100 books like Five Ways to Fall

This is the fourth and last book in the Wild Seasons series and in our view, the best. Featuring a player who’s just looking to hook up for a night of fun and a girl who likes to avoid the drama, these two get thrown for a loop when they cross paths. It’s hot, it’s steamy and it’s also pretty sweet. The banter these two shared was great and their chemistry felt so real. Plus, we loved watching Luke own his past and his mistakes and seeing London finally admit she was falling for the guy. 

We’ve always had a soft spot for a broken bad boy and this book creates an amazing example of that in Dean. A former marine who grew up in a foster home, he’s completely unaware of the secret crush his best friend’s younger sister, Holly has harbored on him for years. When circumstances allow them to explore that crush, things go from secret to oh-so hot and we were so on board for it. We loved watching Dean finally start to feel like someone saw and understood him and even when tragedy strikes, Holly never gives up on him. The final scenes were freaking adorable…there’s nothing better than a bad boy who is all in with his girl!

We have serious love for those brother’s best friend romances and this one doesn’t disappoint. Grady is the perfect broody male lead with all his flaws and wants so much more for Sutton than he feels he can offer her. But omg, when his moody and broody nature finally disappears, he is the perfect mix of vulnerability and love when it comes to Sutton. The push and pull and all the angst had our hearts breaking, but then swooning with happiness by the end.  

A sports romance and opposites attract? Sign us up! But then toss in the mouthy rebel of a professional football star who is rarely told no and we are all in. Kingston Scott is the bad boy who chases the good girl and it plays out in epic fashion. Despite Kingston’s playboy reputation, we couldn’t help but root for him to win the girl. Because underneath it all, he’s a total softie, especially when it comes to his girl Silver. 

I had been married for many years when I read this book and still found it to be funny, funny, funny. More than just a romance, I love the way she incorporates issues with family and job and life always in a humorous way. Written at the height of the chick-lit era ( a genre I love) the book follows Ashely Stockingdale, a successful 31-year-old woman wondering if she will ever find true love. 

The logline sounds like the most depressing character study you’ll ever read. A story of a pregnant teenager, Jane, who lives with her mom after the death of her father. Jane spends her days delivering pizzas and her nights drinking beers alone in a shed behind their house. But thanks to the prose, and the pacing of the plotting, this book is both funny, engaging, and something of a psychological thriller. Especially when Jane becomes obsessed with one of her regulars, a stay-at-home mom. We marveled at Kyoung Frazier’s ability to put us in the head of Jane, in a way that we actually wanted to stay there.

The reason I chose this book is simple. It was the first one to show me the first-person way.

I read this book in high school around 1973 and it stayed with me all these years. This dark side of adolescence skillfully narrated by the introverted Gene is as real today for me as it was when I was a prep school kid reading it.

Gene remembers some fifteen years earlier as he comes back to visit, and tells this story under the guise of a quintessential American story, though as he says “a very untypical one, I guess, and unfamiliar transitional blur in the memories of most people, which is the real America for me.” Every first-person story I’ve tried to write since has had a little bit of Gene in it. 

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.

Like a lot of people, I read The Great Gatsby in high school. I really loved it, which is why I was thrilled when one of my favorite authors did her own fantasy re-imaging of this classic.

The Chosen and the Beautiful is set in an alternate universe where magic flows as easily as champagne. It centers on Jordan Baker, a side character in the original book, and reimagines her as a Vietnamese orphan who was adopted as a baby into a wealthy white family.

I loved how this book managed to take a classic and cast it in a totally new light: it makes you think about who and what gets left out of the history books.   

This book is fiction, infused with magical realism, and I am a scientist. Yet, this book definitely belongs on my list of best books about wild animals.

Superficially, it is about a boy, Dave, who regularly observes a pine marten, a kind of large weasel, in the lush forests of Oregon. I love this book because even the slightest chance of properly empathizing with a wild animal requires a powerful yet constrained imagination. Some of Dave’s attributions to Martin are self-projected, and some of his attributions are deeply true. Reliability in telling the difference is not always so simple.

This book never let me stop wondering, are the thoughts and life of a marten beyond my imagination?