64 books like Motherless Brooklyn

Tom Ripley’s obsession with Dickie Greenleaf is so fascinating because it’s real but completely disturbing. I love this book because of Tom and Dickie, two characters who are loveable and hateable at the same time. The first half flew by on account of the setting–France, Italy, summer–it made me feel like I was there enjoying a European holiday with our protagonists. The second half turned everything on its head, and I was exhilarated and terrified all at once.

This story details love manifesting into a disturbing obsession, and this is a particularly interesting topic to explore. I loved the pace of the book (high, great plot) and the development of the characters. It is definitely one of my favorite stories about friendship with a beautiful European backdrop. 

I love story remixes: new takes on an existing genre. This book takes a conventional mystery plotline and gives it bright new coloring thanks to the narrator’s autism.

As is often the case with neurodivergent folks, Christopher doesn’t know much about the world, but he understands himself. A quiet masterpiece. No sentimentality, thank heavens.

I'd never read a book before which had such spectacular and horrifying opening chapters.

I found the fact that it was describing the cruel acts of a child resonated with me at the time, as everything I'd read before then – which was mainly The Famous Five books, and other books of that ilk, were pretty tame and this book was anything but that. 

A precocious and inquisitive child Oskar goes on a treasure hunt around New York to solve a mystery left behind by his father who had died on 9/11.

In his quest, you see a child seeking to stay close to his father a little while longer. In his streams of consciousness and hyperactive imagination, you feel him trying to fill the void left behind by a supportive father figure.

With the sheer weight of his innocence, he gets strangers to open up to him, let him into their lives, and add to their life stories. In a moving manner, the narrative follows the path that Oskar, his mother and his grandfather take in dealing with trauma and finding closure in their own personal ways.

Renée is the concierge in an elegant Paris hotel. Widowed and in her 50s, she calls herself “short, ugly and plump,” a working-class nobody. She takes refuge in aesthetics and ideas but refuses to let her knowledge show. Renée’s friend in the building is 12-year-old Paloma, beyond precocious, who feels so let down by the meaningless in the world that she plans to commit suicide. Both characters are philosophers of sorts.  “Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it,” says Paloma. In the end, they rescue one another from despair and loneliness. The experience of the book that was so satisfying for me, is the exchange of ideas about life and happiness, which are expressed more as a kind of philosophical discourse rather than a traditionally plotted novel. The ideas, expressed so intelligently and poetically, kept me going.

Trevor Conklin is a teenager in the advanced stages of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and is wheelchair-bound.  His new caretaker, Ben Benjamin, has lost his family to an accident (the details of which we don’t learn until the end of the book) and is financially broke. He has taken a 28-hour course on caregiving at a local church and afterward is hired by Trevor’s single mother to dress, bathe, and do everything that Trevor can’t do for himself. At first, there’s a lot of friction between Ben and Trevor, but after a while they become close and begin to trust one another. Together, they go on a road trip from Washington state to Utah to visit Trevor’s dad, the two haven’t seen one another for years. Along the way, they pick up some hitchhikers and Trevor has an encounter with a young woman. Alongside the road trip, are several flashbacks to… show more.

I like this very violent book because it shows how the love of two fathers for their murdered sons overcomes their own racial and sexual prejudices.

One father is a white redneck and the other is a Black ex-con. Their sons married each other and have been estranged from their fathers because of their homosexuality. When they are murdered, these two men must link up and exact both justice and revenge. What a great premise!

Cosby nicely shows how the two men grow to understand and accept each other because of this higher calling. It ends in blood.

Marissa doesn’t label herself but seems to deal with Autism Spectrum Disorder. In her words, “The best way I can think to describe it is that there’s a beehive in my chest, and most people upset the bees. The nearer they get, the worse it is—and direct contact makes them swarm.” Marissa is more than a diagnosis. She is a film editor struggling to verbalize to producers her inner creative process. I was a film editor for many years and Little’s description of the creative process was spot on. Marissa is trapped on a movie set full of mayhem and murder. How she presents makes it hard for anyone to believe her when she discovers a killer amongst them. The book is a powerful statement on looking beyond how someone presents the truth they are speaking.

I chose this book because of the author. Mason is brilliant and neurodiverse. She has aphantasia, the inability to see images in her mind’s eye. Forty-nine out of fifty people when asked, “Close your eyes and imagine a red ball.” See that red ball. Jamie doesn’t. This is her superpower. Her voice is surprising and singular, “…the trees and rode the shadows sideways into the tangly back hem of his old backyard.” Hem of a yard, love that. And “Guilt wears track shoes. Sprint, marathon, or cross-country, it doesn’t matter. It runs tireless to catch you, and it carries a sledgehammer.”

Tom is the hero we need today. I love characters who know who they are and don’t care what others think of them. And I value ‘fun’ as a goal.

Tom just wants to fool around and yawns at his aunt’s disapproval. The contests between Tom and his aunt’s champion, Captain Najork, are the best descriptions of games I’ve ever read, especially when you consider that the games themselves are invented out of whole cloth and the words applied seemingly at random.