Here are 63 books that Border Songs fans have personally recommended if you like
Border Songs.
Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
This book centers around the plight of twelve young, urban Native Americans in Oakland, California, who, having lost connection to the land and their heritage, struggle to make sense of their identity. For various reasons, they all travel to and converge at the Big Oakland Powwow.
It is a gut-wrenching story that grapples with the disenfranchisement of Native Americans, starting with the colonies; the novel opens with a true account of the so-called Indian Wars. An account of history that was rewritten to make us feel good about Thanksgiving. I loved it for the opening scene and the historical references. An impossible to put down novel.
** Shortlisted for the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award **
One of Barack Obama's best books of 2018, the New York Times bestselling novel about contemporary America from a bold new Native American voice
'A thunderclap' Marlon James 'Astonishing' Margaret Atwood, via Twitter 'Pure soaring beauty' Colm Toibin
Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and hoping to reconnect with her estranged family. That's why she is there. Dene is there because he has been collecting stories to honour his uncle's death, while Edwin is looking for his true father and Opal came to watch her boy Orvil dance.
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
Imagine waking up one morning to find brown, evil-smelling water flowing from your taps. This is what happened in Flint, Michigan, one morning in 2014. Some people blamed the residents of Flint for the debacle, but the city manager made the arbitrary decision to tap into the Flint River to save money. It's ironic that within a week, GM hooked themselves back up to the Detroit waterline as the untreated water was ruining their equipment.
The story follows two families through generations, converging in the present. I found the flashback to the sit-down strike in 1936 at GM in Flint (Chevy in the Hole) especially interesting. It was the beginning of a strong UAW.
The main characters, who are determined to coax life back into a city everyone else has given up on, are flawed, thus likeable and real. Gus, newly committed to sobriety, and Monae, an urban farmer, seem…
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Finalist for the 2022 Heartland Booksellers Award
A gorgeous, unflinching love letter to Flint, Michigan, and the resilience of its people, Kelsey Ronan's Chevy in the Hole follows multiple generations of two families making their homes there, with a stunning contemporary love story at its center.
In the opening pages of Chevy in the Hole, August “Gus” Molloy has just overdosed in a bathroom stall of the Detroit farm-to-table restaurant where he works. Shortly after, he packs it in and returns home to his family in Flint. This latest slip and recommitment…
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
I loved this book because it made me cry with its emotional impact. It opened my eyes to the mistreatment of Native Americans and the Spanish/Mexican inhabitants of southern California when the territory was annexed by the United States after the Spanish-American War.
This is the love story between the mixed-race orphan girl, Ramona, and Alessandro, the head of the Native American sheep shearers. When they fall in love, knowing her aunt, who took her in and owns the rancho, will never let her marry a Native American, they elope. But Alessandro’s tribe is soon driven off their land by American settlers flooding the area, and he and Ramona are thrown into poverty as they travel from locale to locale, desperately trying to find a place to call home.
Ramona (1884) is a novel by Helen Hunt Jackson. Inspired by her activism for the rights of Native Americans, Ramona is a story of racial discrimination, survival, and history set in California in the aftermath of the Mexican American War. Immensely popular upon publication, Ramona earned favorable comparisons to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and remains an influential sentimental novel to this day. Orphaned after the death of her foster mother, Ramona, a Scottish-Native American girl, is taken in by her reluctant foster aunt Senora Gonzaga Moreno. Early on, she experiences discrimination due to her mixed heritage and troubled…
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
This book is the story of four teenagers desperate to escape the mining towns of Ishpeming and Negaunee but doomed to immersion in the violence simmering just beneath the surface.
Riekki did a good job of instilling a sense of impending doom from the opening pages, and I couldn’t put it down. It showed me a side of the UP I didn’t know existed, one beyond the beauty of the peninsula, shining a light on the dirty underbelly of mining—what it offers and what it leaves behind—the cavings—underground passages left by the mining company. Riekki’s description of the bottomless pit in the woods is Poe creepy.
Physically and emotionally brutalized, these four characters—angst-filled Craig; J., never touched by a woman; Antony, with the walls he puts up; and Hollow, determined to escape, are a downtrodden, culturally isolated group. I rooted for them and recognized them as characters that can be…
From a bold new novelist comes a complex tale of friendship and brutality. Set in Michigan s Upper Peninsula, U.P. is the story of four teens immersed in an ugly world, one whose threat of violence is always simmering beneath the surface. R.A. Riekki s distinctive characters and their poignant quest for freedom is a swan song to lost youth, redefining the traditional coming-of- age-story. Four boys, four distinct narratives that converge into a harrowing and heartbreaking whole.
I’ve always loved satire. In college, I wrote and performed comedy sketches as part of a two-man team, and most of my work features at least some comic elements. For example, my novel The Whale: A Love Story is a serious historical novel about the relationship between Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne that also offers moments of comedy to honor Melville's comic spirit (Moby-Dick, while ultimately tragic, is a very funny book). The most serious subjects usually contain elements of the absurd, and the books I love find humor in even the gravest situations.
A tale of labor unrest in the hardscrabble frontier of northwestern America sounds anything but fun or funny, but Walter explores the lives of miners, railroad workers, and Vaudeville performers with surprising verve and a glint of humor on nearly every page.
Set mostly in and around Spokane in the years between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, this sweeping, satisfying story follows a pair of working-class brothers as they confront corrupt lawmen, scheming actresses, and violent union-busters.
'A beautiful, lyric hymn to the power of social unrest in American history...funny and harrowing, sweet and violent, innocent and experienced; it walks a dozen tightropes' Anthony Doerr, author of All the Light We Cannot See _____________________________________________
1909. Spokane, Washington.
The Dolan brothers are living by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his dashing older brother Gig dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment.
I grew up in a small town myself and have always loved books that create characters from the setting. I want to feel immersed and captivated by the place, as well as the people and stories within the pages. The setting of an eerie small town is one of my favorites, because of the feeling that anything magical or mysterious could happen there. My book Starling takes place in a strange small town where odd things are everyday occurrences. There are many books that use small towns as setting for a speculative story, but these are some of my favorites!
This book is weird—in the very best way possible. When I finished reading it, I cried—I loved it that much! It’s one of the most unique stories, following two teenage loners in a small town split by differences and old grievances. But when the town itself turns into an impossible, semi-apocalyptic mess, they’re thrust together to make things right. The setting is so unique, and there is so much heart in this surrealist gem of a book.
'Tinges of the supernatural add to the electric sense of place in a caustic and original novel' Financial Times
Billy Sloat and Lydia Lemon don't have much in common, unless you count growing up on the same (wrong) side of the tracks, the lack of a mother, and a persistent loneliness that has inspired creative coping mechanisms.
When the lives of these two loners are thrust together, Lydia's cynicism is met with Billy's sincere optimism, and both begin to question their own outlook on life. On top of that, weird happenings including an impossible tornado and an all-consuming fog are…
Dogs make great supporting characters, adding drama or humor or pathos, and revealing so much about the humans in the story. I discovered this in writing my first novel: The narrator’s dog keeps her grounded when things go wrong and makes it possible for her to keep going through difficult times. For the reader, he provides levity and depth without turning it into a book about a dog. I had a great model – I used my own dog Boris, even appropriating his name. I think of the fictional Boris as real-life Boris’s best self.
What Comes After is a heart-rending story of a boy who is brutally murdered.
A school friend commits suicide shortly after, leaving a note confessing to the murder, but there are unanswered questions.
Meanwhile, a destitute and pregnant teenager shows up in town with worries and questions of her own. Rufus the dogs brings the dad and the girl together, then rides along with both of them as their intertwining stories unfold.
He doesn’t solve crimes or save lives, but he does what rescued dogs so often do – rescue their people.
This book is tagged as a murder mystery and a thriller, and it is both those things.
But essentially it is the first-person narrative of an aching father, the people around him, and the dog who shares his grief.
Named a top beach read of summer by Oprah Daily, Good Housekeeping, The Wall Street Journal, and more
“Nail-biting wallop of a debut . . . a thoughtful, unexpectedly optimistic tale.” —The New York Times
“If you enjoyed The Searcher by Tana French, read What Comes After by JoAnne Tompkins. . . . a mystery—and a gritty meditation on loss and redemption, drenched in stillness and grief.” —The Washington Post
After the shocking death of two teenage boys tears apart a community in the Pacific Northwest, a mysterious pregnant girl emerges out of…
As a Jew growing up in the United States, I’ve spent a long time reflecting on how genocide, culturecide, and assimilation operate across majority-minority relations. My focus on Indigenous politics in my career as a political scientist stems from a devotion to pluricultural democracy as a way that people can live together well. I want to be part of a world where we can bring our whole selves to our societies and don’t have to cut out certain parts of our identities to be accepted. And I like to read well-researched, compellingly written books that offer insight into how communities do that.
Michelle Jacob’s book taught me about how we can blend scholarship with practice on a personal level. Her book gives me hope that humans are creative, resilient, fierce creatures who can find their way through oppression. Through personal stories, I learned both about Yakama cultural survival, and see many general lessons for other minority communities around the world.
The Yakama Nation of present-day Washington State has responded to more than a century of historical trauma with a resurgence of grassroots activism and cultural revitalization. This pathbreaking ethnography shifts the conversation from one of victimhood to one of ongoing resistance and resilience as a means of healing the soul wounds of settler colonialism. Yakama Rising: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization, Activism, and Healing argues that Indigenous communities themselves have the answers to the persistent social problems they face. This book contributes to discourses of Indigenous social change by articulating a Yakama decolonizing praxis that advances the premise that grassroots activism and…
As a young working mom, I occasionally longed to follow the example of columnist Erma Bombeck and hide from my family in the car. Instead, I channeled the mayhem of family life into a humor column called “The Mother Load,” which detailed the day-to-day challenges of running a business while caring for two daughters, one husband, two guinea pigs, and a dancing rabbit. When I decided to pursue my life-long dream to write fiction, my debut novel was a humorous story about a mother-daughter-grandmother road trip/chase from Boston to Memphis. Although my writing doesn’t shy away from serious issues, I choose to see the world through a humorous and ultimately hopeful lens.
How can you not love a novel about an agoraphobic mother who somehow promises her 15-year-old daughter that she’ll take her to Antarctica?
The mom, Bernadette, knows she can’t handle that kind of trip, but in her desperate attempts to make it work, things get out of hand, and Bernadette disappears. It’s up to 15-year-old Bee to play detective and find her. Set in Seattle, Where’d You Go, Bernadette? is a delightful mix of comedy and satire with a wonderful message about the need to face up to the disappointments in one’s past.
A misanthropic matriarch leaves her eccentric family in crisis when she mysteriously disappears in this "whip-smart and divinely funny" novel that inspired the movie starring Cate Blanchett (New York Times).
Bernadette Fox is notorious. To her Microsoft-guru husband, she's a fearlessly opinionated partner; to fellow private-school mothers in Seattle, she's a disgrace; to design mavens, she's a revolutionary architect; and to 15-year-old Bee, she is her best friend and, simply, Mom.
Then Bernadette vanishes. It all began when Bee aced her report card and claimed her promised reward: a family trip to Antarctica. But Bernadette's intensifying allergy to Seattle --…
I’ve been an avid reader since I was a kid. Werewolf books have always called to me, and so has the moon—but that’s another story. Ha! In all honestly, I love the sense of loyalty and family that comes with werewolves and their packs. Family means a lot to me, and that bleeds over into the type of stories I write. I’ve been an Indie Author for over 10 years now with 50+ books under my belt. I have a passion for writing about shifters of all types (including werewolves), small towns, and romance.
I know these books probably get mentioned on lots of these lists but it’s for good reason. There was so much about this book (and the series) that I loved, but I think the thing I love most was how loyal Jacob was to Bella. All he wanted was to protect her, even if sometimes it was from herself.
I stuck my finger under the edge of the paper and jerked it under the tape. 'Shoot,' I muttered when the paper sliced my finger. A single drop of blood oozed from the tiny cut. It all happened very quickly then. 'No!' Edward roared ... Dazed and disorientated, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm - and into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires.
For Bella Swan, there is one thing more important than life itself: Edward Cullen. But being in love with a vampire is more dangerous than Bella ever…
Interested in
Washington state,
dyslexia,
and
British Columbia?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
Washington state,
dyslexia,
and
British Columbia.
