53 books like Imago

When my husband and I got together, everyone said it wouldn’t work.

He graduated from the University of Texas while I was from University of Nebraska. At the time the schools were rabid football rivals. Both of us were avid fans. And the year we got married, the two schools played each other for the championship.

Is it any wonder I wrote about a metro-male and a good-old-boy? Not only do I write about mismatched couples, I read about them too.

In Tigers and Devils, a top Australian football player and the head of an independent film festival are attracted to each other. You don’t have to know anything about Australian football to enjoy this book.

Kennedy’s sense of humor and the main character’s married couple friends will make you believe even if you don’t have my background and haven’t had decades with your spouse.

Without my glasses, I’m functionally blind. Without his hearing aids, my husband struggles to hear. We shouldn’t work as a couple. Or are our limitations our strengths?

In Kaye’s book, Patrick Stanford is considered by his rotating crew of housecleaners to be an unreasonable client. Until Jake Manning is hired, no one realizes that Patrick as a blind man needs his house to be kept in strict order or he harms himself just walking from room to room.

Although Patrick has a PhD while Jake has barely a high school diploma, what matters is how they understand each other’s needs and work to answer them.

(An aside: Besides, how could I pass up a book in which Pat (my name) and Jake (my husband’s name) fall in love? I couldn’t!)

Okay, okay, shoot me. I’m kind of breaking the rules here. Other than the fact that this is one of my go-to books when I’m overwhelmed or too tired to sleep or, you know, needing relaxation and a laugh, this has nothing to do with my life with Jake.

In fact, the story is about two absolutely opposite men getting together, which at least meets the qualifications of this list. And it is, like the books above, one I’ve read over and over again. It also resonates through my life as a college-level English composition instructor.

Cambridge academic Larry Morton would be the last person you’d think would fall in love with big, burly former boxer Al Fletcher. Although Al has a flair for art, he’s uneducated as opposed to Larry’s degree.

The story, told from Al’s point of view, makes a case that education levels aren’t an unsurmountable barrier… show more.

This book resonates with me for a lot of reasons. The first is that I was married to a gay man before I met my current husband. Friends said his being gay would break us up, and they were right.

One of the protagonists in Reed’s book is a gay man married to a woman. So I was anxious to see what Reed, a gay man who was once also married to a woman, would do with this.

Secondly, I taught in a community college where many of my students had dropped out of school because they’d been bullied like one of the key characters in this book. One of the first essays the first year students were asked to write was a self-examination.

Many of the formerly bullied students wrote about how traumatic high school had been and how they felt unlovable because of it. My first published books… show more.

This is a gentle, lyrical story. This book inspires love. If you read it, you’ll feel the loving relationship the girl has with her grandfather...and with butterflies. You’ll wonder why the butterflies visit the girl once she’s grown up. What do the butterflies who visit her seem to know or sense? Why aren’t the butterflies visiting her neighbors?

This book is both absolutely gorgeous and deeply disturbing.

The premise is simple: in an FBI interview, a young woman recounts the horrific ordeal she’s survived as a member of a serial killer’s “garden” of kidnapped victims. The reading experience is considerably more complex. Much of the story is told in flashbacks, allowing the reader to explore Maya’s experience in the Garden; that’s then balanced with her FBI interview, filling in blanks and establishing her as an almost-reliable narrator.

The dual timeline—one of my favorite devices to read and write—is handled brilliantly, and Hutchinson successfully achieves a formidable tightrope act, balancing the brutality of torture and murder with an elegant and refined narrative.

Her darkness is graceful—but it’s still darkness. 

When I picture a butterfly, I imagine a delicate, lovely creature gliding across the sky. Not a foul-smelling flying creature that feeds on rotting flesh. But that’s the secret side of our (formerly) favorite insects that we meet through our knowledgeable monarch butterfly narrator.

My students couldn’t get enough of this fascinatingly disgusting book.

This is another funny pick that gets my kids giggling.

The main character is a butterfly with an endless amount of questions and plenty of excuses about why they can’t sleep (hmm…reminds me VERY MUCH of some children I know…). Butterfly’s friend Porcupine has good suggestions for Butterfly (and anyone else who needs to get to sleep already!) to try.

This book is a classic natural history quest: Patrick Barkham tries to find all the butterfly species in Britain and Ireland in one summer. It explores our age-old relationship with these fantastic insects, the eccentricities of the butterfly watcher's world, and the author’s adventures along the way, all tied together by the challenge he’s set himself. This is a really entertaining book and brilliantly captures the butterfly obsession, offering an excellent portrayal of what makes butterfly watchers tick.

On Monday, a tiny, very hungry caterpillar ate through one apple. 

"But he was still hungry." 

On Tuesday, he ate through two pears, on Wednesday, three plums, and so on through the week. 

When he gets to Saturday, he eats way too much, starting with one piece of chocolate cake and ending with one slice of watermelon. 

That night he has a stomach ache! The caterpillar recovers on Sunday and, no longer tiny and no longer hungry, he builds a small house around himself called a cocoon.

In time, he becomes a beautiful butterfly.

With cutout pages and gorgeous Eric Carle art, this book is a joy to share with young children.