100 books like Lisa, Bright and Dark

I had an out-of-body experience reading this book! Because it’s written in the first person, the way the narrator—who has mental disabilities—describes his life after undergoing surgery to improve his capabilities becomes increasingly fluid and sophisticated.

The reader literally witnesses Charlie Gordon’s transformation as he becomes more engaged in his life and navigates new relationships and situations. So, when Charlie’s aptitude peaks and then declines, you grow viscerally full of dread as the language he “uses” becomes less nuanced and more broken. Algernon is a mouse that undergoes the same surgery, a detail that makes you think about what it means to be human.

As a child of Japanese immigrants, I did well in school and led a pretty tidy existence. But I was an adventurous reader, curious about how other teenagers led their lives. This book – wow! The title alone drew me in.

The “hamburger” refers to the advice a young woman is given to distract a man who is “on the make.” But the woman —and the reader—quickly learn going out for a burger doesn’t neutralize a teenager’s lust. Certainly, issues surrounding sex, pregnancy, and societal expectations have changed significantly over the years, so some language and circumstances in this novel don’t age well.

What remains true is the empathy with which the author depicts his characters and the honesty in how he depicts the complexities of making choices and growing up.

I’m sure there’s a lot of research about how people decide what book to read. I picked up this one because the cover was inky black, and the author was only identified as “Anonymous,” a pre-Internet version of clickbait!

However, I wasn’t disappointed as this book starkly chronicled a young woman’s descent into drug use through her diary entries. By reading a book presented in such a personal format, I really felt scared for the writer as she continually put herself in dangerous situations while her life spiraled out of control. I was also fascinated by some of the period details she provided, like detangling her just-shampooed hair with mayonnaise. I even tried that once!

Although “Anonymous” ended up being an adult writer, this book made me understand more about resilience and the power of redemption rather than the dangers of drug addiction, which, frankly, I had already learned in… show more.

Having grown up as one of few Asians in my high school, I didn’t really prioritize defining my identity as a Japanese-American. All I really cared about was blending in. But after reading this wonderful book, I realized being connected to my ethnicity and culture was both important and natural.

Olivia, the Japanese-American protagonist, spends her days with her family, traveling from Oregon to Arkansas in search of work. The “floating world” is one of temporariness and fleeting observations, like listening to a neighbor playing records or noting the color of a waitress’s painted nails. Olivia deals with tensions within her family as well as the racism they encounter on the road.

For me, this book helped me realize that I could honor the specificities of who I am against a general backdrop of the community within which I existed.

I connected strongly to this book because the protagonist has experienced abandonment and must rebuild her life from the ashes, learning to trust adults to care for her and allow her a childhood rather than expecting her to be a miniature adult. Equally striking is the power of a secret, and how its revelation changes everything. In addition, through reading If You Find Me, I learned a way of using punctuation that creates tension and immediacy.

This is another novel written expressly for teenagers, and all the better for it.

Inflected by the author’s own autobiographical experiences—like Craig, the novel’s narrator, Vizzini spent a week in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager—It’s Kind of a Funny Story was the first work of fiction I’d read that articulated the adolescent experience through the language of mental health. It was here that I learned “depression” isn’t an abstracted emotion but the very real neurochemical imbalance that impels Craig to call the suicide hotline after abandoning his SSRIs.

There’s an uncanny familiarity to the circumstances of Craig’s breakdown—namely in how he struggles to remain above water at a famously rigorous college preparatory high school—and a fundamental earnestness to his story’s confessions that gilds even its grimmest moments with a fifteen-year-old's sense of impressionable wonder.

Nellie Bly was one of the great muckraking reporters in American history. She pretends to be insane and is admitted to the “mad house.” Along the way, she exposes the horrible treatment of those suffering from mental illness, but of her treatment in a boarding home, where spoiled beef was served.

Many at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Roosevelt Island suffered no mental illness; they simply didn’t know how to speak English, she wrote. “I left the insane ward with pleasure and regret—pleasure that I was once more able to enjoy the free breath of heaven; regret that I could not have brought with me some of the unfortunate women who lived and suffered with me, and who, I am convinced, are just as sane as I was and am now myself.”

Her reporting led to a grand jury investigation and reforms inside the asylum.

Welcome to the sweet romance of Isa, a dancer, and Alex, a baseball player, teenagers in New York with very different upbringings. Isa is a blonde, half-Cuban/half white, private school girl from a well-off family that’s falling apart behind the scenes. Alex is Dominican, attends public school, and divides his time between his divorced parents. He’s also a secret poet and leaves his poems for Isa to find on the subway train where they first met. Both have professional sports potential, but the reality is more complicated. The couple navigates challenges with their families and neighborhoods, including mental health and gangs, and you’ll be rooting for them the entire time. The author has a beautiful poem in the Rhyme and Rhythm anthology that I mentioned above.

The Risk Pool shows the importance of accepting and loving our fathers for who they are instead of resenting them for who they never could be. Sam Hall, the irresponsible wreck of a dad in this warm-hearted and funny book, is by any definition a terrible father, yet his relationship with his son Ned feels real in ways that most fictionalized father-son relationships don’t. Forced to care for Ned when Ned’s mother is hospitalized with mental illness, Sam introduces his son to pool halls, bars, bookies, drunks, and the occasional petty crime. Though aware of his father’s many faults, Ned can’t help but be charmed by Sam’s easy-going life, and even when Sam disappears for years, the bond remains strong.  

I attended an author event at the coolest bookstore in Tampa in The Exchange building, and Lisa Unger was being interviewed by Colette Bancroft, the book editor for the Tampa Times.

Well, the book sounded wonderful, and it really is. The heroine in this story is smart, clever, and managed to keep one step ahead of the unusual, troubled boy she is hired to babysit. I loved this story and now have a signed copy on my keeper shelf.