10 books like Cross Creek

This is a beautifully written book, that brings the marshes of North Carolina to life in a way I didn’t think was possible.

Not only will it transport you to this unique wilderness, it places you in Kya’s isolated world in a profound way, too. I was skeptical going in, because of the hype, but honestly—it was breathtaking. It’s also an example of a different type of worldbuilding which is why I wanted to include it here (narrowly beating out Kate Quinn’s The Rose Code, which will whisk you to the now-infamous Bletchley Park amid WWII).

There’s nothing dystopian, fantastical, or magical about this book, and yet Owens has managed to create a world that feels unearthly and transcendent. If you’re not a fan of fantasy or dystopian, but you enjoy escapism and topnotch worldbuilding, read this one! 

Atticus and Scout Finch are OG father-daughter #goals, so it’s only fitting that any list of novels about father and daughters start here. Lawyer Atticus Finch teaches young Scout about empathy, the multiple perspectives to a story, and standing up for what’s right. His advice resonates with me decades after I first read this classic in middle school: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”

Atticus’ compassionate and measuredly wise parenting style, coupled with young Scout’s wide-eyed coming of age and discovery of uncomfortable social blights, like racism and injustice in our criminal justice system, make this literary duo an unforgettable pair. 

Miami Herald columnist and author Marjory Stoneman Douglas can rightfully be described as the woman who saved the Everglades. The Everglades: River of Grass was published in 1947, the same year Everglades National Park opened. For over fifty years Douglas fought tirelessly against human encroachment on the Everglades and devoted nearly all her time to explain how vital it was to the entire state of Florida. In the 1960s (while in her late seventies) she became involved with the Audubon Society of Miami’s efforts to halt the building of an international airport in the Everglades. She also formed the Friends of the Everglades, an organization that is still today one of the most powerful voices for the area’s preservation. Proving that good people do not always die young, Marjory Stoneman Douglas passed away in 1998 at the age of 108.

The Wilder Heart of Florida is a marvelous collection of essays on wild and natural Florida, selected and edited by Dr. Leslie Poole, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and History at Rollins College, and Dr. Jack Davis, Professor of History at the University of Florida. It is a second volume to the renowned 1999 The Wild Heart of Florida, and features insightful chapters penned by experts on real Florida, like Cynthia Barnett, Lauren Groff, Totch Brown, Lars Anderson, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Clay Henderson, as well as Jack Davis, and Leslie Poole, among others.

William McKeen’s account of the evolution of 1960s–1970s Key West reads like a novel. Based largely on his interviews with Tom Corcoran (who was there then and knew everybody), McKeen tells the wild tales of some of Key West’s most eccentric and now famous characters from that era, like Tennessee Williams, Thomas McGuane, Margot Kidder, Jim Harrison, Hunter Thompson, and Jimmy Buffett.

Allen Morris’s compilation of Florida places, by name, tells the stories of each—the origin of their names, their histories, and who settled them. It was published in 1995 but all the information is just as current today. It is a fascinating read and has been an invaluable history research tool for every one of my Florida books.

This quintessential historical fiction book on Old Florida was both a nominee of the Pulitzer, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. Rich in history and unforgettable characters, the story follows the MacIveys, as they scrap out a living as dirt farmers, beginning in the mid-1800s, through the 1960s. Not hurricanes, the Civil War, freezes, or near-starvation can staunch the family’s resilience, ultimately allowing them to build a great fortune. This novel truly touches my heart as my family came from Georgia, with little in their pockets, in the early 20th century, seeking to fulfill their own dreams. This is writing at its best, steeped in rich and authentic detail, making this a novel that will live on through the ages.

This fascinating book gives the reader a bird’s eye view into the rise and fall of an American dynasty, the Vanderbilts, set in the grandest homes from New York, to North Carolina. The legendary icon’s great-great-great grandson, CNN’s Anderson Cooper, wrote this biography of Gloria Vanderbilt (his mother,) and their family’s amazing history, making this book both dazzling and mind-boggling as we’re given an intimate look into an unimaginable but doomed world of opulence and wealth. Cooper never whitewashes his family’s often obsessive and often ruthless drive for power and wealth, their great loves and greater losses that ultimately collapsed the dynasty. Anything but dry or academic, this book kept me up long into the night.

My only fiction pick, this classic novel set in Florida in the 1870s is about 12-year-old Jody Baxter and his friendship with a fawn. I became familiar with this coming-of-age tale in an unusual way. In seventh grade, I was on a school speech team, and one of the other kids competed in the storytelling competition using an excerpt from The Yearling. That excerpt included the moment when Jody’s father talks to him about becoming a man: “What’s he to do when he gits knocked down? Why, take it for his share and go on.” That phrase stuck with me, and was even more powerful years later when I read the novel in its entirety and learned all that Jody had gone through by the time he and his father reached that moment.

It is an erotic romance of many species. This lush, exuberant novel interweaves the stories of three strong twentieth-century women whose lives are shaped both by their lusts and by the sights, sounds, tastes, scents, and textures of the southern Appalachian landscape. The women’s lives mingle in turn with the lives of others similarly influenced by their lusts and by different sensations of that landscape—among them moths, mice, birds, and immigrant coyotes. The shifts of perspective among Kingsolver’s vividly and voluptuously imagined human and nonhuman protagonists are both disorienting and fascinating. Of this work Kingsolver later writes, “Reader, hear my confession: I have written an unchaste novel.”