Here are 100 books that Love Grows fans have personally recommended if you like
Love Grows.
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It’s often said that it takes a village to raise a child. I grew up in an intergenerational family in India. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles provided that extended community. Grandparents can pass down traditions, ensuring the preservation of culture. Stories that speak to the reality of multi-generational households can normalize and celebrate the presence of elders. The number of Americans living in multigenerational households is about four times larger than it was in the 1970s, yet the educational potential and the joy of these relationships are often ignored in literature.
I love that the protagonist, Lin, discovers that not only does tofu take time but also takes up the whole universe. It starts with the soybean seed and sunshine. Some kids might not know that tofu can be made at home. Most of all, little Lin realizes that making tofu means spending time with Grandma Nai Nai.
All good things--and foods--take time, as Lin learns in this beautifully illustrated story about patience, family, and a good home-cooked meal.
CLICK CLACK WHIRRRR . . . Lin and her grandma, NaiNai, are making tofu from scratch! When NaiNai goes through each step, from blending soybeans with water to molding curd into shape, Lin gradually becomes impatient. But she soon discovers that making tofu not only takes time, but also takes the whole universe! It takes the seed from soil and sunshine, the cloth from thread and fiber, weight and space, books of words and pictures. And most of all,…
It’s often said that it takes a village to raise a child. I grew up in an intergenerational family in India. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles provided that extended community. Grandparents can pass down traditions, ensuring the preservation of culture. Stories that speak to the reality of multi-generational households can normalize and celebrate the presence of elders. The number of Americans living in multigenerational households is about four times larger than it was in the 1970s, yet the educational potential and the joy of these relationships are often ignored in literature.
This book reminded me that families change and evolve. Jillian is getting a third grandmother, and she’s not sure she needs one more till they embark on making some matzo ball soup. The illustrations in this book are delightful and make the characters come alive.
Jillian isn't so sure she needs a third grandma now that her stepdad is joining the family, but can her brand-new Bubbe win her over?
When Jillian joins Bubbe for some mom-mandated matzo ball soup making, she realizes she has room in her heart (and stomach!) for one more grandmother. But how can she convince Noni and Gram she still loves them just as much? A super soup celebration, of course! Chaos in the kitchen leads to matzo ball soup, spicy gazpacho, meatball soup, and a trio of grandmas united in their love for their family.
It’s often said that it takes a village to raise a child. I grew up in an intergenerational family in India. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles provided that extended community. Grandparents can pass down traditions, ensuring the preservation of culture. Stories that speak to the reality of multi-generational households can normalize and celebrate the presence of elders. The number of Americans living in multigenerational households is about four times larger than it was in the 1970s, yet the educational potential and the joy of these relationships are often ignored in literature.
I loved that the heroine of this story, Martina, is a quiet, imaginative little girl. In contrast, she has loud, rambunctious Tias. So, she slips away at a party and finds a quiet place to imagine. This rollicking picture book reimagines the familiar Caribbean folktale, la Cucaracha Martina. The illustrations are bold and lively, and they are also available in Spanish.
A quiet girl overwhelmed by her rambunctious family finds a magical land of solitude only to discover what truly makes a home a home in this lively and magical bilingual picture book that reimagines the beloved Caribbean folktale “La Cucaracha Martina.”
Martina does not like parties. Parties are full of tías with their flashy fashions and boom-and-bellow laughter that’s too much for quiet Martina. At least with all that noise, no one notices when she slips away. She finds herself in a magical place: a warm, familiar island where she can finally play in peace and quiet. Martina is home…
It’s often said that it takes a village to raise a child. I grew up in an intergenerational family in India. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles provided that extended community. Grandparents can pass down traditions, ensuring the preservation of culture. Stories that speak to the reality of multi-generational households can normalize and celebrate the presence of elders. The number of Americans living in multigenerational households is about four times larger than it was in the 1970s, yet the educational potential and the joy of these relationships are often ignored in literature.
So often grandparents and other loved ones live far away these days, in a different city or even a different country, and staying connected can take work. This sweet story is touching, like many of Pat Miller’s other picture books. The illustrations are simple, and the page cutouts add anticipatory fun.
Someday soon, I'll see you. Even though you are there. And I am here. So very far apart.
In this heartfelt picture book, a child imagines ways to connect with a grandmother who lives far way. Whether by rocket ship or jet pack, train or in a plane, any journey is worth it to see someone you love.
With an inviting, accessible text by Pat Zietlow Miller and inventive art from the critically-acclaimed illustrator Suzy Lee, this picture book reminds us that, no matter the physical distance between us, the people we care about are never far from our hearts.…
I have always been a voracious reader and was blessed with parents who filled my home with books, who read to me, and who exposed me to both true and fictional stories that expanded my heart and nourished my imagination. I grew up on Christian biographies, along with devouring history and novels. I was shaped, nourished, and strengthened by the stories of real men and women who lived lives that mattered, and who understood that God never puts His children in times, in places, or in circumstances where He cannot enable them to shine brightly, and where they cannot speak truth and compassion into the darkness.
The sheer, transcendent beauty of the language in this book would have made me love it even had I not found the story engaging, and the powerful, personal truth of the story it tells would have made me love it even if the prose had been awkward and lackluster.
The marriage of the language with the deeply personal story of a young American couple finding their way through love, marriage, and friendship to the love of Christ, and then facing the ultimate test of their young faith, will mark you forever. I will warn you that I finished the book in floods of tears!
A heart-rending love story described by its author as “the spiritual autobiography of a love rather than of the lovers” about the author’s marriage and search for faith.
Vanauken chronicles the birth of a powerful pagan love borne out of the relationship he shares with his wife, Davy, and describes the growth of their relationship and the dreams that they share.
A beloved, profoundly moving account of the author's marriage, the couple's search for faith and friendship with C. S. Lewis, and a spiritual strength that sustained Vanauken after his wife's untimely death. Replete with 18 letters from C.S. Lewis,…
I am a member of an unfortunate tribe, the tribe of grieving mothers who write. Upon learning that my newborn son was profoundly brain-damaged, I kept a diary. Writing those pages helped me make sense of his prognosis and figure out how to care for him before he died. Later, my diary helped me write my memoir Holding Silvan: A Brief Life which went on to be named a “Best Book” of the year by both Library Journal and the Boston Globe. Today, I write and work with other writers trying to craft their own stories of loss. Each experience of grief is unique. The five memoirs I’m recommending give voice to a variety of maternal losses — from stillbirth to murder. While each of these memoirs is powerful in its own way, the love in them is universal.
Upon receiving the news that her two young daughters had been killed by a drunk driver, Genevieve Jurgensen didn’t think she could go on, let alone ever write about her loss. Fortunately for us, she eventually found a way to tell this story. Through letters to a friend, she draws us in, circling the pain of that terrible day, musing about the mysterious ways in which loss can coexist with a happy, ongoing life. With its raw and intimate feel, the book is a profoundly moving testimony to the complicated process of healing.
What do you do, how do you live, when both of your daughters are killed on the same afternoon?
On April 30, 1980, Genevieve Jurgensen found herself facing that question when she lost her four- and seven-year-old daughters to a drunk driver. Here she presents her search for an answer.
I’m pretty sure I’m about to die in space. And I just turned twelve and a half.
Blast off with the four winners of the StellarKid Project on a trip to the International Space Station and then to the Gateway outpost orbiting the Moon! It’s a dream come true until…
I am a nonfiction writer who aims to bring heart to my writing. If I can move the reader and enable them to connect to their inner world, then I consider that I have been successful. As I consider my purpose is rehabilitating women whom history has mistreated, my way into these misunderstood women is to examine their inner lives. What moves them and how they manage to survive and surmount their own heartbreak is the question that I am most interested in.
This book became a lifeline for me when I was going through an unhappily difficult and extremely stressful time. I felt as if it was written for me as a form of salve for my lack of trust in myself and my life at this point.
Rilke is wise, knowing, and reassuring about the vicissitudes of our emotional journeys. He encouraged me to hold onto myself in an emotional sense. To seek my own inner counsel and to not panic when my life seemed to unravel. I love his discourse on faith, solitude, trust, and his dissection of what it is to be an artist.
I found this a profoundly important and moving book when I was wavering about the bigger picture of life.
Born in 1875, the great German lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke published his first collection of poems in 1898 and went on to become renowned for his delicate depiction of the workings of the human heart. Drawn by some sympathetic note in his poems, young people often wrote to Rilke with their problems and hopes. From 1903 to 1908 Rilke wrote a series of remarkable responses to a young, would-be poet on poetry and on surviving as a sensitive observer in a harsh world. Those letters, still a fresh source of inspiration and insight, are accompanied here by a chronicle…
My engagement in the topic has two distinct vectors, academic, and personal, or, if you wish, existential. My academic engagement began when Buber's son Raphael (1900-91), who served as the Executor of the Martin Buber Literary Estate, invited me to assemble and edit his father's writings on the "Arab Question." He explained that of all of his father's publications, his ramified writings promoting the political and human dignity of the Palestinian Arabs spoke most dearly and, as a citizen of the State of Israel, most immediately to him. I accepted Rafael's invitation with alacrity, for like Raphael I'm an Israeli by choice, having emigrated to the country in 1970.
Examines
how the architects of the conflict worked to influence and indoctrinate their
respective ideologies in the ordinary soldiers by analyzing the battle orders,
pamphlets, army journals, and recordings of radio broadcasts in Hebrew, Arabic,
and English. Through two overarching narratives – the official and unofficial,
the propaganda and personal letters, Dear Palestine reveals the fissures
between ‘sanctioned nationalism’ and individual experience and identity. This
book reminds one that everyday individual’s fears, bravery, hubris, base
cruelty, lies, and fantasies are as important in history as the preoccupations
of the elites.
In 1948, a war broke out that would result in Israeli independence and the erasure of Arab Palestine. Over twenty months, thousands of Jews and Arabs came from all over the world to join those already on the ground to fight in the ranks of the Israel Defense Forces and the Arab Liberation Army. With this book, the young men and women who made up these armies come to life through their letters home, writing about everything from daily life to nationalism, colonialism, race, and the character of their enemies. Shay Hazkani offers a new history of the 1948 War…
I’ve been devoted to reading memoirs since childhood. My favorite memoirs are based on letters written by people who served in World War II. Their letters encapsulate their experiences with an intimacy meant only for their loved ones. I am fascinated with the immediacy of their personal experience, the longing for home, and the courage to carry on that is expressed in these letters. I continue to be astonished and inspired by the lives of “ordinary” people who tell their own extraordinary stories better than anyone else could. I am the author of two non-fiction books based on letters and my current project is a World War II-era historical novel.
The authors spent ten years researching and acquiring the 30,000 letters that resulted in this collection portraying the wide range of experiences of women in uniform during World War II. I’ve returned to this book often during my research and would recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the role women played during the war. These eyewitness accounts of the day-to-day lives of ordinary women stepping up to do extraordinary things are compelling and inspirational.
Veterans' Day, 1993. The Vietnam memorial, Washington, D.C. Tearful thousands gather for the unveiling of a new monument, a long-overdue tribute to the women who served in Southeast Asia. The event was a powerful reminder of the importance of women in the war--and of its emotional role in their own lives. Yet Vietnam was not the first war in which American women enlisted alongside men. Fifty years ago, an even greater conflict engulfed the lives of tens of thousands of women as they joined the Second World War. Now Judy Barrett Litoff and David C. Smith recapture their experiences in…
I am a historian who focuses on the political history of the United States during the 20th century. My particular interest focuses on the history of the Republican Party & the American presidency. I am curious about how individuals acquire political power and their use of it. I was drawn to write a book about the friendship between Roosevelt and Lodge because of my fascination with the friendship among Eastern elites and how Lodge served as a mentor to Roosevelt in helping him achieve prominence in United States politics. Despite the many books on T.R. no one has ever written a narrative about his relationship with Lodge.
One of the most prolific correspondents in American history, Adams keen eye and biting wit is the perfect companion for anyone who wants to gain a picture of the themes, events, and personalities that dominated the Gilded Age.
The grandson, and great-grandson of two American presidents, Adams was a symbol of the WASP elite whose dominance in American society was beginning to wane. A former journalist, professor at Harvard, mentor to Henry Cabot Lodge and friend of Theodore Roosevelt, Adams was closely associated with the who’s who of politics, art, and society.
While Adams may have realized he was writing for posterity, the letters are detailed and leave little to the imagination in terms of what Adams thought of those he encountered among the politicians and government men who occupied the nation’s capital.
Henry Adams's letters are one of the vital chronicles of the life of the mind in America. A perceptive analyst of people, events, and ideas, Adams recorded, with brilliance and wit, sixty years of enormous change at home and abroad.
Volume I shows him growing from a high-spirited but self-conscious 20-year-old to a self-assured man of the world. In Washington in the chaotic months before Lincoln's inauguration, then in London during the war years and beyond, he serves as secretary to his statesman father and is privy to the inner workings of politics and diplomacy. English social life proves as…