100 books like This Appearing House

The Stitchers is the first book in the Fright Watch series and any one of them would be the perfect Halloween read. But let’s be real. Old people are scary.

Quinn knows there’s something off about her neighbors. The Oldies have lived in the neighborhood for as long as anyone can remember, and yet they never seem to get any older. If Quinn’s dad was still alive, she knows they’d be coming up with theories: Are they vampires? Aliens? Who knows! The answer is worse than she imagined. When Quinn sees one of the Oldies jogging, she knows she recognizes that leg…it was her dad’s.

I always loved Rod Sterling at Halloween and The Stitchers has such a great Twilight Zone vibe. It’s perfect for kids who lean towards the science fiction side of spookiness where normal things are just…wrong.

Eastport is the most cursed city in the US and the residents are darn proud of it!

Unfortunately, Mallory hasn’t quite adapted to her new home and finds her parents’ spooky stories to their restaurant customers and the constant Halloween in the town embarrassing. None of this stuff is real, after all! But when Mallory sees the girl in white, things start happening that she can’t explain. Worse yet, she’s doing things she can’t explain. Dangerous things.

I loved this new take on the Lady in White urban legend, and as a huge fan of towns like Salem, where the Halloween vibe is year-round, I loved visiting Eastport, even if Mallory’s not a fan. This one has some truly scary scenes, but the story itself has a base that any kid will relate to, the struggle of fitting in.

Every day is Halloween when you live in the seventh most haunted town in America, so ghosts and witches are nothing new to Evie Von Rathe. But when Aunt Des disappears, Evie knows she’ll do anything to get her back, even if it means playing a deadly game against a serial killer with a creature called The Clackity.

Watching Evie overcome her anxiety is a struggle kids will relate to and makes her an easy character to root for. The Clackity has such a perfect spooky Grimm’s Fairy tale vibe, that I was immediately sucked in. Nothing is more Halloween than a dark trip through the woods, and the twisted Alice in Wonderland feel of this book lives and breathes Halloween.

I firmly believe that Halloween books are for everyone, even kids who don’t want their pants scared off or kids who aren’t big readers. In comes Lumberjackula! An adorable graphic novel with a great Halloween esthetic.

Jack is a half vampire, half lumberjack kid who has to make a big decision: should he go to Lumberjack school like Mom wants, or Vampire school like Dad wants? Jack doesn’t want to disappoint either parent, but he has a secret…he wants to dance!

Lumberjackula has all the fun of Halloween without the fear, and the illustrations are adorable. It’s a great book to make sure all of your middle graders get to join in the Halloween fun. (And as a former goth myself, Dad’s band is awesome!)

I recommend this award-winning book written by a woman who fought cancer successfully 3 times. In this book, she demonstrates bravery and expertise in this subject. This book is exceptionally written with a lot of research within and outside the medical field. Despite her own challenges, her compassion shines through. From reading this book, I found it very healing to understand cancer and how following certain protocols can help the disease to remission.  I love how this book helped my friend affected by cancer and many other people, and I sense the author has saved many lives

The value I got from the book was an understanding of how cancer works and whether affected by cancer or not, how making changes in our everyday life can help aid remission and aid healing of the body.

Like everything Audre Lorde wrote, this slim book is powerful and revolutionary. Lorde refuses to see her breast cancer as just a personal problem, and instead, as a Black lesbian feminist, traces its origins to larger economic, industrial, and political forces, including food additives and air pollution. Her activist research is impressive, but it is her fierce, bold critiques that I find most inspiring. She calls out the medical establishment, “We live in a profit economy and there is no profit in the prevention of cancer; there is only profit in the treatment of cancer.” She condemns psychological “causes” of cancer, “It is easier to demand happiness than clean up the environment.” Lorde calls us to understand ourselves within a matrix of social and environmental forces and to make change.

This classic text by medical sociologist Arthur Frank was written in the wake of two life-threatening events: a heart attack at age 39 and a cancer diagnosis a year later. 

Frank draws on both his scholarly and personal experiences to guide others who find themselves in similar circumstances. He helps us understand that when we place ourselves in medicine’s hands, we also subject ourselves to their ways of knowing. Their stories bleed into our stories, but they are never the same as our stories because what medicine knows as disease is not the same as what we experience as illness. 

Thus, Frank teaches us: “These two stories, the story of medicine taking the body as its territory and the story of learning to wonder at the body itself, can only be told together, because illness is both stories at once.”

Imagine being a medical school student in the best of health and full of spirit and ambition, and suddenly being engulfed by a strange and mysterious illness that even the best of doctors in the most renowned hospitals are unable to appropriately diagnose, let alone treat. This chilling story of a doctor who literally chases his own cure is a great example of the much-needed patient advocacy that may often be required to diagnose and treat rare and complex conditions effectively. The author’s passion for finding the underlying cause of his disease (Castleman’s disease) and experimenting with innovative unlikely combinations of drug therapies makes his story memorable and truly inspiring.

Only dogged research could unearth the story of how one Black woman’s death – and the harvesting of her cells – could change the course of medical research.

It is a story of how some innocuous biological matter could grow into a hothouse of excess. Pharma companies enriched themselves reproducing the cells of Henrietta Lacks but did little or nothing for the family who lost their matriarch.  

For me, this book unleashed the idea of shaping deep research into a story can change our view of society.

Unexpected Lessons in Love broke new ground by discussing anal cancer and a colostomy in this autobiographical novel. A former schoolteacher and psychotherapist, she brought long-honed skills of observation and analysis to her compelling and highly readable story, which features mental illness, nuns, a kidnapped journalist, and many complicated family dynamics as well as a mother, wife, and grandmother facing terminal cancer.