10 books like Esperanza Rising

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s characters live and breathe in my heart. 

In Anne of Green Gables, orphaned Anne Shirley is taken in by Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of quaint Avonlea on beautiful Prince Edward Island. Anne’s many social challenges, her antics—well-meaning but with frequent disastrous (and humorous) results, her close friendship with neighboring Diana Barry, and her many hopes and longings and dreams warm and delight my heart. 

Like Anne, several characters in my own stories—as well as I—longed from childhood to become a writer. In my book, my heroine, also an orphan from Prince Edward Island, strikes up a correspondence with the author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. 

Anne of Green Gables is a book rich in characters that will never grow old—a perfect pleasure.

Sometimes as a writer you read books that make you think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ and so it is with The Book Thief.

For me, the idea of casting death as a character is brilliant but to portray him as the narrator, and one with a sense of humour too is genius. Through his eyes we are able to see not just the horror but the humanity of the people living in Nazi Germany and particularly the main character, Liesel. She is a smart young girl reeling from personal tragedy and fascinated by words.

She steals books that are threatened with destruction to read with Max, the Jewish man hidden by her foster parents. Powerful and original, it tells you everything you need to know about love, death, and humanity.

When I first read Fever 1793—set in Philadelphia during a yellow fever epidemic—I thought it was a well-written and thought-provoking glimpse into how people would respond in a crisis. After re-reading it post-pandemic, I would now add “prophetic.” Mattie is a typical grumpy teen who would rather have fun than work in her family’s coffee house. But there is a deadly fever rapidly spreading through the city. Desperation unleashes her inner strength, allowing her to prevail over disease, fear, food shortages, unscrupulous thieves, and well-intentioned but poorly-managed medical science.

Two Black teenagers in New York are thrown back in time to the Civil War era. Suddenly the similarities and differences of what it means to be Black in America are also thrown into relief, past and present both converging and clashing. Genna is our first-person narrator, and through her, we live fully in two worlds—one in which she struggles to go to college and leave behind the dangers of her Brooklyn neighborhood and one in which she struggles to stay alive in a volatile society which offers little support to the poor and vulnerable of any race.

This is somewhat science fiction, but more of an alternate historical fiction novel. This is the first in the Lady Astronaut series. It starts off with a bang, literally, when a meteorite hits Earth in 1952. This meteorite destroys much of the east coast and sets off a ticking time bomb where Earth will no longer be habitable in a matter of decades. Now there is a full effort to colonize space so humans can find another home. Women who were once thought not able to become astronauts are now able to vie for spots in the Astronaut Corps along with their male counterparts. I love science history and reading about the women “calculators” of this area (Katherine Johnson, Rear Adm Grace Hopper, etc.). So if there’s a space adventure set in this era, count me in!

Red, a monoecious oak tree, narrates this luminous and beautifully illustrated novel. Red is two hundred and sixteen rings old and happily provides shelter for seven opossums, four raccoons, five owls, six skunks, and a witty crow named Bongo. Together, Red and the animals concoct a plan to support Samar, a girl whose family has just moved into the neighborhood. Samar hasn’t made any friends yet, and she’s feeling sad and lonely. Wishtree is about inclusion and community, but at its heart, it’s a love song to the trees and creatures that call urban areas home. Have tissues ready: Samar’s comforting middle-of-the-night visits to Red and Bongo will have readers wiping away a tear or two. 

This is a funny, entertaining novel about a teenage boy named Stanley who is sent to a boys' detention camp in the middle of nowhere for allegedly stealing an expensive pair of gym shoes. There he and the other boys spend every day digging holes in search of buried treasure the evil camp warden is trying to find. I love the absurdity of this situation as the camp is huge and their likelihood of finding anything of value is slim to none. Later, Stanley and a friend escape the camp and must survive in the wilderness without having brought food or water. Stanley and his family are subject to a family curse and the author does a great job gradually revealing what caused the curse and how things are made right in the end. 

Willow Chance is an adopted twelve-year-old genius who can diagnose an inordinate number of medical conditions.

To ease her anxiety, she counts by sevens. After her adoptive parents die in a car accident, Willow’s neurodivergence doesn’t allow her to deal with the trauma in typical ways which surprise people around her. As other characters in this multiple-point-of-view story emerge and get to know Willow, they find her entirely endearing and would do anything for her. I found it satisfying to see how Willow processes through her grief in her own way.

This story is beautifully written, and I wanted to swoop in and protect Willow.

The Orphan Train is a novel about forgotten and neglected children left to fend for themselves in an antiquated welfare program. The story weaves memories of an old woman with the naiveté of a present-day teenager teaching the reader that everything is not as it appears.

Christina Baker Kline breathes life into a horrible moment of American history making us rip the bandage off, look at our past and see the unexpected silver lining.

This is a super-gripping novel that starts out with a young man named Brian on a small plane above the Canadian wilderness on the way to visit his father when the pilot has a heart attack. Brian has to crash land the plane in the wilderness and then survive on his own with only a hatchet to help him. I love survival stories and really enjoy reading about what people decide to do and what they think about to keep themselves alive until they are rescued.