100 books like Rich in Love

Reading this book made me stop writing my own Southern gothic ghost book in the middle, rethink it completely, and start over again from scratch, and I wasn’t even mad about it. It’s just that good. It’s about thirteen-year-old Jojo and his family—his much-loved and very much dying grandmother, his strong, silent, and protective grandfather, his wild child mother, Leonie, his baby sister, Kayla, who looks to Jojo to keep her safe, and his white father, Michael, who just got out of jail. Everybody has secrets, and everybody sees ghosts. This literary novel won the National Book Award, but I promise you, horror readers, it will scare you silly and break your heart. 

Wow. The voice in this book takes my breath away. I’ve never read anything else quite like it.

There’s a plot full of adventure, tragedy, and healing, but mostly, there is Rueben Land and his sister Swede, two of the most compelling characters in literature. The story begins with a miracle when Rueben’s father commands his newly stillborn son to breathe.

Questions about miracles, hope, faith, and redemption pepper the story with no easy answers, again asking: What does it mean to be human? That’s a question all great literature grapples with.

In this exceptional story that I’ve read twice, Elizabeth Strout places a seemingly ordinary, though distant, mother and her shy teenage daughter in the provincial town of Shirley Falls, Maine, to create a stunning awakening in the daughter Amy and foster the admission of a long-hidden secret by Amy’s mother Isabelle. As much as Amy thinks her development is about her sexuality, it is more about forming a relationship with her lonely mother. After Amy learns her mother’s story, she learns her most important moment of identity has not been sexual initiation, but her self-acceptance. The relationship between mother and daughter fosters Amy’s coming of age. 

Whenever I come across a list of banned books, I'm surprised to see this one at or near the top. The 14-year-old protagonist is funny. Since it's semi-autobiographical, I learned a bit about Native American history, life on the Spokane Indian Reservation, and what the main character experiences attending a white racist school a few miles from the reservation.

I read this book years ago and should reread it. I was much younger then. We change as we grow; despite that, I believe my feelings toward the main character would remain sympathetic because it's a struggle to fit in and be comfortable in two different worlds.

I was profoundly moved by this painful-redemptive story of a young girl navigating her dysfunctional family. To discover the world through her thoughts plunged me into a frighting life of loss and danger and confusion. Yet it is the voice of this character that attracts me with her fierceness and determination.

I was stunned by the writing and had to pause and re-read parts to get the incredible revelations subtly slid into sentences. Ellen Foster is an unforgettable character. 

Though I have read and relished all of Alice McDermott’s novels, Child of my Heart is my favorite. Theresa, age 15, is East Hampton’s most sought-after babysitter when her favorite cousin, eight-year-old Daisy, comes to spend the summer in this gorgeous coming-of-age novel. Though Theresa and Daisy share a magical world, Theresa eventually realizes the ongoing bruises on Daisy’s feet and body mean she is seriously ill. While the cousins intuitively conceal Daisy’s condition, Theresa becomes aroused by and wary of her sexual attraction to the father of Flora, a toddler she babysits. Through the haunting presence of death and her dawning sexuality for a much-older man, Theresa crosses into adulthood. 

Escaping his abusive home life in upstate New York, fourteen-year-old, Chappie—called Bone after his tattoo—falls in with an assortment of drug dealers and Rastafarians. Angry and hard, Bone is also resilient and proves to have the biggest heart with a soft spot for others who have been dealt a terrible hand by life. In Rule of the Bone, Russell Banks masterfully explores the themes of class and race and the lives of the forgotten in rural America. Chappie has a lot to say about everything, and you may not like how he says it, but he is more often right than wrong.  

The “big girl” of our title is Malaya Clondon, whose mother shames her endlessly about her weight. Malaya struggles to fit into all her worlds, be it the expected perfection of her mother and grandmother, the upper-class standards of her prep school peers, or a rapidly gentrifying Harlem. Malaya's clear-eyed and wise narration of her plight was an eye-opener for me. Big Girl is one of the most honest depictions I know of a young woman talking about what it feels like to be constantly judged because your body does not conform to the expectations of others. This book will stick with you for a long time.  

This novel traces the coming of age of the only child, a daughter, of a very traditional Episcopal priest. He struggles with depression, a failed marriage, and his work. She struggles to keep up her father’s spirits and tend to his household, as well as with the abandonment of them by her mother and with the question of who she shall be when she isn’t just tending to her dad. Ultimately, she arrives at a calling of her own. It’s a warm-hearted, leisurely novel that also can be quite comical about church people and human interaction of all kinds, but also treats faith seriously. (There’s also a good sequel that takes us into her ministry, Evensong.)     

Waylaid is a bawdy coming-of-age novel about a Chinese American teenage boy working in his parents’ seedy motel – a vibrating bed kind of place – in New Jersey.

He broods about how to lose his virginity. He learns about the adult world from the patrons: Johns, sex workers, the families kicked out of their homes, and the rest of the down and out of American life. I gravitated to Waylaid because it isn’t wholesome yet doesn’t fall into the spirals of toxicity of a Bukowski poem.

It speaks to how sex is used to distract us from the working-class problems all around us, many of which our young are well aware of, but still holds onto this little flame of hope that even in such dark and down-and-out spots, we can find light.