Here are 100 books that In the Shadow of the Valley fans have personally recommended if you like
In the Shadow of the Valley.
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I’ve always loved reading memoirs, especially about a hero’s journey—whether it’s a teacher figuring out a tough group of students or a kid figuring out how to change the story they’ve been written into. I love nothing more than the triumphant ending that makes me cheer and cry happy tears. As an English teacher and debut author of my own memoir, I’ve found that honest storytelling opens a door for others to walk through and tell their own stories. I love seeing my students connect with stories like theirs because it shows them they’re not alone in their struggles and that living happily ever after is possible.
I loved this book because it’s a true hero’s journey—from an unimaginable start in life to an awe-inspiring grand finale—Stephanie overcame everything and found light at the end of her dark tunnel. She was abused, abandoned, and on her own from a young age—all things I felt on a visceral level because I know the shame of feeling unloved and unwanted.
The title also struck me because of all we’re promised as citizens in this country, but our most vulnerable are left without the resources to pursue their happiness. This memoir is not only about the strength of the human spirit but a call to action that we must do better for children who are battling the monsters of poverty and foster care.
The sharp and surprising true story of a woman who finally sets out to understand her past, and the mother she had one day hoped to forget. Full of unexpected twists and unbelievable revelations, American Daughter is an immersive memoir that will have you on the edge of your seat to the very last page.
For years, Stephanie Plymale, successful CEO and interior designer, kept her past a fiercely guarded secret. Only her husband knew that her childhood was fraught with every imaginable hardship: neglect, hunger, poverty, homelessness, truancy, foster homes, a harrowing lack of medical care, and worse. Stephanie,…
I’ve always loved reading memoirs, especially about a hero’s journey—whether it’s a teacher figuring out a tough group of students or a kid figuring out how to change the story they’ve been written into. I love nothing more than the triumphant ending that makes me cheer and cry happy tears. As an English teacher and debut author of my own memoir, I’ve found that honest storytelling opens a door for others to walk through and tell their own stories. I love seeing my students connect with stories like theirs because it shows them they’re not alone in their struggles and that living happily ever after is possible.
Penny’s story grabbed me by the hand and pulled me with her from the first chapter when she’s ripped from the only home she’s ever known and thrown into a car with a strange man who doesn’t even speak her language.
For years, this sweet girl lives with a monstrous stepmother whose abuse is tolerated by everyone but suffered only by Penny. I loved this book because while it’s Penny’s journey, there were many similarities to my life—both of us scrubbing floors like Cinderella and taking care of a sibling who called us “Mama”—and we both not only survived but thrived.
There is comfort in knowing that Penny didn’t believe what the monsters told her about herself, and she didn’t let them write the ending to her fairytale.
Penny is just four years old when she is snatched away from her all-American home by the Hungarian father who abandoned her when she was a baby. After facing isolation and neglect in a strange, dysfunctional household where heartache, rejection, and physical abuse rule her life, she escapes-only to find herself in a relationship with a man who's just converted to fundamentalist Christianity. Penny's road is long, winding, and often painful, but gradually she begins to listen to her inner voice, stand up for herself, and refuse to bow to the pressures of either her family or society-freeing herself to…
I’ve always loved reading memoirs, especially about a hero’s journey—whether it’s a teacher figuring out a tough group of students or a kid figuring out how to change the story they’ve been written into. I love nothing more than the triumphant ending that makes me cheer and cry happy tears. As an English teacher and debut author of my own memoir, I’ve found that honest storytelling opens a door for others to walk through and tell their own stories. I love seeing my students connect with stories like theirs because it shows them they’re not alone in their struggles and that living happily ever after is possible.
This book had me from the opening line of the prologue: ”We make chapels of our scars.” Her descriptions read like poetry, and I highlighted and underlined page after page.
Alice writes about using the chaos of Hurricane Katrina to “fly away” from her home in New Orleans, where she and her children lived with her abusive husband. I loved this book because of the way Alice fought for her children—something I desperately wished my mom had done for me when I was young.
This is a story you won’t put down—no eating, no sleeping—until you know for sure that Alice has defeated all the monsters and her children are living happily ever after.
The incredible true story of one woman's journey to relocate the place inside herself where strength, hope, and personal truth reside.
After Hurricane Katrina, Alice Anderson has returned home to assess the damage to her beloved Mississippi coastline and the once-immaculate home she’d carefully cultivated for her husband, Dr. Liam Rivers, one of the community's highly respected doctors.
But in the wake of this natural disaster, a more terrifying challenge emerges as Liam’s mental health spirals out of control, culminating in a violent attack at knifepoint, from which Alice is saved by their three-year-old son. Afraid for her life, she…
I’ve always loved reading memoirs, especially about a hero’s journey—whether it’s a teacher figuring out a tough group of students or a kid figuring out how to change the story they’ve been written into. I love nothing more than the triumphant ending that makes me cheer and cry happy tears. As an English teacher and debut author of my own memoir, I’ve found that honest storytelling opens a door for others to walk through and tell their own stories. I love seeing my students connect with stories like theirs because it shows them they’re not alone in their struggles and that living happily ever after is possible.
Kimberly Shannon Murphy’s story of unspeakable abuse by a trusted family member is as heartbreaking and harrowing as it is a testament to the importance of truth-telling. If only others had been as brave as Kimberly and spoken up, her abuse wouldn’t have happened.
I loved this story because no matter how hard life was, little Kimberly felt a “glimmer” deep in her soul—magic that promised she would live happily ever after. It’s a raw retelling, but I reminded myself that she lived it, so I owe it to her to read it.
She excavated these memories, bringing them out of the dark and into the bright spotlight where she now stands as an award-winning stuntwoman who defeats monsters on the big screen!
Winner of the 2024 Andy Award for Memoir and Narrative Nonfiction
A Zibby's Top 10 Book of 2023
A USA Today Best Book of 2023
A USA Today Book Club Pick
Foreword by Cameron Diaz
“Reading Kimberly Shannon Murphy’s searing and vividly told memoir is like watching a gripping work of cinema verité: each scene demands our attention as the plot moves towards its dramatic conclusion. A powerful and inspiring story of suffering and shame, resilience and redemption.” —Gabor Maté M.D., New York Times bestselling author of The Myth of Normal
A raw and heartening memoir of one woman’s journey…
When students ask me if I am from Kentucky, I say “no, but I got here as quickly as I could.” I chose to make the state my home and raise my family here, and I have studied its history for nearly three decades. I am drawn to Kentucky’s story and the paradox it represents: on one hand, you have the Derby, rolling hills and pastures, and fine bourbon, but set against that polished, sophisticated image are the stereotypes of a lawless, illiterate, poor state. As a borderland, not quite north or south, east or west, Kentucky offers a fascinating lens through which to view the nation’s history.
Uneven Ground is a book about Appalachia, but it is also a story of American economic development and a cautionary tale about the failures of capitalism. Eastern Kentucky lies in the heart of central Appalachia, an area rich in resources but home to some of the nation’s poorest people. Eller knows more about the region’s challenges than anyone and he provides a compelling indictment of development narratives that emphasize industrialization and false promises of “progress.” His book offers hope that out-of-the-box thinking and a new definition of “the good life” can lead to healthy and more equitable communities in the mountains.
Appalachia has played a complex and often contradictory role in the unfolding of American history. Created by urban journalists in the years following the Civil War, the idea of Appalachia provided a counterpoint to emerging definitions of progress. Early-twentieth-century critics of modernity saw the region as a remnant of frontier life, a reflection of simpler times that should be preserved and protected. However, supporters of development and of the growth of material production, consumption, and technology decried what they perceived as the isolation and backwardness of the place and sought to "uplift" the mountain people through education and industrialization. Ronald…
I grew up in West Virginia and believed you had to leave the region to write. Only after I’d published my first novel did I discover books like these and many more. I have become a wide reader in our literature, with a special interest in novels that both tell the stories of individuals and families and explore the connection between resource extraction and poverty. It’s also a pleasure to read about regional successes as well as losses.
Kentuckian Harriet Arnow married the child of Jewish immigrants and lived much of her life in Michigan.
Her great American novel, Hunter’s Horn, however, is set back in Kentucky. Rich in local color, the novel’s main storyline centers on the hunt for the great fox known as King Devil.
The men’s challenge of catching the fox, though, is just the warp thread for a tapestry of conflict and interplay among industrialization, old folkways, popular culture, and the aspiration to join the larger culture. The novel, which also proves to be strongly feminist, ends with the resounding close of a trap, which is a warning to all of us.
In Hunter's Horn, Arnow has written the quintessential account of Kentucky hill people - the quintessential novel of Southern Appalachian farmers, foxhunters, foxhounds, women, and children. New York Times reviewer Hirschel Brickell declared that Arnow "writes...as effortlessly as a bird sings, and the warmth, beauty, the sadness and the ache of life itself are not even once absent from her pages".
Arnow writes about Kentucky in the way that William Faulkner writes about Mississippi, that Flannery O'Connor writes about Georgia, or that Willa Cather writes about Nebraska - with studied realism, with landscapes and characters that take on mythic proportions,…
I grew up in West Virginia and believed you had to leave the region to write. Only after I’d published my first novel did I discover books like these and many more. I have become a wide reader in our literature, with a special interest in novels that both tell the stories of individuals and families and explore the connection between resource extraction and poverty. It’s also a pleasure to read about regional successes as well as losses.
Kentucky writer Robert Gipe’s graphic novel is about a teen-age girl growing up in Appalachia.
Dawn tells the story of her drug-dealing junk-food-scarfing Kentucky family and their dilemmas. Like Maynard’s characters, Gipe’s border stereotypes, or would, if Gipe didn’t know and respect his people so well. These are the descendants of the hunters of Hunter’s Horn and the battling miners of Storming Heaven.
There is also a strong political thread about Dawn's grandmother who is an organizer against mountaintop removal. The novel has the bonus of Gipe’s wry little black and white illustrations.
Dawn Jewell is fifteen. She is restless, curious, and wry. She listens to Black Flag, speaks her mind, and joins her grandmother's fight against mountaintop removal mining almost in spite of herself. "I write by ear," says Robert Gipe, and Dawn's voice is the essence of his debut novel, Trampoline. She lives in eastern Kentucky with her addict mother and her Mamaw, whose stance against the coal companies has earned her the community's ire. Jagged and honest, Trampoline is a powerful portrait of a place struggling with the economic and social forces that threaten and define it. Inspired by oral…
I was born and raised in the suburbs of eastern Pennsylvania, not far from the Appalachian Mountains, but a world away from the place the rest of the country calls “Appalachia.” Researching All This Marvelous Potential, my book about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 tour of eastern Kentucky, was a revelation. Appalachia is rich in Black history, and queer history, and labor history, and a national leader in education. I am a journalist and author. All This Marvelous Potential is my sixth book.
Few books have changed the course of history like Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Exposing political corruption, environmental destruction, and endemic poverty in Appalachia, Night Comes put poverty squarely on the national agenda and inspired LBJ’s War on Poverty. Although not rigorously factual — Caudill never let the facts get in the way of a good story — Night Comes is a priceless document of its time and place, and required reading for anyone who wants to understand Appalachian culture and history in the middle of the 20th century.
At the start of the 1960s the USA was unquestionably the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world.
Yet despite its prosperity and influence there were areas of the country which seemed to have been forgotten.
In 1962 Harry Caudill, a lawyer and legislator, decided to shine a light upon the appalling conditions which he witnessed in Eastern Kentucky.
His introduction lays out the issues which he saw before him: A million Americans in the Southern Appalachians live in conditions of squalor, ignorance and ill health which could scarcely be equaled in Europe or Japan or, perhaps, in parts…
I was born and raised in the suburbs of eastern Pennsylvania, not far from the Appalachian Mountains, but a world away from the place the rest of the country calls “Appalachia.” Researching All This Marvelous Potential, my book about Robert Kennedy’s 1968 tour of eastern Kentucky, was a revelation. Appalachia is rich in Black history, and queer history, and labor history, and a national leader in education. I am a journalist and author. All This Marvelous Potential is my sixth book.
The Appalachian Volunteers began in the early ’60s as a ragtag group of college kids who spent their summers fixing up one-room schoolhouses in rural Kentucky. With funding from government anti-poverty programs, it grew into a formidable organization dedicated to fighting strip mining and economic injustice. Then it was killed, like so many good things, by the Nixon administration. This superb history of the AVs is really a history of Appalachia—and America—in the 1960s.
The Appalachian Volunteers formed in the early 1960s, determined to eliminate poverty through education and vocational training and improve schools and homes in the mountainous regions of the southeastern United States. In Reformers to Radicals: The Appalachian Volunteers and the War on Poverty, Thomas Kiffmeyer illustrates how the activists ultimately failed, mainly because they were indecisive about the fundamental nature of their mission. The AVs, many of them college students, were also distracted by causes not directly connected with the war on poverty, such as civil rights and opposition to the Vietnam War. Despite some progress, the organization finally lost…
I was born and raised in the south. I come from a large, talkative family. All my life, I listened to my family talk. Hearing them was more fun than television. I grew up with country music playing constantly in the background. It was on the radio when I woke up and still playing when I went to bed. My parents read to me, made up bedtime stories, and let me tell them my made-up stories. Let me follow them around with my childish tales, encouraging me. Being an author has always been my number one dream.
I was drawn to Bertie from the start. Her struggles to understand herself and why things happened as they did resonated with me in a very personal way.
I read this recently on Kindle and couldn’t wait to read more each time I had to put it down to do some mundane tasks in life, such as eating, taking my granddaughter to therapy, and stuff like that. Bertie stayed in my mind, calling me to finish her story.
Even now that I’ve finished, she still whispers in my mind, making me want to read the book all over again.
Set in Appalachia and the Midwest at the turn of the twentieth century, this exquisite debut novel paints an intimate portrait of one resilient farm family’s challenges and hard-won triumphs—helmed by an unforgettable heroine.
Growing up on their hardscrabble farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina “Bertie” Winslow has learned a lot from her mama, Polly. She knows how to lance a boil, make a pie crust, butcher a pig, and tend to every chore that needs doing. What she doesn’t know, but is forced to reckon with all too soon, is how to look after children as a mother should…
