Here are 72 books that Pickard County Atlas fans have personally recommended if you like
Pickard County Atlas.
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I am a total sucker for people who are so complicated I can’t get a read
on them. This love comes from growing up without any extended family. When I heard little bits of my parents’ pasts, it felt like the world got more interesting, and I wanted to dig in to know everything there was to know about what shaped them and, by proxy, what shaped me. I’m drawn to
shady characters who don’t want to give up the goods, as they present a
joyful challenge by withholding mystery, and those types of characters
are the ones I love to read and write about.
I’ve never encountered such a duplicitous and complicated character as the Captain. Having to survive life in Vietnam before and during America’s entry into the war, and after as an immigrant in America, I kept thinking I understood why the character behaved the way he did. His actions made sense. Then I’d get what I thought was a glimpse at his heart and intentions and know I had him all wrong, only to turn the page and see a completely different facet of him again.
Over and over his past and present and desires for the future kept morphing him. The stunning thing about this story is I totally understood why he would be this complex as each section doled out enough clues how someone like him could be so strange and malleable and twisted up in the most odd and fascinating ways.
It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. The Sympathizer is the story of this captain:…
I am a total sucker for people who are so complicated I can’t get a read
on them. This love comes from growing up without any extended family. When I heard little bits of my parents’ pasts, it felt like the world got more interesting, and I wanted to dig in to know everything there was to know about what shaped them and, by proxy, what shaped me. I’m drawn to
shady characters who don’t want to give up the goods, as they present a
joyful challenge by withholding mystery, and those types of characters
are the ones I love to read and write about.
This book stunned me by becoming something different over and over again.
The characters in Amerikaland are upright role models, but then we dip into their super complicated pasts. When their family pops up, the story begins to weave itself into a wild plot that requires unbelievable fortitude to endure. As the pages kept coming, I no longer had any idea what was going to happen next and felt like anything could happen. These people were driven by inner fires that could burn up the world at any moment.
I had to lay on the couch after this one as I felt completely gutted, but while lying down, I picked it up again and started rereading.
In a reimagined present day, Sabine, a guarded, independent German tennis player, and Sandy, a Brooklyn-born Jewish baseball player, find themselves in New York City for World Day-a sporting event meant to celebrate international peace.
For years, Sabine was regarded as a tennis legend until an act of violence threatened her life and career. Now, she is determined to stand before the crowds once again a winner. Sandy is the beloved star of his hometown team, but a recent horrific antisemitic crime nearly unravels him.
Their lives are forever changed when a massive terrorist attack strikes World Day. As Sabine…
I am a total sucker for people who are so complicated I can’t get a read
on them. This love comes from growing up without any extended family. When I heard little bits of my parents’ pasts, it felt like the world got more interesting, and I wanted to dig in to know everything there was to know about what shaped them and, by proxy, what shaped me. I’m drawn to
shady characters who don’t want to give up the goods, as they present a
joyful challenge by withholding mystery, and those types of characters
are the ones I love to read and write about.
This book is so sprawling and insightful that it gave me a touch of delightful paranoia. It captured the era of the newly approved Patriot Act.
The story’s character’s think they are acting as solo agents but everything they do is now being scrutinized. This gave me a chance to see their real time and inner struggles as they wrestle with how to create both public and private lives. I was ready to wrap tinfoil over my head after finishing this one!
A provocative novel about abandoned faith, heartbreaking loss, and inescapable government scrutiny in the heartland of a post-9/11 nation.
American missionary and ROTC cadet Tyler Ahls, long missing in Pakistan, has just surfaced, proselytizing in an Afghani terrorist propaganda video. For Omaha nurse Elisabeth Holland, it's a shock that her brother is even alive. Now she must ask herself a more grave question: Is he a hostage or a traitor?
Seasoned FBI special agent Frank Schwaller is asking this too. He's come to Nebraska armed with countless hours of video, audio, and email surveillance. The object of his unyielding gaze…
I am a total sucker for people who are so complicated I can’t get a read
on them. This love comes from growing up without any extended family. When I heard little bits of my parents’ pasts, it felt like the world got more interesting, and I wanted to dig in to know everything there was to know about what shaped them and, by proxy, what shaped me. I’m drawn to
shady characters who don’t want to give up the goods, as they present a
joyful challenge by withholding mystery, and those types of characters
are the ones I love to read and write about.
I’ve never come across a character who knows how to rock, as well as Hollis Bragg! He is so creative and self-destructive as he wails on his guitar it felt like there was nothing to do but let the fierceness of his emotions wash over me.
From the first page, Hollis is a wildly manic and interesting tour guide through rural West Virginia on the eve of great changes. Everyone here has a motive, and there is no real trust in what that motive will drive them to do. They are each self-serving and captivating.
"A near-Shakespearean snarl, a mad, seven-day action crucible set in the West Virginia wild...The Poison Flood is an ambitious saga, cockamamie and passionate. Through Hollis, Farmer produces a pocket Hillbilly manifesto."--Atlanta Journal Constitution
A captivating, gritty, and tender story of a reclusive musician and the local disaster that threatens his small town and changes his life forever.
Hollis Bragg lives on the fringes. The hunchbacked son of a West Virginia hill preacher, he now resides in rural isolation next to the burned-out husk of his father's church, and earns his living ghostwriting songs for a popular band that left the…
I've been writing for decades, as one genre evolved into another. Local Colorado history led to the identification of "Boulder Jane Doe," a murder victim. During that journey I learned a lot about criminal investigations and forensics. I devoured old movies (especially film noir), and I focused on social history including mysterious and intriguing women. Midwest Book Review (see author book links) credits In Search of the Blonde Tigress as "rescuing" Eleanor Jarman "from obscurity." So true! Despite Eleanor's notoriety as "the most dangerous woman alive," she actually was a very ordinary woman. I've now found my niche pulling mysterious and intriguing women out of the shadows.
Mollie was 18 years old and a new bride in 1860 when she and her husband left eastern Nebraska for the gold diggings of Colorado.
The 7-week journey across the plains tested her strength and endurance, but Mollie battled the hardships and isolation of pioneer life with humor, intelligence, and honesty. She never intended her journal to be published, but it was, and I found it inspirational.
Mollie is a vivid, high-spirited, and intensely feminine account of city people homesteading in the raw, new land west of the Missouri. More particularly, it is the story of Mollie herself - just turned eighteen when the Dorseys left Indianapolis for Nebraska Territory - of her reaction to the transplantation and to her new life which included rattlesnakes, blizzards, Indians, and the hardships of pioneer life. Mollie describes her nearly three-year engagement to Byron Sanford, during which time she worked as a seamstress, teacher, and cook. Following her wedding Mollie's life took a new turn. Catching "Pike's Peak Fever," the…
I love these books because they hold thinking as the highest virtue, and they value the rights of the individual. I like to challenge the norm. These stories seek to preserve and enhance human life through art and science.
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.
There's trouble in the deadly wilds of Nebraska . . . and Reacher walks right into it. He falls foul of the Duncans, a local clan that has terrified an entire country into submission.
But it's the unsolved case of a missing eight-year-old girl that Reacher can't let go.
Reacher - bruised and battered - should have just kept going. But for Reacher, that was impossible.
What, in this fearful county, would be worth dying for?
_________
Although the Jack Reacher novels can be read in any order, Worth Dying For follows on directly from the end of 61 Hours.…
I grew up watching my mother suffer under a strict patriarchal religion. She never felt she had a choice in her life, and yet she always remained a dreamer, collecting newspaper articles about events in history that interested her. They piled up in a box and I’ve no idea what she thought to do with them. She would thumb through them between bouts of standing over a ringer washer or hanging wet clothing outside in freezing weather. There were 15 of us, you can imagine the laundry. I never saw her cry…despite working like a mule. I admire her and women like her for getting through.
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.
"An important and riveting story of a 19th-century feminist and change agent. Starita successfully balances the many facts with vivid narrative passages that put the reader inside the very thoughts and emotions of La Flesche." —Chicago Tribune
On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche Picotte received her medical degree—becoming the first Native American doctor in U.S. history. She earned her degree thirty-one years before women could vote and thirty-five years before Indians could become citizens in their own country.
By age twenty-six, this fragile but indomitable Native woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered…
My family moved frequently and, as a result, I was raised in a number of different small towns in Montana, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, and Massachusetts. I now live in a large city but the experience has never left me. There was always a certain amount of crime and corruption in the towns I grew up in, but I only had a child’s eye view of it. However, a child’s eye view is usually the most vivid. This experience and the books that I have listed above all had a direct influence on Blue Hotel.
This is a portrait of Nebraska (and
Nebraskans) where most of my own book takes place. It’s also the state
where I went to high school. I like Hansen’s spare and precise writing style
because it perfectly fits the time and place, as well as the characters
themselves who are presented stripped of the conceits and pretensions. For me,
it’s a style, though different from McCarthy’s, that creates the illusion of
actual direct experience as opposed to something I happen to be reading about. His
story “Wickedness” creates a powerful image of winter on the Great Plains and
its effect on people.
Stories of the heartland by the National Book Award finalist and author of The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
“Nebraska captures a rowdy, changing America. Written with wit and brawny lyricism, in voices ranging from hip to tender, the stories gathered here are as diverse and expansive as the country they celebrate…References to America’s heartland abound throughout the book and serve as a central metaphor for what’s close to American hearts, what connects us: dreams, myths and possibilities as vast as the Great Plains. Wise and smart-alecky, creaking with legend and crackling with modernisms, these tales…
There are 2.2 million people behind bars in the United States—more than any other country in the world —in greatly disproportionate demographic numbers. There are mandatory drug sentencing laws that put fathers and mothers, sometimes both, away for many years regardless of their actual direct involvement in a crime. I wrote this book because no matter how one feels about these laws, or these crimes, if 2.2 million adults are incarcerated, there are at least as many children without mothers or fathers. Having lost my mother to suicide there are many connections, stigma, shame, and the hardship of reconciling a mother’s love in spite of the events that took her away from me.
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.
Junior Library Guild Selection * Kids' Indie Next List Pick From Leslie Connor, award-winning author of Waiting for Normal and Crunch, comes a soaring and heartfelt story about love, forgiveness, and how innocence makes us all rise up. All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook is a powerful story, perfect for fans of Wonder and When You Reach Me. Eleven-year-old Perry was born and raised by his mom at the Blue River Co-ed Correctional Facility in tiny Surprise, Nebraska. His mom is a resident on Cell Block C, and so far Warden Daugherty has made it possible for them…
As an award-winning author of nonfiction books for kids, I’m passionate about discovering titles by other authors that introduce a topic innovatively and engagingly. I obtained a B.S. in Biology, with an emphasis in Ecology, from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. I received the 2023 Stephen Fraser Encouragement Award and a 2023 finalist for the Russel Freedman Award. I feel that it’s important to plant seeds of curiosity and encourage children to look at the world around them through a different lens. I love reading books that present complicated ideas in a way that young readers (and adults!) can understand.
It’s hard to imagine our world looking any different than it does today, but this book will take you back millions of years to a time when camels, elephants, and, of course, rhinos roamed North America.
That is, until a volcano buried them in ash. I found the discovery, excavation, and study of these animals captivating. The chapters are short, and the illustrations are engaging.
This book left me curious about what other fossils are buried beneath our feet and what story their discovery might tell.
Twelve million years ago, rhinos, elephants, and camels roamed North America. They would gather at nearby watering holes - eating, drinking, and trying not to become someone else's lunch. But one day, in what we now know as Nebraska, everything changed. The explosion of a super volcano a thousand miles away sent a blanket of ash that buried these animals for millennia.
Until 1953, when a seventeen-year-old farm worker made an unbelievable discovery.
This is the first book to be published about the Ashfall Fossil Beds, where more than 200 perfectly preserved fossils have been found. Step into the past…
