90 books like Hello from Renn Lake

I’ve often whined about epic friend groups being featured in tons of films and not enough in books—but Strange Birds is the delightful exception that gets every detail of the cinematic friend group perfectly right. There’s mysterious invitations hidden in a library, scary treks through the woods, artistic activism in the face of wrong, and a wickedly cool group initiation featuring some mighty powerful crystals. If nothing else, the group’s shenanigans will make you want to go out and spend all your money on hoards of plastic flamingos. (Just trust me on this.)

This book is one of my favorite middle-grade novels. At first glance, it may not look like it’s about an environmentalist. Indeed, it is about many things. A boy with a medical condition that affects his chin and jaw. Bullying, grief, anxiety, drumming (!), bar mitzvah prep, coming out of one’s shell. And Will is not exactly modeling good conservation practices by taking turtles from the nearby marsh, caring for them in his bedroom, or gifting a Blanding’s turtle to a boy he visits in the hospital. But Will’s learning process about these turtles and their threatened habitat is a major part of this riveting novel. Will’s identification with turtles is deep, symbolic, incredibly moving. Treat yourself to the audio version, narrated in a lively way by this multi-talented author.

This pick has the distinguished honor of convincing me to try cricket flour. It also manages to present a layered storyline, one that combines an almost classic mystery plot with a traumatized character’s journey of self-healing. This book serves as a powerful reminder that we are more than the incidents that victimized us. And yes, even an insect hater like me enjoyed learning so much about the many uses of crickets! 

When I was a kid, I wanted to rescue animals. I remember taking crabs home from the beach in milk cartons. Sadly, they didn’t make it – nor did they need rescuing in the first place. 12-year-old Madi Lewis is a savvier rescuer, an “animal whisperer” trained by her late grandmother, an animal rehabber, to keep careful records and do basic caretaking. But Madi’s parents have made it clear: no more foster animals. When Madi and her friends find two orphaned beaver kits in a dam, she has to keep it a secret – hard to do as they uncover a local conspiracy to eliminate beavers at Lake Wild. This fast-paced eco-mystery teaches a lot about conservation, ethics, and, of course, beavers! I love Madi as a young Jane Goodall type, too. 

First of all, Heather’s writing is so clear and so emotional, it’s hard not to get sucked into this world immediately. Second, the characters are so well-rounded.

You can feel their ache radiating off the page. The micro poetry Hannah leaves all over the city breaks my heart every time I read them, but what absolutely sends me is how the girls learned to process grief and all the other Big Emotions by making soup. This book easily has crossover appeal for both teens and adults.

Imani is thirteen and approaching her Bat Mitzvah. She is also an African-American adopted by a white Jewish family.

She has many questions about her birthparents and her own place in the world. When she has the opportunity to read the diary of her adopted mother’s grandmother who fled Europe as a Jewish refugee during World War II, Imani learns why sometimes mothers make impossible choices to save their children’s lives.

This novel is a riveting mix of history and coming of age. 

This novel’s protagonist, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two Lesbian mothers, who found her as a newborn on the doorstep of their vet practice.

But at 36, Pepper is still trying to find her footing in the world and understand things about herself, like her habit of imagining she’s living in different worlds, based on different choices she might have made.
Without being shown exactly why, the reader soon grasps that this has something to do with the fact that her birth mother is Ula Frost - a very famous portrait painter about whom fantastic claims are being made.

These come primarily from the models in her portraits, these are her clients, who say that her painting them brought forth their mirror selves from other universes, often with disastrous consequences. Outrageous as this claim seems, many in the art world believe it, and Ula's paintings sell for millions of dollars.… show more.

The dedication of this non-fiction book says, "...to all families separated by a culture of secrecy.” The book flap says, “Gabrielle Glaser breaks the secrecy that surrounded a lucrative network of adoption agencies, doctors, and social scientists.” One reason I knew I had to read this book was that it talked about Louise Wise Agency, the adoption agency I was adopted through. They are now closed, but their practices have since come under scrutiny. Because of their methods, I was told lies that I lived with for most of my childhood and was kept from reuniting with my siblings when they first started searching for me.

This coming-of-age novel features a sixteen-year-old star baseball playing girl, but that’s just the beginning. Alex is biracial, raised in a white family, and she struggles to find where she fits in. Race, gender, identity, adoption, body image – this novel explores hard-hitting issues with the complexity they deserve. I especially appreciate that the author wrote from her own experience as a transracial adoptee.

As soon as I began reading Emma’s Gift, I was hooked.

Though the author’s relationship to Emma – mother-to-child – is different from my relationship to my twin sister, having a family member with a disability made the connection. The challenges of the situation and the difficult decisions that Kuperschmit had to make resonated with my own.

The honesty and bearing of emotions were necessary for both of us to tell our story. I could hardly put the book down, awed by Kuperschmit’s beautiful and eloquent descriptions of what she was going through.

We shared an understanding that there is a real person underneath the disability and I was thankful throughout for Kuperschmit’s skill in showing her readers that, even with an “atypical” child, there is the ability to love and be loved.