Here are 91 books that Anthropology of an American Girl fans have personally recommended if you like
Anthropology of an American Girl.
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As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to exploring the teenage experience. Maybe that’s because my experiences in high school and college were rife with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows—everything was intensely beautiful and painful at once. That tension played a major role in my self-discovery process, and story-wise, it makes for a compelling character. But in a lot of literature, I find the depiction of teenage characters to be either sensationalized or infantilizing, melodramatic, or unconvincingly flat. When writing my own adolescent subjects in The Wayside, I turned often toward the rich, complex characters in the stories here.
Along with Anthropology of an American Girl, this is one of the books that made me want to become a writer. More specifically, it opened my eyes to what a writer can do with a teenage subject.
The story follows a prep-school student, Lee, but Sittenfeld handles her experience with all the nuance of “adult” subjects. I also admire how Sittenfeld captures the labyrinthine social politics of an elite boarding school and comments on class and race hierarchies without ever feeling didactic.
I think people mistake this book as YA—I certainly did when I first picked it up as a thirteen-year-old—but don’t be fooled by that candy-colored ribbon belt on the cover. This is as complex a novel as they come.
An insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding school’s glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.…
First, I'm a woman and I'm inspired by women from the past who overcame the rules of the day in which they lived. It doesn’t matter where they lived, or what they tried to overcome, but to have bucked the patriarchal system and achieved some measure of success, is phenomenal. Second, I became inspired by silent film star Marion Davies, and I wrote a book about it. I never intended to write historical fiction. My first book was a memoir about sailing to Tahiti at fourteen with my father and two sisters. But life has a funny way of directing us where we need to go. Here I am: inspired by women from the past!
Wild Africa is romantic and daring and I loved the danger and inspiration of 1920s Africa, when British born real life woman Beryl Markham becomes one of the first female pilots. It’s a bit of Out of Africa and riveting.
Markham encounters many obstacles and has several disastrous relationships but eventually she overcomes and succeeds. She becomes the first person (not woman) to fly solo from Britain to North America.
As a young girl, Beryl Markham was brought to Kenya from Britain by parents dreaming of a new life. For her mother, the dream quickly turned sour, and she returned home; Beryl was brought up by her father, who switched between indulgence and heavy-handed authority, allowing her first to run wild on their farm, then incarcerating her in the classroom. The scourge of governesses and serial absconder from boarding school, by the age of sixteen Beryl had been catapulted into a disastrous marriage - but it was in facing up to this reality that she…
Like the widows in The Widows’ Wine Club, I’m getting on. Unlike them, I’ve been a writer for forty years, often hunched over a keyboard, ignoring people. Amazingly, though, I managed to have a happy marriage and make some great friends. Phew! Because I’ve needed friends, especially since my husband died. Looking back, I’m interested to see that I didn’t instantly take to some of my closest buddies. Circumstances threw us together, and we got to know and like and love each other. I explore this in my book.
I love this book because it has everything, believable, engaging characters, a riveting plot, a vivid setting, and a cause. Larger-than-life Margery O’Hare and lady-like Alice are unlikely friends, but friends they become in this great story.
When I first saw photos of those "librarians on horseback," the wonderful women who responded to Eleanor Roosevelt’s call to take books to the rural poor of Kentucky in the depressed 1930s, I longed to know more. Jojo Moyes gives us lots more. There’s an array of well-drawn characters, but it’s Margery and Alice who drive the story forward, defying the odds to achieve their aims and find men who love and appreciate them.
Yes, it’s a love story, too, and a whodunnit? Perfect!
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A REESE WITHERSPOON X HELLO SUNSHINE BOOK CLUB PICK
"A great narrative about personal strength and really captures how books bring communities together." -Reese Witherspoon
From the author of The Last Letter from Your Lover, now a major motion picture on Netflix, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond in Depression-era America
Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve, hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I love realm of the sensual. I sometimes call it The Magic Kingdom—the experience that sets us apart from our childhoods and teenage years. Intimacy—not just with people or lovers, but with the stuff we love as adults—is a compelling quest. For me, it lives in writing, cooking, singing, painting, befriending, loving—the things that lift my life out of the ordinary into time-stopping moments. Sharing it my writing, especially in my new fiction (Stay with Me, Wisconsinand my upcoming novelThe Seven Mile Bridge) has been an experience of helping us all get our hands and hearts and skin into the things we love and then abide there as long as life allows us.
Laurie Colwin is by far my favorite fiction writer. She died in 1992 at the age of 48, and Goodbye Without Leaving is one of my all-time favorite books of hers.
In it, Geraldine Coleshares—a privileged graduate student who is unmoved by her insulated and expectation-laden world—goes on the road as backup singer for Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes—an Ike and Tina Turner-type rock and roll band.
Her parents are horrified and will barely speak to her when she calls them from the road, but there’s nothing she loves more than to stand on stage in a day-glow fringed dress, singing her heart out.
When love finds her in the form of a straight-ahead lawyer who adores her and knows every rock n roll and rhythm and blues artist from the last century, she grudgingly lets him in, and though she knows she loves him, she resists marriage at every…
One of the most beloved novels from the critically acclaimed novelist Laurie Colwin, Goodbye Without Leaving explores a woman’s attempts to reconcile her rock-and-roll past with her significantly more sedate family life as a wife and mother.
As a bored graduate student, Geraldine Colshares is plucked from her too-tame existence when she is invited to tour as the only White backup singer for Vernon and Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes. The exciting years she spends as a Shakette are a mixed blessing, however, because when she ultimately submits to a conventional life of marriage and children, she finds herself stuck…
I love realm of the sensual. I sometimes call it The Magic Kingdom—the experience that sets us apart from our childhoods and teenage years. Intimacy—not just with people or lovers, but with the stuff we love as adults—is a compelling quest. For me, it lives in writing, cooking, singing, painting, befriending, loving—the things that lift my life out of the ordinary into time-stopping moments. Sharing it my writing, especially in my new fiction (Stay with Me, Wisconsinand my upcoming novelThe Seven Mile Bridge) has been an experience of helping us all get our hands and hearts and skin into the things we love and then abide there as long as life allows us.
This book is one of a four-partPride and Prejudice sequel series that continues the romantic lives of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy into their sex lives and family life.
It is, absolutely, an adult romp, and brilliantly written. Make no mistake, there are tons of sequels to Pride and Prejudice, but most only achieve wispy attempts at vanilla romance. If you love sensuality, these are the books to read.
The reason Jane Austen’s stories are is stellar is this: she knows how to build tension. Just like in love, she starts building a conflict, a distance between two hearts that has obstacle after obstacle to overcome, then teases us with little bits of promise, dashes our hopes, then raises the stakes and takes us to the edge of what we can stand, then lets us have a taste.
Mr. and Mrs. Darcy have an exceedingly passionate marriage in this continuing saga of one of the most exciting, intriguing couples in the Jane Austen Literature.
As the Darcy's raise their babies, enjoy their conjugal felicity and manage the great estate of Pemberley, the beloved characters from Jane Austen's original are joined by Linda Berdoll's imaginative new creations for a compelling, sexy and epic story guaranteed to keep you turning the pages and gasping with delight.
What people are saying about Mr. Darcy Takes A Wife, the bestselling Pride and Prejudice sequel.
As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to exploring the teenage experience. Maybe that’s because my experiences in high school and college were rife with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows—everything was intensely beautiful and painful at once. That tension played a major role in my self-discovery process, and story-wise, it makes for a compelling character. But in a lot of literature, I find the depiction of teenage characters to be either sensationalized or infantilizing, melodramatic, or unconvincingly flat. When writing my own adolescent subjects in The Wayside, I turned often toward the rich, complex characters in the stories here.
I can’t talk about notable adolescent protagonists without mentioning Blue van Meer. Marisha Pessl’s cult-favorite debut made an impact on me as a teenage reader, but I recently picked it back up on a whim and was just as enthralled as an adult.
This is a formally inventive novel interspersed with hand-drawn illustrations and pop quizzes. It also defies generic categorization, weaving in elements of murder mystery, campus novel, and coming-of-age saga. It’s a lot to take in (and it clocks in at a door-stopping 540 pages), but Blue’s always-surprising observations keep the pages turning.
The mesmerizing New York Times bestseller by the author of Night Film
Marisha Pessl’s dazzling debut sparked raves from critics and heralded the arrival of a vibrant new voice in American fiction. At the center of Special Topics in Calamity Physics is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic knowledge. But she could use some friends. Upon entering the elite St. Gallway School, she finds some—a clique of eccentrics known as the Bluebloods. One drowning and one hanging later, Blue finds herself puzzling out a byzantine murder mystery. Nabokov meets Donna…
Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Then a tornado blows it away. Ava is safe in the basement, but when she emerges, only one corner of her home stands. Rather than crumbling under the loss, she feels a load lifted. Maybe something beyond the familiar is…
As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to exploring the teenage experience. Maybe that’s because my experiences in high school and college were rife with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows—everything was intensely beautiful and painful at once. That tension played a major role in my self-discovery process, and story-wise, it makes for a compelling character. But in a lot of literature, I find the depiction of teenage characters to be either sensationalized or infantilizing, melodramatic, or unconvincingly flat. When writing my own adolescent subjects in The Wayside, I turned often toward the rich, complex characters in the stories here.
It’s not often that a thirty-something man nails the depiction of the interior life of a seventeen-year-old girl, but Jesse Ball did exactly that in his 2016 novel. Scrappy, arson-obsessed Lucia Stanton just might be my favorite literary teenage hero of all time. I think of her as a mix between Holden Caulfield’s charming disaffection and Juno’s precocious wit.
Ball imbues Lucia’s voice with intelligence and a hint of world-weariness, but he still manages to convey her innocence. You learn a lot from her, but you also want to protect her. My copy is dog-eared and underlined into oblivion. It’s one of those books I think is woefully underrated, and I recommend it any chance I get.
“Ball has created a voice that echoes the beloved narrators of J. D. Salinger and John Green. . . . With her tragic past, brilliant mind and subversive potential, Lucia could be thought of as a young Lisbeth Salander, or a high-IQ, antiheroic Katniss Everdeen, but with a better sense of humor.” —Newsday
Lucia Stanton’s father is dead, her mother is in a mental hospital, and she’s recently been kicked out of school—again. Living with her aunt in a garage-turned-bedroom, and armed with only a book, a Zippo lighter, and a pocketful of stolen licorice, she spends her days riding…
As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to exploring the teenage experience. Maybe that’s because my experiences in high school and college were rife with the highest of highs and the lowest of lows—everything was intensely beautiful and painful at once. That tension played a major role in my self-discovery process, and story-wise, it makes for a compelling character. But in a lot of literature, I find the depiction of teenage characters to be either sensationalized or infantilizing, melodramatic, or unconvincingly flat. When writing my own adolescent subjects in The Wayside, I turned often toward the rich, complex characters in the stories here.
I wholeheartedly recommend this entire short story collection, but the title story, which centers on a recent high school grad, is a standout. While her architect father gallivants around Spain, Sara is left alone in his cold, modernist home on the coast of County Cork and battles her compulsion to self-harm.
This is a delicate subject matter, but it’s another example of an adult man inhabiting the mind of a teenage girl with a surprising facility. Kevin Barry is hands-down one of the best contemporary writers working today—no one uses language quite so inventively. Not for nothing, he’s one of the funniest writers, too, and his humor works to temper the melodrama that might arise in the hands of another writer.
Kevin Barry's deliciously wicked collection Dark Lies the Island delivers on the many reckless promises made by his virtuosic and prizewinning debut novel, City of Bohane. It firmly establishes him as both a world-class word slinger and a masterful storyteller.
Like all writers, I am first and foremost a reader, with deep appreciation for a great story. I’m also a veteran book club member who meets with book clubs all over the U.S. and Canada (usually via Zoom) three or four times a week to discuss my own work. They are, as I am, invariably pleased by a plot twist. It All Comes Back to You delivers a big one, along with emotional involvement in two worlds, as it’s a dual timeline. I consider myself an expert as a result of hundreds (thousands?) of hours discussing books with groups who are, without exception, smart, fun, funny women who educate me.
Upmarket Women’s Fiction at its finest! Women’s Fiction isn’t, incidentally, fiction written by or necessarily for women.
It comprisesrich stories in which the plot is driven by the protagonist’s emotional journey. You’ll always witness external events creating an interesting and lasting impact from beginning to end, changing our main character inside forever.
In Five Years excels at that, and packs a devastating, shocking, powerful punch in the process. I cried, but experiencing this story was worth it.
'SMART, EMOTIONAL, INTRIGUING AND COMPELLING - I LOVED IT!' JILL MANSELL
'Full of twists and turns, this is a heart-breaking yet uplifting story about love and friendship, and is one of this year's must-reads' Heat magazine *****
Dannie Kohan has held true to her meticulously crafted 5-year plan since she understood the concept. On the day that she nails the most important interview of her career and gets engaged to the perfect man, she's well on her way to fulfilling her life goals.
But that night Dannie falls asleep and dreams of a night five years in the future where…
This book is set in Montauk, under looming threat from a warming climate and overdevelopment. Now outsider Clancy, a thirty-six-year-old claims adjuster scarred by his orphan childhood, has inherited an unexpected legacy: the power to decide the fate of Montauk’s last parcel of undeveloped land. Everyone in town has a…
Neighbors. We’ve all got ‘em, right? We believe we’re the good ones, and we pray we don’t live next door to the bad ones… but sometimes it’s inevitable that we share our property lines with those ill-suited for neighborly behavior. Horror books about bad neighbors are the perfect window into our own communities. We can peer into the lives of others without worry of getting caught. We can tiptoe through their rooms and rummage through their drawers… Who knows what we might find. Are they witches? Serial killers? Devil worshippers? Only their dirty laundry will tell.
A bewitching book from beginning to end. Harrison knows how to blend her horror with humor, along with an added dash of pathos to make her characters feel achingly real and relatable. What would you do if you moved to a new town, only to discover your neighbor just-so-happened to be a witch? Fair warning to those afraid of spiders: This book is crawling with the little homewreckers.
A darkly funny, frightening novel about a young woman learning how to take what she wants from a witch who may be too good to be true, from the author of The Return.
All her life, Annie has played it nice and safe. After being unceremoniously dumped by her longtime boyfriend, Annie seeks a fresh start. She accepts a teaching position that moves her from Manhattan to a small village upstate. She’s stunned by how perfect and picturesque the town is. The people are all friendly and warm. Her new apartment is dreamy too, minus the oddly persistent spider infestation.…
