtagonistMale Lead
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