Here are 100 books that Fever 1793 fans have personally recommended if you like
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I like happy endings. There, I’ve said it. I love books. I’ve written more than sixty to date, and I read all the time in every genre. I also love history, and World War II is a particular passion. It was an era rich with drama, horror, and heroism, with stories begging to be told. So many of those stories, real and fictional, end in heartbreak. But the great thing about being a writer is that I can take the characters I love through hell and back, then, in the end, have them come shining through. That’s what I want as a reader, too.
A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France with two girls on board, Maddie, the pilot, and Verity. Leaving Maddie behind in the wreckage, secret agent Verity is captured by the Nazis and told that she will be executed unless she reveals her mission.
This heart-stopping tale of spies, deception, and true friendship will have you reading through the night—and cheering for Verity.
'I have two weeks. You'll shoot me at the end no matter what I do.'
Shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal, Code Name Verity is a bestselling tale of friendship and courage set against the backdrop of World War Two.
Only in wartime could a stalwart lass from Manchester rub shoulders with a Scottish aristocrat, one a pilot, the other a special operations executive. When a vital mission goes wrong, and one of the friends has to bail out of a faulty plane over France, she is captured by the Gestapo and becomes a prisoner of war. The story begins in…
Storytelling wields the power to transcend time and place, connecting us through shared experiences and emotions. It shapes our understanding of the world and ignites the imagination, making it an essential part of the human journey. As a psychologist, I understand how the stories we tell about ourselves are crucial in defining who we are and that books and good people can help shape our character. The books I've chosen celebrate the human spirit and our ability to face adversity, adapt, and ultimately choose our destiny. As Stephen Covey wisely stated, “Our ultimate freedom is the right and power to decide how anybody or anything outside ourselves will affect us.”
This book by Markus Zusak is frequently named one of the best WW2 books. I like it because it’s a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of hope in dark times. It’s a haunting and beautifully written novel set in Nazi Germany.
Narrated by Death, the story follows Liesel, a young girl sent to live with a foster family. As she navigates a tumultuous world filled with fear and cruelty, Liesel finds comfort in books and words. I loved the premise of stealing forbidden books and sharing their stories with others. Through Liesel’s experiences, I explored the themes of love, loss, and the power of storytelling in the face of adversity.
'Life affirming, triumphant and tragic . . . masterfully told. . . but also a wonderful page-turner' Guardian 'Brilliant and hugely ambitious' New York Times 'Extraordinary' Telegraph ___
HERE IS A SMALL FACT - YOU ARE GOING TO DIE
1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier. Liesel, a nine-year-old girl, is living with a foster family on Himmel Street. Her parents have been taken away to a concentration camp. Liesel steals books. This is her story and the story of the inhabitants of her street when the bombs begin to fall.
The fantastical attracts me as something not less real than the world but as a revelation of the world: the magic and beauty that underlies everything. This is pantheism, the belief that all parts of the universe are connected and deserve our awe and wonder. This is also social justice and how we treat all living things on the Earth we so remarkably and briefly share. As the author of some dozen published books, translated into nine languages, I also write about science and nature in adult nonfiction, as well as YA fantastical history and speculative fiction. Again, they are connected. I teach writing, and I love to write.
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.
"Although there is plenty of history embedded in the novel, A Wish After Midnight is written with a lyrical grace that many authors of what passes for adult literature would envy." -Paula L. Woods, The Defenders Online
"Zetta Elliott's time travel novel A Wish After Midnight is a bit of a revelation...It's vivid, violent, and impressive history." -Colleen Mondor, Bookslut
Genna is a fifteen-year-old girl who wants out of her tough Brooklyn neighborhood. But she gets more than she bargained for when a wish gone awry transports her back in time. Facing the perilous realities of Civil War-era Brooklyn, Genna…
Science Fiction was just something that we did as a family growing up. We’d always gather to watch various iterations of Star Trek as family. Family movie nights usually consisted of whatever science fiction titles the local movie rental place would have on hand, which usually meant watching a lot of B-movie junk, but it was fun. It might sound silly, but I think growing up with all those science fiction movies and books really informed my career choice, electrical engineer. You see, in these movies and books the women just got the job done. I thought, why can’t I do it too??
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!
A meteor decimates the U.S. government and paves the way for a climate cataclysm that will eventually render the earth inhospitable to humanity. This looming threat calls for a radically accelerated timeline in the earth's efforts to colonize space, as well as an unprecedented opportunity for a much larger share of humanity to take part.
One of these new entrants in the space race is Elma York, whose experience as a WASP pilot and mathematician earns her a place in the International Aerospace Coalition's attempts to put man on the moon. But with so many skilled and experienced women pilots…
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been more drawn to nonfiction than fiction. I remember spending hour after hour with my mother’s World Book Encyclopedias, memorizing breeds of dogs, US state capitals, and how to sign the alphabet. I loved reading books to learn about all kinds of things, and still do. But when it comes to fiction, unless the words are arranged like musical notes on the page, I struggle to read past chapter three. I need the narrator’s voice to make my brain happy and interested. While reading, I need to feel something deeply—to laugh, cry, or have my thoughts dance so rhythmically I find myself fast-blinking.
I love the narration of this book. It is rich, lush, and vibrant. Each scene is painted like the sky at sunrise. The main character Esperanza’s journey—from riches to rags, from pampered to grateful, from fearful to hopeful—is very satisfying.
Seeing the world through Esperanza’s viewpoint was heart-wrenching and eye-opening. The ending contains a delightful surprise, which, in my opinion, also makes for a great read.
Esperanza Rising joins the Scholastic Gold line, which features award-winning and beloved novels. Includes exclusive bonus content!
Esperanza thought she'd always live a privileged life on her family's ranch in Mexico. She'd always have fancy dresses, a beautiful home filled with servants, and Mama, Papa, and Abuelita to care for her. But a sudden tragedy forces Esperanza and Mama to flee to California and settle in a Mexican farm labor camp. Esperanza isn't ready for the hard work, financial struggles brought on by the Great Depression, or lack of acceptance she now faces. When Mama gets sick and a strike…
My family could never afford vacations when I was growing up, so I had to travel in my imagination through what I read. But that allowed me even greater freedom—I could go back in time, forward into the future, and everything in between. This skill led me to research and write my books today and have a career as an award-winning author and editor. History, to me, is only one side of the story—what about all the people in the past who never had the chance to speak? Alternate history is a way to explore the voices we’ve never heard except through a writer’s imagination.
I’ve long been inspired by Butler’s writing, which features BIPOC characters front and center. As a multiracial person, I seldom saw people who looked and thought like me in the older fiction I read.
The notable thing about this book is that it’s technically science fiction, not alternate history, since the novel's beginning in 2024 (this year!). However, much of what Butler wrote has come to pass, raising one question: Has her vision of the future become an alternate version of the past? I love trying to wrap my head around that conundrum.
The extraordinary, prescient NEW YORK TIMES-bestselling novel.
'If there is one thing scarier than a dystopian novel about the future, it's one written in the past that has already begun to come true. This is what makes Parable of the Sower even more impressive than it was when first published' GLORIA STEINEM
'Unnervingly prescient and wise' YAA GYASI
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We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.
America is a place of chaos, where violence rules and only the rich and powerful are safe. Lauren Olamina, a young woman with the extraordinary power to…
I love books that entertain and uplift when characters learn and overcome. As a teenager, things happened that threw me into a painful tailspin, ending in a wilderness program for troubled kids. It taught me that I can do hard things and face challenges in life. I’ve lost loved ones, have a special needs child, divorced, been broke, earned my black belt, returned to school as a single mom for a degree, and co-founded a nonprofit to support literacy for kids. None of that was easy, but it increased my compassion and hope. Stories can be powerful reminders of human resilience, and that battle scars make someone more beautiful than before.
I first read this book as a kid, and it’s one of the reasons I became an avid reader. It's set in Puritan New England and features romance, intrigue, and suspense. It has great historical detail, a fun story, and well-written characters.
The protagonist, 16-year-old Kit from Barbados, arrives in the harsh world of early colonial Connecticut and doesn’t fit in—and society punishes her for it! I found myself angry and outraged for her–I just wanted everything to be fair. This story is a light-handed look at how life isn’t fair. Frustration comes from expecting or demanding it to be. There will always be circumstances and people making things difficult. Can it be endured? Yes!
I love the main characters, Kit and Nat (the son of the boat Captain who brought Kit to the colonies). They are cute together. This is still one of my favorite books.
In this Newbery Medal-winning novel, a girl faces prejudice and accusations of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Connecticut. A classic of historical fiction that continues to resonate across the generations.
Sixteen-year-old Kit Tyler is marked by suspicion and disapproval from the moment she arrives on the unfamiliar shores of colonial Connecticut in 1687. Alone and desperate, she has been forced to leave her beloved home on the island of Barbados and join a family she has never met.
Torn between her quest for belonging and her desire to be true to herself, Kit struggles to survive in a hostile place. Just when…
Let’s face it—we spend a lot of time at work. Work is a big part of our lives, but sometimes it’s terrible and feels like there is no winning against institutionalized sexism and capitalism. And you really want to win! I love reading about women who are finding ways to overcome massive obstacles at work no matter what gets in their way, whether it’s by destroying an industry with a spreadsheet, breaking a curse, ditching a bad boss, or just finding a way to survive. Because sometimes that’s all you can do—survive it. Stories of women working feel endlessly relatable because we have so many shared experiences, and that’s why what happens at work shows up in my reading and my writing.
This book is dystopian and is really about the downfall of capitalism, but it starts in an office.
Candace Chen has her job and not much else. She goes to work and has little personal life outside of it. She barely even notices when a plague sweeps New York, and everyone leaves, and society crumbles. Her work keeps her busy, and she does it until the money she’s promised shows up in her bank account.
What caught my attention is how well the author communicates the idea that humans become completely adaptable to untenable systems at work, and we keep doing our jobs under nearly any circumstance. Even a plague.
This examination of the conditioning we get to put work first no matter what else is happening is a painful eye-opener. Better boundaries next time, I guess.
Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance.
"A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring." ―Michael Schaub, NPR.org
“A satirical spin on the end times-- kind of like The Office meets The Leftovers.” --Estelle Tang, Elle
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR * The New Yorker ("Books We Loved") * Elle * Marie Claire * Amazon Editors * The Paris Review…
I’ve always loved to be scared! When I was young I turned off the lights to watch movies like Alien and It. When I got older, I played Resident Evil and Silent Hill. And when I got even older, I started writing things that would make me jump if the dog came in too suddenly mid-chapter. I think we are drawn to scary books and movies because they give us a safe way to explore the unknown – and, less philosophically, because sometimes it’s just fun to get sucked into a dark and creepy universe!
Pre-Covid, I loved to read about dangerous viruses taking over the world. The genre has lost a liiiiitle bit of its charm since then, but Contagion is too good a story to pass up. It reminds me powerfully of the Dead Space video games, with its mysteriously uninhabited space stations. Like the very best scary sci-fi, it blurs the line between the terrifying things close to home – like an unexplained illness – and the deep, dark, scary depths of space we have yet to understand!
Perfect for fans of Madeleine Roux, Jonathan Maberry, and horror films like 28 Days Later and Resident Evil, this pulse-pounding, hair-raising, utterly terrifying novel is the first in a duology from the critically acclaimed author of the Taken trilogy.
After receiving a distress call from a drill team on a distant planet, a skeleton crew is sent into deep space to perform a standard search-and-rescue mission.
When they arrive, they find the planet littered with the remains of the project—including its members’ dead bodies. As they try to piece together what could…
In June of 2020, I published a cult escape/pandemic mashup novel, Agnes at the End of the World. Of course, pandemic novels aren’t for everyone right now, but there are some readers, like myself, who seek out what frightens us in fiction to survive our present moment. I read a bajillion pandemic novels before embarking on my own, and I hope that it helps someone, as novels have always helped me. Ultimately, every pandemic novel is about social ills, large and small, and about grief. They remind us that we’re all in this complex world together, telling stories around a campfire to shine some light in the dark.
A Beginning at the End is probably the novel I’d recommend to most readers now, because it’s not just about a pandemic—it’s the story of a pandemic’s long aftermath. The novel paints of picture of societal resilience and growth, and individuals holding out hope for the future after the greatest of tragedies.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: Brotherhood
Four survivors come together as the country rebuilds in the aftermath of a devastating pandemic. A character-driven postapocalyptic suspense with an intimate, hopeful look at how people can move forward by creating something better.
Six years after a virus wiped out most of the planet’s population, former pop star Moira is living under a new identity to escape her past—until her domineering father launches a sweeping public search to track her down. Desperate for a fresh start herself, jaded event planner Krista navigates the world for those still too…
