100 books like I Thought You Said This Would Work

I love this book because it is not afraid to look at deep sadness and disappointment in an honest and complex way. This novel is a collection of short stories that all take place in a coastal Main town and are connected by the large presence of Olive.

Olive is intelligent, acerbic, and abrasive. She is anything but easy. I appreciate the compassion Strout gives her imperfect characters as they struggle with their messy lives. I grew to care more for Olive as I traveled her rocky path with her, even as she was often the one to throw down the rocks before her.

This is a quiet book, which I read in a quiet way. It brought me comfort in its illumination of uncomfortable things. 

I’ve never read a book as quickly as I read this one. Our eponymous lead character is quirky and odd, but the story is written with so much empathy, depth, and humor that I was rooting for her from the start.

I loved how the relationship between Eleanor and Raymond plays out and avoids the predictable ‘boy meets girl’ ending. It doesn’t surprise me that the book is ‘in development’ as a movie, as the story plays out like a film when you read it. Definitely read this one first before you see the film! (It probably won’t take long as I couldn’t put this book down.)

I love this novel for its hilarious, unique take on the rage-against-the-patriarchy trope. Elizabeth Zott, the novel’s lead, is a refreshing portrayal of a woman battling the world of mansplaining while doing it in the most stereotypically “female” way—cooking up a storm! As a chemist, her scientific breakdowns of how ingredients chemically react with one another make for many humourous moments on the page. 

This is a book that will have you hooting with laughter and rooting alongside the protagonist till the very end. It mirrored the frustrations I have often felt as a working woman and left me vindicated for the times I, too, have “behaved badly” in male company.

Can a woman be true to herself and her ideals, even while living a lie?

I felt this was the intriguing question posed by the novel Younger, which inspired the popular TV series from Darren Starr starring Sutton Foster. I loved both the book and the series with its personable main character and charming premise.

Recently single Alice desperately needs a job. But nobody wants to hire a forty-something divorcee who’s been out of the workforce for years. With help from her best friend, youthful-looking Alice poses as a millennial and lands a job at a publishing house, where she thrives. Masquerading as a younger woman is filled with excitement and romance but also with peril, and I enjoyed the unexpected complications Alice encountered during her quest to reinvent herself. 

Terry Tempest Williams is a Utah-based poet and naturalist who writes in this book about her mother's devastating cancer diagnosis and the rising of the Great South Lake in 1983, which was endangering the bird population by which Terry measured her life.

The way she interweaves the human world with the natural world and how interconnected everything is, in some ways, in my memory, reminds me of the same power Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast had for me, in that I was mesmerized out of my misery by the incredibly specific descriptions of sights and sounds and even smells.

Her mother’s illness and the tragedy that was occurring in the lake were somehow embroidered together to feel like the same story. When my opera The Grapes of Wrath premiered in Utah in 2008, it was as if Terry’s exquisite book had iconized the state for me. Coincidentally, it was Mark Doty… show more.

This is another ghost story told in the traditional vein. However, it is not set within the bounds of some old building but in an entire mountain village, populated by more than one ghost.

I think this is a gentle, rather beautiful read. The cold surroundings are depicted so well, it is easy to envisage them in your own mind. We begin to get to the heart of the story when Freddie crashes his car one snowy night. Circumstances mean he has no choice but to accept the hospitality of an elderly couple and spend the night under their roof. While staying with them, the tragic, ancient history of the place begins to show itself to Freddie, drawing him irrevocably into its story.

Yes, it is somewhat predictable, but I find that almost comforting. There may not be any huge surprises or great reveals, yet the way in which the… show more.

Ida B is one of the first books with a homeschooler that I loved (and I’m pretty sure I cried a lot). Ida B loved being homeschooled and is so upset about being sent to public school that she wears black and sits in the corner refusing to participate. I might have done the same thing if my parents put me in public school! But I love her public school teacher. She cares about Ida B so much.

Ultimately, Ida B isn’t about school, though; it’s about Ida B’s growth and her relationships. That’s what makes it a good book. Like my character Hannah, Ida B has a vivid imagination and fights change in her life. I loved this book.

A gripping personal account of an airman’s adventurous escape through France and over the Pyrenees. After Herbert Spiller’s Halifax bomber crash-landed to the east of Paris in October 1942, he had the good luck to be helped by the priest and abbot of St-Dizier. They saw him safely on to a train to Paris, where he was taken under the wing of the Comet escape line and then passed south down the line and eventually over the Pyrenees … sometimes at a high cost. Several of the French people who assisted him later died either by execution or in the concentration camps. “You can imagine ... the sense of debt that hangs over me when I ponder on the fact that nine people died through helping me to live and return to duty,” Spiller writes, dedicating his book to all those who risked their lives to help him.

I adored the film version of this book when I was about ten, and I still remember the saintly Bernadette limping around the monastery, refusing treatment for her deathly disease. The novel’s author was a Czech Jew who left 1930s Vienna and found refuge in the town of Lourdes, where Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin in 1858.

As thanks, he wrote this tearjerker about Bernadette and the beautiful lady who appeared to her eighteen times in a grotto outside town. Word got around, and both religious and civic officials challenged Bernadette’s story, mostly because she was uneducated and came from a wretched family. They threatened her with hell and an insane asylum. Yet hundreds of people seemed to be miraculously healed by the waters of the grotto, and most of the skeptics were persuaded. Werfel romanticizes Bernadette’s life, but the story follows the visionary into a convent where she eventually… show more.

Mystery, quest, treasure, and historical adventure, this novel has it all.

Labyrinth links a twelfth-century French heroine in a land of legends, castles, and knights with a present-day heroine who finds two ancient skeletons at an archaeological dig and is drawn into a quest for the Holy Grail.

I love mystical, historical quests, and mysterious symbols, especially when the setting is so real you feel you are there. This one kept me reading far into the wee hours and I enjoyed learning more about medieval France.