66 books like Chevy in the Hole

This list could be full of Toni Morrison novels and be no worse for it.

I’d argue that the late writer is the finest we’ve ever had on the topics of grief, loss, and ancestry—especially from the Black American perspective. One of my favorite examples is Song of Solomon, a mesmerizing journey through what it takes to craft an identity in the midst of racism and the ruptures it creates in our lives.

Morrison's singular prose is pure magic as it weaves a tale of the enduring power of love. A literary masterpiece.

I loved the book because it’s an insightful window into the challenges of a troubled community, the native Indians, who are still haunted by the painful past and face an uncertain future. I loved how the writer picks the thread of stories of many characters who have chosen to live outside reservations and then knits them all together in the end.

Unique characters with unique stories and strong evocative writing make There There a remarkable debut.  

Tom Drury has been called “the greatest writer you’ve never heard of” and when you discover his work, you’ll feel a thrill similar to the joy of knowing the gems hiding in plain sight throughout the Midwest (Get it? Plain sight?). The End of Vandalism, Drury’s first novel (you could read any of them- they’re all great, but start with this one as the same characters reappear in future books), takes place in a fictional Iowa town and follows the lives of three of its residents, who are involved in a love triangle. Drury writes real, beautiful, complicated, and thoroughly Midwestern characters. Although Grouse County is fictional, it could just as easily be a real place. And if you find you need more Iowa, read Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella (this is my sneaky way of recommending more than 5 books).

Toews is a Canadian writer, not Midwestern, but I’m from Michigan and we tend to lump Canada in with us whenever possible. My list, my rules. The book takes place in the adorable town of Algren with heroine Knute and her daughter Summer Feelin’ as well as a cast of other quirky lovable small-town characters. Toews has the ability to write sweet and funny small-town stories without pandering to stereotypical character tropes. Whenever I think of this book, I think of the peaceful feeling it gave me one summer, reading on my porch steps or leaned over my grocery cart in line for checkout, whenever I had two free minutes to read. Toews later fiction is quite a bit darker and she does that well too, but I always love to sink into her earlier works when I want something feel-good.

A mix of coming of age in the first half of the twentieth century, and Bradbury’s peculiar brand of very earthly oddness and sci-fi strangeness, Dandelion Wine is full of all sorts of magic. It reminds you of what it is to be a small human again, when everything seems possible, and aliens and monsters are as likely (and as important) as long summer days spent outside, barefoot and sunburnt and a little feral. Even when we don’t recognise the details of the childhood described, we remember the feeling, and it reawakens a sense of wonder that’s incredibly precious.

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. 

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… show more.

A mystical love story that crosses borders, I found this a delightful read. The story takes place along a stretch of border between Canada and Northwest Washington State that’s nothing more than a long grassy ditch separating once congenial communities. 

Brandon Vanderkool, a dyslexic, bird-watching artist, brings an unusual perspective to his employment with the Border Patrol. Though surprisingly adept at his job (smugglers and illegals walk right into his arms while he’s owl-watching), it’s his talent for painting and obsession with birds that endeared him to me.

When he crosses paths with his childhood friend, Canadian Madeline Rousseau, and her basement full of flowering cannabis, I impatiently root for them to act on their mutual attraction and recognize how ill-suited they are to their occupations. The ending is spot-on and mystically electrifying!

Cornejo Villavicencio renders the lives of the undocumented across America with razor-sharp clarity, intertwining her own story throughout.

She shows us how the undocumented struggle to find work, healthcare, and safety while also maintaining their families, integrity, and sanity. She becomes a medium for immigrant stories that might otherwise remain illegible except as fodder for ideological battles.

Cornejo Villavicencio was one of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard and was a PhD candidate at Yale at the time of her book’s publication; this marks her as an exceptional kind of speaker, and the book’s marketing and reviews rarely failed to mention these facts.

And yet Cornejo Villavicencio vehemently rejects the American-dream mythology that would make her life exemplary. Even so, that mythology orbits around her book, showing how difficult it is to disentangle false themes of transcendence from migrant literature.

But Cornejo Villavicencio cuts through the sentimental or… show more.

I had never really given much thought to counting until I read this book, but in the very first chapter, Stone made me rethink everything I thought I knew about “one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.” She shows that every time we count, we’re making cultural assumptions. For example, what counts as a fish? And what makes the color of the fish more relevant than other features? Counting reveals that while these choices may seem intuitive, basic, and meaningless, they have very real impacts on people’s lives. Especially when we use numbers to measure things like merit, poverty, race, and productivity, those fundamental assumptions matter more than we care to admit.