Love Nebraska? Readers share 100 books like Nebraska...

This is a Rubik’s cube of a Western. It feels so familiar in terms of its Western iconography and stock characters and motifs, but McCarthy twists the familiar tropes of the popular Western into bizarre and inscrutable patterns.

It’s a book I want to figure out but can’t quite, and that’s why I have re-read it several times. With each read, I’m confronted with a new puzzle just when I thought I had cracked its code. 

Road to Perdition takes place during the Great Depression. Like my book, it concerns a man who betrays his Chicago Irish-American mob boss and is forced to flee for his life (accompanied by his young son in this case), pursued by a relentless killer sent by his former boss. Superficially, what appealed to me was the Depression-era atmosphere that the author of Road to Perdition created. On a deeper level, it appealed to me as a story of a man in a battle for the soul of his son. The man, an enforcer for his gangland boss, considers his own soul to be irredeemably lost because of the crimes he has committed, not only survive but to thrive.

This is the story that inspired my novel. It takes place in a small Nebraska railroad town in the bitterly cold winter of 1898. My novel takes place in the bitterly cold winter of 1947, shortly after WW2, mostly in the same blue hotel in the same snowbound town as in Crane’s story.

Crane’s story “is one of the most well-known of the short stories in the collection The Monsters and Other Stories. Although it appears to be a reasonably simple tale about a man who encounters trouble following a stay at the Palace Hotel, several complex themes underpin the story and define many of the overarching themes in novels like Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and more generally, Crane’s corpus. Stylistically, the story breaks free from the norms of the period, often entering the realms of Expressionism, an unusual style to encounter in American literature.”

I grew up in a small Montana town, so Watson’s novel has a special meaning for me. It is a vivid portrayal of small-town life on the Great Plains and takes place during the same time period as my own book. It tells of the corruption of a trusted official and its effect on his family, his victims, and the town itself. Watson’s novel allowed me to feel and understand the deep emotions, the pain, the anxiety, the love, and the disappointment that his characters were feeling.

Horse stealing was more than theft of valuable and essential property. Matthew Luckett explains that on the Great Plains horse stealing “destabilized communities, institutions, nations, diplomatic relations, and cross-cultural exchange.” Luckett challenges many popular notions about horse thieves (for starters, they were not hung).  There were different kinds of horse theft and horse thieves. Don’t be misled by “Nebraska” in the title—this book shows that horse stealing had regional and national repercussions.   Luckett is an engaging writer, and this book is extremely readable and filled with compelling stories. I particularly recommend the chapter “The Horse Wars” about the role of horses in the war the U.S. Army waged against the Indians. 

I don’t know of a criminal case—or a true crime book—that better exemplifies America’s fractured political divide. With deep access to the central figures in this heartbreaking story, author Sexton investigates the gulf between one side and the other and how we got there.

The book focuses on a night of violent conflict in Omaha, Nebraska, in May 2020, during the social unrest following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Sexton takes readers inside the decision-making process of key players in the drama, including family members as well as law enforcement and criminal justice professionals.

You will not be surprised to learn that misinformation and half-truths from spurious social media sources played a key role in this case, equal parts tragedy and debacle.

My Grandma Leora's family "went bust" in NE Nebraska during the 1890s drought. The McCance family stuck it out in central Nebraska during the same time. Grace McCance remembered so many dear details, like making horses from tumbleweeds, Indians learning German as a second language, the battle over wearing a bonnet, a pet rooster that liked to visit while feasting on grasshoppers. Grace was the second daughter in a family of seven girls and two boys. She hoped one day to make the most beautiful quilts and to marry a cowboy, which she did. They camped out the first night, then had their wedding portrait taken the next day.

Decades ago, I did a lot of quilting, so was familiar with the remarkable Flower Basket Petit Pointe quilt, which was designated as one of the top 100 quilts of the 20th Century by Quilters Newsletter Magazine in 1999. Grace McCance… show more.

On the other end of the spectrum is a light and funny, extremely well-written, and poignant middle grade novel about a boy growing up with his mother inside prison walls. (Full disclosure, I cried at the end of the book.)

While it’s not realism, it brings attention to its readers, that the law is not perfect, and often the wrong people are in prison. The happy ending helps make this realization palpable for young readers, who nonetheless will get the message about criminal justice and being quick to judge. 

The title says a lot about why this book moved me. Susan La Flesche was a warrior for her people, and what greater reason do any of us have for our existence? La Flesche overcame impossible odds and gave up a great deal to become a doctor. Time and again she risked her life to travel to homes in the dead of night or through snowstorms to reach someone who needed her. That dedication and drive inspire me. Reading the book makes me roll my eyes at my own short list of accomplishments. Also, I was raised close to the famous Indian School in Genoa, Nebraska. I grew up fascinated by the buildings and the haunted feelings in the classrooms. Starita’s lyrical descriptions of the land also transported me back.

Of all twenty-some books (and counting) in Child’s Jack Reacher series, this one stands out. In an interview, Lee once said, "I just wrote this one by the numbers." To me his final solo effort feels like he finally figured out how to say what he always wanted. It’s personal, yet geopolitical. Empathetic, yet very tough. In this tale of two half-cities run by rival gangs, the Armenians and the Ukrainians, he does so simply and brilliantly.

The story’s government is corrupt, as so many are, full of bribe-taking politicians who are unable to protect the citizenry from organized crime. To fill that void, in steps Jack Reacher with some intuitive detecting, a little romance, and a lot of bad-guy killing.