Here are 95 books that When You Know What I Know fans have personally recommended if you like
When You Know What I Know.
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My novel choices were part of the Afterschool Literacy & Building Modules for an organization called LitShop. It encourages growth in literacy, making, building, and leadership in girls ages 10-15 in St. Louis, Missouri. I’m honored to lead the writing classes. All of the LitShop books feature strong girls who believe they can make and build their way to a better world, and I aim to include similar characters in my stories. Stories can provide us with motivation, inspiration, and companionship, and all of these books have done just that… for the girls of LitShop as well as myself.
This pick has the distinguished honor of convincing me to try cricket flour. It also manages to present a layered storyline, one that combines an almost classic mystery plot with a traumatized character’s journey of self-healing. This book serves as a powerful reminder that we are more than the incidents that victimized us. And yes, even an insect hater like me enjoyed learning so much about the many uses of crickets!
"[A] deftly layered mystery about family, friendship, and the struggle to speak up." - Laurie Halse Anderson, bestselling author of Speak and Shout
From acclaimed author Kate Messner comes the powerful story of a young girl with the courage to make her voice heard, set against the backdrop of a summertime mystery.
When Mia moves to Vermont the summer after seventh grade, she's recovering from the broken arm she got falling off a balance beam. And packed away in the moving boxes under her clothes and gymnastics trophies is a secret she'd rather forget.
In That’s What Friends Do, the #MeToo experience that Sammie’s mom shares with Sammie is my story. I was thirteen. I never told anyone. Even as I started writing my novel, it didn’t occur to me to share with my husband, or my teenage children, my experience. But one evening, as the #MeToo movement was exploding in the media, I was sitting around a dinner table with several other couples. All of the women had had a #MeToo experience. Most of us were young teens when it happened. Shame and guilt had kept us silent for far too long. My novel – and the others on my list – are working to break through that silence.
This heartbreaking and powerful novel tells the story of fifth-grader Rowan, who isn’t a girl even though everyone thinks he is, but also isn’t the “right kind” of boy. At night, his dad comes into his room and does things Rowan can’t talk about with anyone. Silenced or ignored by everyone around him, Rowan writes letters expressing his thoughts, feelings, and dreams; he attaches them to balloons and sends them out into the universe. When he befriends a classmate who is as much of an outsider as he is, Rowan slowly begins to open his heart, and to speak up. I loved this novel both because of Rowan’s determination to be who he knows he is and because of the unexpected support he finds on his journey.
Tender and wise, The Ship We Built is about the bravery it takes to stand up for yourself-even to those you love-and the power of finding someone who treasures you for everything you are.
Sometimes I have trouble filling out tests when the name part feels like a test too. . . . When I write letters, I love that you have to read all of my thoughts and stories before I say any name at all. You have to make it to the very end to know.
Rowan has too many secrets to write down in the pages of…
In That’s What Friends Do, the #MeToo experience that Sammie’s mom shares with Sammie is my story. I was thirteen. I never told anyone. Even as I started writing my novel, it didn’t occur to me to share with my husband, or my teenage children, my experience. But one evening, as the #MeToo movement was exploding in the media, I was sitting around a dinner table with several other couples. All of the women had had a #MeToo experience. Most of us were young teens when it happened. Shame and guilt had kept us silent for far too long. My novel – and the others on my list – are working to break through that silence.
When Tai’s useless, always-high dad touches her best friend, Mila, where he shouldn’t, the girls’ friendship is challenged and changed. Tai, already ashamed of her father, wants to pretend the moment never happened. But, Mila can’t pretend because she lives every day with the fear and shame of that moment. After a summer apart, the two friends struggle to reconnect while also competing for acceptance into the same gifted-and-talented arts program. As both work to be seen for who they want to be, they must also learn to look back together at what really happened. I loved the portrayal of the girls’ friendship and the honesty of a story in which the “happy ending” doesn’t mean a return to the way things were.
When best friends Tai and Mila are reunited after a summer apart, their friendship threatens to combust from the pressure of secrets, middle school, and the looming dance auditions for a new talented-and-gifted program.
Fans of Renee Watson's Piecing Me Together will love this memorable story about a complex friendship between two very different African American girls-and the importance of speaking up.
Jamila Phillips and Tai Johnson have been inseparable since they were toddlers, having grown up across the street from each other in Pirates Cove, a low-income housing project. As summer comes to an end, Tai can't wait for…
In That’s What Friends Do, the #MeToo experience that Sammie’s mom shares with Sammie is my story. I was thirteen. I never told anyone. Even as I started writing my novel, it didn’t occur to me to share with my husband, or my teenage children, my experience. But one evening, as the #MeToo movement was exploding in the media, I was sitting around a dinner table with several other couples. All of the women had had a #MeToo experience. Most of us were young teens when it happened. Shame and guilt had kept us silent for far too long. My novel – and the others on my list – are working to break through that silence.
Lydia knows her mom’s boyfriend, Jeremy, makes her mom happy. But sometimes Jeremy makes Lydia really uncomfortable, especially when his hugs go on too long. She already dresses in baggy clothing so the boys in her school will stop saying things about her body. What more can Lyddie do? When her mom buys a run-down house, and Lyddie finds a book of magic spells inside, she thinks she has a solution: the right combination of magic spells will keep her safe. But when Lyddie’s spells don’t work against the boys, or Jeremy, she has to use her voice and her courage instead. I loved the way this wonderful coming-of-age novel confronts and challenges the culture of toxic masculinity that too often is used as a cover for bullying.
From the critically acclaimed author of the ALA Notable and Charlotte Huck Honor Book Forever, or a Long, Long Time comes a poignant coming-of-age novel about the complicated parts of growing up, finding your voice, and claiming your space. Perfect for fans of Rebecca Stead, Laurel Snyder, or Ali Benjamin!
Lydia hasn’t felt comfortable in her own skin since the boys at her school started commenting on the way she looks in her uniform. Her cousin and friends think she should be flattered, but the boys—and sometimes her mom’s boyfriend, Jeremy—make Lydia uncomfortable and confused. Even more confusing is when…
I am a writer and advocate for survivors of sexual abuse. Since 1998, I have encouraged them to find their voice and use it through my organization, Time To Tell. Being isolated is foundational to our experience, and our culture perpetuates the isolation by often refusing to address it, acknowledge it, or expose it, as well as not listening to–nor believing–survivors. This forces us to remain silent. I am certain that telling is healing. I lead writing circles for survivors to experience community and get support and encouragement. I recommend all these books not only for the wisdom offered but also the direct experience of not being alone in the reading.
It wasn't until I believed healing was possible that I started to heal. It's a huge step, and this little book was perfect for helping me to start believing. It's very short but packed full of wonderful ideas, exercises, and tips. I love their list of things to do to express your anger.
Reading it gave me the first glimpse that I had a right to my anger—what a gift! The second part has stories from other survivors and how they got to healing, which are very inspiring.
There's nothing as wonderful as starting to heal, waking up in the morning and knowing that nobody can hurt you if you don't let them.
Beginning to Heal offers hope and guidance for all survivors starting the healing journey. No matter how great your pain today, you can not only heal but thrive. Based on the authors' bestseller The Courage to Heal, this Revised Edition of Beginning to Heal takes you through the key stages of the healing process, from crisis times to breaking the silence, grief, and anger, to resolution and moving on. It includes inspirational highlights, clear explanations,…
One of the most important lessons I learned from my grandma is that children have no fear or self-doubt unless they are taught to have these feelings, and then it's a choice to continue to believe in self-doubt. However, I was paralyzed by it after her death. I stopped being a carefree kid and started living through emotional survival. I lived a life of physical, mental, and emotional turmoil, and by a miracle, I was spared and given a chance to change it all. I am a dancer, writer, performer, and speaker, following every dream I've had.
I had not witnessed a healthy grownup relationship when I was younger. My introduction to intimacy was horrid at best, not to mention the lack of role models available to me for feminine sexual guidance.
I spent years looking for love from other people and by means of sexual behavior that left me feeling ashamed. I lived my life based on many harmful beliefs that were self-destructive; I didn't feel I deserved to have a fully healthy relationship.
My therapist suggested this book, and it took me on a journey of returning to where and how I learned my habitual behavior, removing the adverse judgment and allowing me to start again, especially with my current husband. Our marriage is in a lovely place, partly due to this book.
Considered a classic in its field, this comprehensive guide will help survivors of sexual abuse improve their relationships and discover the joys of sexual intimacy. Wendy Maltz takes survivors step-by-step through the recovery process using groundbreaking exercises and techniques. Based on the author's clinical work, interviews, survey results, and workshops, this book is filled with first-person accounts of women and men at every stage of sexual healing. This compassionate resource helps survivors to: identify the sexual effects of sexual abuse; create a positive meaning for sex and develop a healthy sexual self-concept; gain control over upsetting automatic reactions to touch…
I'm a veteran author, journalist, and journalism professor who has taught over 1000 students. At the age of 50, through a memoir I began writing, I fell down a rabbit hole of memory and began to suspect I had been sexually abused as a child. The man was a close family friend, who liked to call himself my grandfather. He did not speak English. My parents were immigrants and the usual difficulties of retrieving memories from childhood were complicated by the fact that they were all in the Czech language. For years I read everything I could find about childhood sexual abuse and then everything I could read about psychoanalysis.
The Courage to Heal was another of the first books I turned to when I began reading about childhood sexual abuse.
I felt confused back then and ambivalent about believing that I had been abused that I didn’t borrow the book from a library or buy it. Instead I went to the local bookstore and read it crouched in an aisle. It’s a great survey of the world of people who were sexually abused as children, with many case studies, background research, and resources for community support.
Come to terms with your past while moving powerfully into the future
The Courage to Heal is an inspiring, comprehensive guide that offers hope and a map of the healing journey to every woman who was sexually abused as a child—and to those who care about her. Although the effects of child sexual abuse are long-term and severe, healing is possible.
Weaving together personal experience with professional knowledge, the authors provide clear explanations, practical suggestions, and support throughout the healing process. Readers will feel recognized and encouraged by hundreds of moving first-person stories drawn from interviews and the authors' extensive…
I grew up in the 1960s in the Midwest, in a male-dominated family, where appearances were highly important, where no one seemed to focus on anyone’s feelings or plans (particularly as a female member of the family). As a result, I’m drawn to books where the author explores this type of problematic relationship, of a protagonist trying to carve out her identity in the midst of often overwhelming obstacles. It also interests me to read about women who, like me, somehow managed to discover who they were (I use the word “translate” in my memoir), to carve out an identity that is separate from the idea that people around her erroneously hold to be true.
I highly recommend Poetic License for anyone who a) grew up in a patriarchy and b) had fathers who were larger than life.
Cherington’s father was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and she had to live in his shadow for much of her life, and accommodate to a world which largely revolved around him.
It was fascinating to read about the notable literary figures who came to their home but, at the same time, having grown up in a patriarchy myself, with a larger-than-life father, I could easily imagine what life was life for the author, a life she describes in beautiful, lyrical language.
At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she'd recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents' well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth-even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her?
In this powerful memoir, aided by her father's extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father's best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of…
I grew up with a single mother, lots of siblings, and little money. Books were my escape from reality. My love for reading began at an early age, back in the Babysitting Club days. I started writing as a girl but never thought it was something I would show other people. I kept my nose stuck in any book I could get my hands on, my favorites have become psychological thrillers. After spending decades in the medical field, I decided that it was time for me to write again. Once I completed my first novel and sent it out to agents, I quickly learned that I was right where I needed to be.
I am a long-time Fisher fan, and I love all of her books, but this one really spoke to me. So much pain and brutality trapped inside one girl makes you think of many different scenarios, none of which are what happens. Fisher creates amazing stories with fascinating twists and turns, but this one tops the cake. Gripping and graphic to the point that you forget you are reading fiction. I love unhappy and open endings that make you think and question what you just read; this one just might be my favorite.
In the Bone there is a house. In the house there is a girl. In the girl there is a darkness. Margo is not like other girls. She lives in a derelict neighborhood called the Bone, in a cursed house, with her cursed mother, who hasn’t spoken to her in over two years. She lives her days feeling invisible. It’s not until she develops a friendship with her wheelchair-bound neighbor, Judah Grant, that things begin to change. When neighborhood girl, seven-year-old Neveah Anthony, goes missing, Judah sets out to help Margo uncover what happened to her. What Margo finds changes…
For my first 18 years, I slept in the same room (opposite my parents) in the same house (116 Monticello Avenue) in the same city (Piedmont) in the same state (CA) in the same country (USA), but soon after leaving for college in Evanston, IL, I pined for elsewhere and ended up peripatetic. That peripateticness plagued me, as a woman/wife/mother. While growing our family, my French husband and I moved: Israel to France to California to New York to Israel to New York to Israel. Finally, in my early fifties, I understood home is more about who you are than where you live.
The Part That Burns is not a linear narrative but a memoir in fragments. Each essay or chapter is different, interesting, engaging like scattered pieces of a puzzle that the writer—and reader—are trying to put together.
It's about a childhood wrought with abuse and rejection, about trauma and epigenetics, home and roots. It's about a girl who grows up to become a teenager who becomes a young woman who becomes a wife and a mother and every step of the way, she yearns for what we all yearn for: acceptance and love.
My memoir is as slim and sparse as Ouellette’s and some might consider my chronological story as fragmented because of its tiny chapters and missing connective tissue from one chapter to the next.
"I love this book and am grateful it is in the world." —Dorothy Allison, New York Times best-selling author of Bastard Out of Carolina and Cavedweller "Simply beautiful. Precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid." —Joyce Carol Oates "A textured remembrance of a traumatic childhood that also offers affecting moments of beauty." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
In her fiercely beautiful memoir, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping…
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