100 books like Familyism

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.

Janet Fitch achieved a miracle with this novel about a girl rambling through a flawed foster care system after her mother is convicted of a heinous crime.

In a predictable set-up, the mother would be supportive despite her incarceration. She would be a wise person offering the girl advice. But the author had the confidence and skill to make the mother a beautiful monster, a brilliant, malignant poet whose attempts at controlling the girl are frustrated by the physical distance between them.

The girl’s growing awareness of her mother’s destructive potential is set against a series of foster families. I highly recommend White Oleander for the honesty of the mother-daughter conflict. The novel expertly depicts the epic struggle to create an identity in relation to a charismatic, narcissistic parent.

Any book set in suburban life with a dark underbelly has me hooked.

I loved the themes of privilege, race, and motherhood within the context of suburban life. I also enjoyed the contrast between such different ways to parent: a wealthy and seemingly perfect family compared to a nomadic and unconventional mother-daughter duo.

I think the story also raised some interesting questions about the intricacies of motherhood and, of course, how we always feel the weight of the choices we make as mothers and the impact of those choices on our lives and the lives of our children. Not to mention, what a great title!

Franzen is at his best when depicting character, and The Corrections goes deep, creating a family drama that is rooted in detailed psychological portraits of his subjects.

In doing so, he meticulously builds their worlds, motivations, and fears, creating nuanced portrayals that not only reveal individual personality, but also the texture and color of life in America in the late 20th century.

Yet the true theme of the book is family dynamics: what does it mean when your mother insists that you come home for Christmas, and what does it mean when you don’t really want to go?

Families come in all shapes and sizes, and it's crucial for children to see a variety of experiences in literature.

Hey, Kiddo portrays the author's upbringing with his grandparents due to his absent father and mother's substance abuse. The book offers child-friendly talking points on the challenging topic of addiction. It captures the complexities of growing up and family life amidst life-changing events.

From one extreme to another!

The Push is a fast-paced suspense that had me on tenterhooks from start to finish and I couldn’t stop reading it. It’s about a woman, Blythe, who is determined to be a loving and kind mother to her new baby. But as the stress and relentlessness of early motherhood takes its toll, Blythe becomes increasingly convinced there’s something wrong with her daughter. The problem is that no one believes her.

This book reminded me of my early days of parenting, when I was sleep deprived, overwhelmed, and paranoid that I was a terrible mother. Looking back now, it really does feel like a distant memory and if you’re a new mother reading this, I promise you that this too shall pass. (Unless you’re Blythe perhaps…!) 

Wilson’s novels often interrogate art and morality in a hilarious fashion.

In this book, siblings Annie and Buster struggle to overcome their childhood personas of Child A and Child B in their parents’ performance art pieces. When Caleb and Camille disappear under mysterious circumstances, Annie and Buster must investigate to find out if their parents are really dead or if this is yet another elaborate scheme in the name of art.

What is real? What is artifice? Can they escape the myth of their parents’ making and find a healthier way to make their own art?

Frank McCourt's classic book, the memoir of his childhood, is proof in the pudding that the origin of humor is the suffering of the low-status character. And that’s only one reason why I love it.

He had me at “Above all -- we were wet.” His descriptions of the impossible and undignified conditions of his childhood, where children had absolutely no control over anything and adults were at the mercy of life itself, brought me so close to him that I think I started believing we were actually related and scribbled him into the family tree as a long-lost uncle.

McCourt captures the hapless quality of gullible, unsupervised children let loose on an unforgiving world with a buoyancy that comes through every sentence and rises above the brutal conditions of his childhood. 

And the truth he finds in the details, from the brutality of religious authority figures to the abject… show more.

Rydr is on her way from California to Chicago via rail, to meet a relative who will take care of her now that her grandmother no longer can. What I love most about this book—aside from the fact that it takes place on the California Zephyr, one of my very favorite train rides in the world—is that Rydr’s experience is so influenced by the strangers she meets on the train. That’s why I love train travel so much: you never know who you’re going to meet. And you almost always end up sharing a meal and a story with someone you would never have met otherwise. 

As the daughter of an alcoholic, I took enough college psychology classes to know I was part of an unchosen cycle, at risk to continue the family chaos.

Despite my resistance, my personal, unanticipated, troubled behavior did emerge, baffling me, and this book was exactly what I needed to sort things out, especially when I became a parent and feared contaminating my children.

Reading about negative, senseless, and too-familiar family habits of concealment, disparagement, anger, pain, and especially the role-playing coping mechanisms that commonly develop in a dysfunctional family, gave me hope.

Family hero, scapegoat, quiet one, mascot, all of these I recognized clearly. By learning, understanding, and erasing the blame, I could redefine normal and finally “crawl out of the trap.”