100 books like Sister Noon

An immersive and atmospheric novel, The Jump-Off Creek follows a taciturn widow named Lydia into the Oregon wilderness where she hopes to homestead. Resourceful, fiercely independent (and determined to stay that way) she nonetheless finds herself drawn into a bedraggled community of homesteaders and frontiersmen. Yes, there’s a love interest, but that is a subplot, not the story. The story is one of survival and grit set in a landscape as beautiful and unforgiving as the weather.

Molly Gloss is a master storyteller. I find each of her books quite different but equally compelling. The Jump-Off Creek might be my favorite only because it was my first taste of her work. And, of course, I remain in awe of the indomitable Lydia.

You’ve just been married when civil war breaks out and your husband goes off to fight. What do you do? Remain at home, waiting? Rosette cuts her hair, dons men’s clothing, and goes off to fight alongside her husband. If this sounds far-fetched, you’ll be intrigued to discover that the novel is based on a firsthand account, which the author discovered on the shelves of a university library while in search of something else entirely.

I’d come across a handful of true accounts of women dressed as men while researching my own gold rush novel. I didn’t know, until I read McCabe’s novel, that hundreds of women had fought as men during the American Civil War. If that’s not badass, then I don’t know what is.

The forthright honesty and the audacity of Nora Simms, narrator of Erika Mailman’s Woman of Ill Fame, is stunning and nearly as compelling as the murder mystery at the center of the novel. Set in San Francisco during the Gold Rush, the novel takes us into the city’s bordellos, which, like the rest of the state, have been infected by a get rich quick at any cost ethos. The cost for many of Nora’s colleagues is high. Women of ill-fame are being killed, one by one, and only Nora is capable and willing to wade through layers of deception to discover the identity of the killer and to save her own life. 

Nora is not your typical damsel in distress and that might be why I love this book so much. She’s not a “good” woman, by society's standards, but she is one of the most surprising… show more.

Lois Leveen uses a mixture of fact and well-researched speculation to bring Mary Bowser, a largely unknown Civil War hero, to the page. Free and educated in the North, Mary Bowser returned to slavery to spy on the Confederacy in the household of Jefferson Davis. This much, at least, is known about the woman. Leveen imagines Bowser’s early life, braids in national history, and leaves us breathless with wonder at the courage and audacity required to complete the assignment Bowser accepted.

I love novels that pick up where the historical record ends, especially novels that do so lovingly and with such tender respect for the real woman lost in history.

In Suicide Blonde, the lead character Jesse tries to sustain a connection with her beautiful bisexual boyfriend, Bell, who though he loves her, cannot refuse the allure of sex with strange men and seems to be regularly “dipped in sleaze.” Jesse becomes caretaker of Madam Pig, an old obese beauty queen who lives in a crumbling old house. The paint peels in the wind with only vacant lots and industrial buildings nearby, as Madam Pig swills red wine and vomits down staircases. I loved this book for the lonely dystopian feel and the way Jesse seems utterly alone in the world. I also loved the natural way Stienke writes about sex. I learned a great deal from her graphic content, learning how to actually write sex into litertaure. The book is not for the faint of heart and does not have a happy ending, but in its way, it… show more.

Jessica Sewell’s book Women and the Everyday City makes us feel like we’re walking the streets of turn-of-the-century San Francisco. She combines traditional architectural history sources like floor plans, maps, and historic photographs with diaries written by women from varied class and ethnic backgrounds to piece together their experiences of the city. My favorite section uses advertisements and published memoirs to demonstrate that women without the economic means and cultural capital to be welcomed in downtown department stores or even some of the local grocery stores had much more complicated choices to make as they navigated everyday needs like finding transportation, buying food, and creating community. She compares the urban public imagination with how the city was actually built and experienced—just like theorist Henri Lefebvre suggests!

How to Make an American Quilt is a novel stringing together wonderful interconnected stories told across a couple of generations and incorporating descriptions of sight, smell, and touch. “I am not the kind of person to throw something away just because it is broken. I would not waste what could still be of use,” says one of the main characters who goes on to explain that quilts are made of “spare time” and “excess materials.”

This is one of the best, most alive short fiction collections published in the 21st Century. Steinberg’s fictions are generally powerful, but the episodes and sentences that compose them tend to be compelling in their own right. So while the individual narratives in this book are brilliant short fictions on their own, the sentences or thoughts that construct them have an electrifying effect few writers can manage.

I’m a big fan of Don Brown and this is one of my favorites. In this biography, we follow the adventure of Alice Ramsey who was the first woman to drive across the United States. It was 1909, so no easy task since there weren’t any interstates, road maps, or gas stations. Yet, Alice, along with her companions, set off. Magically, Brown lets us go along with them as they ramble past farms and fields, muster their way down roads clogged with pigs, dig themselves out of muddy holes, and urge the car across vast moonlit deserts, and over the grueling Sierra Nevada mountains. Alice’s grand adventure not only celebrates a woman’s first, but takes us along for the long, extraordinary, bumpy ride. Bravo Alice! Bravo Don Brown!

In this exquisitely written poem of a memoir, Jillian Lauren splays her heart wide open, on every page as she transforms from an addict whose used up most of her luck to a mother whose role requires great stores of grit, determination, and love. We’re right there with her as she and her husband decide to adopt a boy from Ethiopia, and we’re along for the bumpy, often painful, occasionally joyful, ride through the challenges of parenting this tiny person who has already lost so much, but has so much to give. Outside of motherhood, she’s so funny and interesting I kind of want to be best friends with her. Not in a weirdo-stalker way, though.