84 books like Mothering Heights

Dav Pilkey’s Dogman series is full of silly humor that we all love to laugh and groan at.

The idea of a dog and a policeman being ‘Frankensteined’ together to create the ultimate crime fighter is something that young readers completely accept without any queasy afterthought. While the rest of us might squirm at the idea of stitching together a dog’s head on a headless policeman, Dav Pilkey manages to make the grotesque incredibly funny and heartwarming.

The illustrations are full of movement and humor and young readers will love the Flip-o-rama section which includes interactive pages where you get to make the drawings come to life by flipping the pages back and front. Young readers get more than just a reading experience from this series.

Since the protagonist has some amnesia, I loved piecing together the threads of Jamie’s identity in this book.

Jamie isn’t exactly a villain, per se, but I’d classify him as morally gray; after all, he uses his memory-erasing abilities to rob banks and commit crime. When he meets arch nemesis and do-gooder Zoe in a support group for those who lost their memory, they realize their pasts might be more entangled than they think.

We Could Be Heroes is fun, fast-paced, and features great characters in a speculative world that’s easy to immerse yourself in. I personally really enjoy stories with amnesiacs, since it allows us to learn more about the characters right alongside them and feel the emotional punches of reveals, and Chen’s work balances that with fun and lighthearted moments seemingly effortlessly.

You had me at the title!  Dave the Bear is calmly sweeping the floor of his cave one day, when, suddenly, two clumps of hair leap into the air! They are actually two hairy slugs and end up on Dave’s head as new eyebrows!

This fantastically funny story is about all the crazy things that happen to Dave, as the Eyebrows of Doom take over his life! Written in a bouncy rhyme this will make everyone giggle. I love the arty illustrations too.

I first read this as a teen, and honestly, I found it hard at first. It was sometimes a struggle to understand the intricate world-building and sheer scholarship Tolkien invested in this magnum opus. Like many, after watching the films, I decided to revisit the books and immediately found them to be accessible despite the intricacy.

In fact, the level of detail that went into Tolkien’s world-building is maybe rarely equaled in modern fantasy. Tolkien even invented languages for the tome, apparently termed glossopoeia, such as the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin. He also had a framework for the evil speech and the talk of men, dwarfs, and Ents. Whether you love or even hate it, the lore involved is so masterful it feels more like a ‘living’ fable than a made-up tale. 

I really connected with evil genius Doctor Impossible and his whacky world of superheroes. In grade and high school, I felt like I was the one who was overlooked, which was often the good days; getting noticed generally meant I was being made fun of and bullied. But to take revenge, to show my plebeian classmates the (imagined) might that lay within me, how glorious that would be! Hahaha! Evil laugh aside, as Doctor Impossible does just that, I also enjoyed his vulnerable needs, longings, and regrets. And the lives of the heroes are not all they are cracked up to be. While not as stark (or violent) as The Boys, Grossman also exposes the toll superhero biology can take on the mind and body. A fun and poignant read.

From the moment I spied the cover, I knew I had to read this book. 

It featured an armored soldier on horseback leading a group of weary travelers on a dark, foreboding night. It whispered of danger and mystery–two things all good fantasy contains. The group, inspired by prophecy, battles against unworldly creatures, eyeless monsters, and enigmatic foes in their quest to defeat the dark one.

I loved the clear delineation between the creator and the dark one and their contrasting visions for the world.

I love how much Mercy learns about herself. I also really admire the time and space and, above all, respect Briggs's investments in Mercy's witting and unwitting explorations of her powers and heritage. And how Mercy reacts to revelations about her mother and mostly unknown father. I, at least, admire when Mercy is allowed to get cranky and try to pick and choose what she wants to keep or discard, approve or disapprove.

All this, and it's a heck of a roller coaster ride. I rode the slow build-up, increasingly bracing myself for the first big drop, and then whoop-whoop-whoop, I whirled up and down and sideways to the end.

At a whopping 1,152 pages, Stephen King’s The Stand was just too much to capture in a single movie.

That’s why, in 1994, CBS adapted it across four, ninety-minute episodes of a limited run “mini-series” (a fancy way of saying “a really long movie”). In all fairness, it had a great cast and was better than it had any right to be, and was far more enjoyable than CBS’s 2020 attempt at a do-over.

But even with a total six-hour runtime, it couldn’t capture all the story, heart, and nuance that made the book so incredible. It’s a feat to read, one I did to pass the time when bored in school, and one I will surely do again in the future.

Elizabeth Knox plunks her protagonists into the middle of an ongoing mystery that crosses the veil between this world and the world of Faerie, with no explanation, so the reader has to follow the same few clues that the heroine is given. I love an author who assumes that her readers are that intelligent! As she unravels the mystery, Taryn Cornick also must face up to the consequences of a great sin she once committed and do all she can to atone for it, while accepting that it may not be enough. Knox weaves in aspects of Dante’s Purgatorio, Celtic and Norse mythology, our current ecological crisis, and the psychology of trauma to create an epic fantasy that invites multiple re-readings.

Did you ever hear about the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise? If you’re a Star Wars fan, this is the book that really humanizes the evil side of the galaxy far, far away. While it has the typical sorcery, lightsaber fights, and sweeping space opera, this book, at its core, is the story of a dark father-son relationship. Even the overarching villain of the Star Wars saga, Palpatine, is given a lot of backstory, depth, and humanity in this story. I read this book in college, and it’s what spurred my writing journey.