100 books like Self-Portrait with Nothing

The Snow Child depicts a maybe real, maybe imaginary little girl bringing joy to a childless, homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska.

In this bestselling debut novel, released in 2016, a couple that yearns for a child of their own is visited by a nymph who appears and disappears in the snow drifts on their homestead. In her novel, Eowyn Ivy manages to sustain the reader’s belief that this girl could in fact be real, without directly saying one way or the other. 
Why do this in an essentially realist portrayal of hardscrabble life in rural Alaska? Again, I see it as a way to get past the character’s rational mind and open both the character and readers’ hearts to the ineffable.

Here, Mabel, the main character says it better. “You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact, Mabel had come to suspect the opposite.… show more.

On a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on a beach.

Tucked inside is the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl. Ruth, the auto-fictional protagonist of this novel, is a writer who finds the lunchbox and suspects it’s debris from Japan’s 2011 tsunami. Thus ensues a dual storyline in which each of these characters seeks out the other and, in the process, reckons with family, fate, and ancestral heritage.

I chose this National Book Award finalist from 2014 for its subtle use of the two main characters liminal realities to wrestle with the possibility of how two people living at a vast distance apart and even in different times might be connected to each other.

As a writer I was blown away by this passage which comes late in the novel. “[Ruth] thought back to the mystery of the missing words. Had she somehow… show more.

I can’t stop thinking about this book. The setting is Florida in the near future, where climate change has reached a point where the ocean is reclaiming the state. The book spans the entire life of the protagonist, Wanda. Wanda broke my heart. She suffered so much loss, none of which was her own fault. But, smart and curious, she found a way, led primarily by an older woman who took her under her wing. 

I felt for Wanda as she lost her family and friends, dealt with bullies, and lost her home. And I cheered her on when she found ways to survive. Wanda is the light: the message of the book, which could easily have been horribly depressing, was that love will find a way—life will find a way if you give it room to breathe.

At first glance, Valley of Shadows is a straight-genre horror novel, with a gruesome whodunnit at its center.

We’re given a noble but flawed Mexican American hero, Solitario, searching for a band of ritualistic murderers, who, by the novel’s midpoint, have already slaughtered a dozen men, women, and children.

This leaves Solitario, like the reader, desperate to keep them from killing again, but clueless about who they are and how they select their victims. This mystery remains unsolved until a shocking perpetrator and motive emerge on the novel’s final pages.

An essential thread in Ruiz’s riveting story is its otherworldly cast of characters, including a parade of personable ghosts, two living bruja (Mexican witches), and both the mythology and practical applications of Aztec and Apache mystical traditions.

Readers will recognize these flourishes as directly traceable to the fantastical, politically charged magic realism style developed by masters of this genre, namely… show more.

As soon as I began reading Emma’s Gift, I was hooked.

Though the author’s relationship to Emma – mother-to-child – is different from my relationship to my twin sister, having a family member with a disability made the connection. The challenges of the situation and the difficult decisions that Kuperschmit had to make resonated with my own.

The honesty and bearing of emotions were necessary for both of us to tell our story. I could hardly put the book down, awed by Kuperschmit’s beautiful and eloquent descriptions of what she was going through.

We shared an understanding that there is a real person underneath the disability and I was thankful throughout for Kuperschmit’s skill in showing her readers that, even with an “atypical” child, there is the ability to love and be loved.

Imani is thirteen and approaching her Bat Mitzvah. She is also an African-American adopted by a white Jewish family.

She has many questions about her birthparents and her own place in the world. When she has the opportunity to read the diary of her adopted mother’s grandmother who fled Europe as a Jewish refugee during World War II, Imani learns why sometimes mothers make impossible choices to save their children’s lives.

This novel is a riveting mix of history and coming of age. 

This coming-of-age novel features a sixteen-year-old star baseball playing girl, but that’s just the beginning. Alex is biracial, raised in a white family, and she struggles to find where she fits in. Race, gender, identity, adoption, body image – this novel explores hard-hitting issues with the complexity they deserve. I especially appreciate that the author wrote from her own experience as a transracial adoptee.

Okay, this is not a memoir, and Glaser doesn’t have a personal connection with adoption. BUT she is a phenomenal writer and excellent reporter, which means she beautifully tells other people’s stories. And she does so here with so much empathy and integrity. This is the story of the forced relinquishment of a baby boy during the Baby Scoop Era and his journey of reconnecting with his birthmother decades later.

It’s an astounding, heart-wrenching story that highlights the incredible tenacity of a young mother and her stunning fight to keep her baby. This story made me cry….a lot.

First of all, Heather’s writing is so clear and so emotional, it’s hard not to get sucked into this world immediately. Second, the characters are so well-rounded.

You can feel their ache radiating off the page. The micro poetry Hannah leaves all over the city breaks my heart every time I read them, but what absolutely sends me is how the girls learned to process grief and all the other Big Emotions by making soup. This book easily has crossover appeal for both teens and adults.

Aside from the fun coincidence that I share my surname with the lake in this book, I fell in love on page one because one of the narrators is actually the lake! Chapters alternate between Renn Lake and 12-year-old Annalise, whose family owns lakeside cabins. Annalise has always felt a special connection to this water. When a toxic algae bloom threatens Renn Lake, she and her friends fight to save it. I grew up on a lake in Washington State that became clogged with Eurasian Milfoil, a highly invasive plant affecting water quality, fish, and other things. Remembering what it felt like to see my local lake transform, and how powerless I felt to help it, I rooted for Annalise and her friends and felt hope for this new generation of activists.