Fans pick 58 books like The Ballad of Dani and Eli

By Nicholas Bruner,

Here are 58 books that The Ballad of Dani and Eli fans have personally recommended if you like The Ballad of Dani and Eli. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Ruins of Gorlan

Jaysyn NyCole Author Of A Traitor’s Heart: The Lands of Ala’Mar Saga

From my list on epic fantasy with medieval tones and magic.

Why am I passionate about this?

Ever since I was a child, I’ve enjoyed the idea of knights and dragons, kings and queens, marvelous creatures and magicks. After reading blossomed within me, I read book after book and found that the fantasy world was more than just a fancy—it was home. For over 30 years, I’ve enjoyed the good with the bad and everything in between. My imagination flourishes every time I open the pages and a new journey begins. For this reason, I delved into the realm of writing in hopes that I, too, might share an adventure that readers will find themselves lost in.

Jaysyn's book list on epic fantasy with medieval tones and magic

Jaysyn NyCole Why did Jaysyn love this book?

The Ruins of Gorlan for me was a reminder that you never let anyone tell you, “you can’t”.

Will was a misfit, an orphan. He was too small for battle school and becoming a knight, not adept at being a diplomat, a scholar, nor even a cook. He had no idea what would become of him. It was a fear that permeates down deep. I remember how I felt when I couldn’t go into the army, was unable to go to Devry, and I didn’t want the ordinary.

For Will, it all changes and his fantastic journey begins as he’s chosen to be the ranger’s apprentice. And I cheered inside. I knew it. He didn’t give up. We didn’t give up. And found what our skills were best suited for.

By John Flanagan,

Why should I read it?

5 authors picked The Ruins of Gorlan as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 10, 11, 12, and 13.

What is this book about?

The Ruins of Gorlan is the first thrilling book in John Flanagan's Ranger's Apprentice series - over eight million sold worldwide.

They have always scared him in the past - the Rangers, with their dark cloaks and shadowy ways. The villagers believe the Rangers practise magic that makes them invisible to ordinary people. And now 15-year-old Will, always small for his age, has been chosen as a Ranger's apprentice.

What he doesn't yet realize is that the Rangers are the protectors of the kingdom. Highly trained in the skills of battle and surveillance, they fight the battles before the battles…


Book cover of Still Falling

S.C. Megale Author Of This Is Not a Love Scene: A Novel

From my list on with some serious ass-kicking.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an author who believes stories must first entertain and thrill if they are ever to instill something powerful and unforgettable. While I would love to sit here and compile books that laud the values I believe in, that’s just not how it works. Action is the best way to convey theme – and these examples celebrate the storytelling techniques I stand by. I love ass-kickers, in literature and in life. And I hope one day to be remembered as one of them. 

S.C.'s book list on with some serious ass-kicking

S.C. Megale Why did S.C. love this book?

Good sweet lawd of mercy, if you want ass-kicking, read Marty Wilsey. Ass-kicking with guns? Yes. Ass-kicking with fists? Yes. Ass-kicking with blades? Yes. Ass-kicking with good writing? You better believe it. This is Wilsey’s debut book, and it opens up his breakneck-paced sci-fi repertoire. High recommended. 

By Martin Wilsey,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Still Falling as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

He's a working stiff looking for a good paycheck. When the Ventura and its crew enter orbit for a scheduled planet survey, the ship activates an automated defense system protecting the planet. Although the Ventura is destroyed in the attack, Barcus alone survives the harrowing fall to the remote planet surface. He struggles to remain alive and sane, and to discover why everyone he knew and loved on the Ventura was deliberately murdered.

Swinging between despair and fury, Barcus discovers that for every answer he obtains, there are more questions raised. Barcus is assisted by the Emergency Module, Em, his…


Book cover of Road Trip

S.C. Megale Author Of This Is Not a Love Scene: A Novel

From my list on with some serious ass-kicking.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an author who believes stories must first entertain and thrill if they are ever to instill something powerful and unforgettable. While I would love to sit here and compile books that laud the values I believe in, that’s just not how it works. Action is the best way to convey theme – and these examples celebrate the storytelling techniques I stand by. I love ass-kickers, in literature and in life. And I hope one day to be remembered as one of them. 

S.C.'s book list on with some serious ass-kicking

S.C. Megale Why did S.C. love this book?

I love how Road Trip hooks you right away with its concept: a road for sale? What kind of road? How much? And what could be on that road? You might not be ready for it. I can assure you there is ample action on this highway, however, that could give new meaning to "road rage." Like all of Keener’s work, this book is original and well-written. You could even say it’s ass-kicking.

By David Keener,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Road Trip as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

He Bought a Magic Road

Rocco Fitch had a grand plan for his life…but it went up in smoke the day he was disabled in Afghanistan. Now he’s unemployed, his wife has left him, and the bank is about to take his house. But he can still spare some change when he encounters a fellow vet begging in the street. Except the strange man won’t accept the money unless Rocco agrees he’s buying a road.

The next morning, the beggar is AWOL, there’s a magic highway crossing Rocco’s backyard that nobody else can see, and demonic-looking riders are traveling his…


Book cover of Hangfire: An Eddie Holland Novel

S.C. Megale Author Of This Is Not a Love Scene: A Novel

From my list on with some serious ass-kicking.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an author who believes stories must first entertain and thrill if they are ever to instill something powerful and unforgettable. While I would love to sit here and compile books that laud the values I believe in, that’s just not how it works. Action is the best way to convey theme – and these examples celebrate the storytelling techniques I stand by. I love ass-kickers, in literature and in life. And I hope one day to be remembered as one of them. 

S.C.'s book list on with some serious ass-kicking

S.C. Megale Why did S.C. love this book?

What makes Hangire such a great ass-kicking novel is that it’s clear the author knows guns and gunfight strategy. The action is crisp, but aggressively realistic. Tension never ceases—if it’s not shooting up bad guys, it’s with a dash of romance or a smidge of mystery. The writing is confident and action-packed. Even the title, am I right? 

By John H. Matthews,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Hangfire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Eddie Holland is back. The former FBI agent turned private detective in Austin, Texas, returns for another fast paced mystery. Following on the heels of The South Coast and Ballyvaughan, Hangfire keeps you guessing until the very end. Clem Akins has gone missing, but not before sending a cryptic text message to Eddie. With little to go on, Eddie and Gus go looking for him, only to find the trail leads them to uncover a group of former Army soldiers on the run or in hiding, afraid of their treasonous pasts catching up to them.HANGFIRE is the third novel in…


Book cover of Mel Bay Presents How to Make a Band Work

Gayla M. Mills Author Of Making Music for Life: Rediscover Your Musical Passion

From my list on helping you make music.

Why am I passionate about this?

After dabbling in music in my youth, I returned to playing roots music over fifteen years ago. I’ve joined music circles, jammed, made new friends, and learned a lot. My husband Gene and I have recorded three albums and played at bars, festivals, weddings, and listening rooms. Professionally, I’ve spent years as a writing teacher and writer, and I also teach at an annual folk music camp. I wanted to share the joys of music with others, so I talked with dozens of musicians, dug down to find rare resources, and pulled it together into Making Music for Life to make it easier for others to pursue their own musical journey.

Gayla's book list on helping you make music

Gayla M. Mills Why did Gayla love this book?

Pete Warnick is best known in the bluegrass world as a performer (Country Cooking and Hot Rize) and teacher (the Warnick Method), but his book on the nuts and bolts of being in a band is uniquely helpful in its specific details, particularly for weekend warriors. He addresses getting a sound system, rehearsals, prep immediately before the gig, band dynamics and emotions, performance details, and more. Although some material is now dated, I’ve used much of the book’s details to improve our bookings and performances and found tips available nowhere else. 

By Pete Wernick,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Mel Bay Presents How to Make a Band Work as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This "guide to success" has been created especially for bluegrass and acoustic performers, with applications for all levels of the music/entertainment business. Many of the skills necessary for a band's success do not directly involve music and are rarely formally taught. This book is an attempt to fill that gap and teach you how to help yourself on the professional level so that you can achieve your musical dreams. It covers such topics as: How to create good promotional materials; Whom to call to get bookings, and what to say; How to attract important allies such as record companies and…


Book cover of The Days of Bluegrass Love

Michael Cart Author Of Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

From my list on beautifully capturing gay teens’ lives and loves.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been a full-time writer since 1994 and have so far published twenty-seven books, three of them with gay themes: My Father’s Scar, a gay coming-of-age novel and two about LGBTQ+ issues: Top 250 LGTBQ Books for Teens and The Heart Has Its Reasons, a history of queer literature. I’ve been interested in this literature since I was a gay teen myself, because there were no YA books with queer characters then. I missed seeing my face in the pages of a good book and so I promised myself that when I became an adult. I would make sure there was an ample assortment for today’s queer kids. And, guess what? I’ve kept my promise!

Michael's book list on beautifully capturing gay teens’ lives and loves

Michael Cart Why did Michael love this book?

Weary of people asking him what his plans for the future are, eighteen-year-old Dutch teen Tycho decides to travel from his Holland home to America to work at a camp for international kids. Along the way, he meets Oliver, who’s from Norway, and is also going to work at the camp. The two quickly become fast friends and then something more. When their love relationship is discovered, they’re expelled from the camp, and the two fly back to Norway where Tycho will stay with Oliver while the boy’s mother is gone. No, there are no wild parties, just a lovely examination of an emerging relationship that is challenged by Oliver’s keeping a closely guarded secret. If this sounds dull, trust me, it isn’t! Find out why I’m so crazy about this book by reading it. Tell them Michael sent you...

By Edward van de Vendel,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Days of Bluegrass Love as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 12, 13, 14, and 15.

What is this book about?

Tycho Zeling is drifting through his life. Everything in it - school, friends, girls, plans for the future - just kind of ... happens. Like a movie he presses play on, but doesn't direct.

So Tycho decides to break away from everything. He flies to America to spend his summer as a counselor at a summer camp, for international kids. It is there that Oliver walks in, another counselor, from Norway.

And it is there that Tycho feels his life stop, and begin again, finally, as his.
The Days of Bluegrass Love was originally published in the Netherlands in 1999.…


Book cover of The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society

Brooks Blevins Author Of A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 1: The Old Ozarks

From my list on the Ozarks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.

Brooks' book list on the Ozarks

Brooks Blevins Why did Brooks love this book?

It is doubtful that anyone has been more associated with an American region than Vance Randolph is with the Ozarks. Ornery and darkly romantic, Randolph was always attracted to people on the margins. Few were more marginal than the Ozarkers in the early twentieth century. While we must take a lot of Randolph’s “nonfiction” with a dose of salt, The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, was the first book-length documentary take on the region and its people. It set the stage for generations of Ozarks observations to come. 

By Vance Randolph,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Ozarks as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Vance Randolph was perfectly constituted for his role as the chronicler of Ozark folkways. As a self-described "hack writer," he was as much a figure of the margins as his chosen subjects, even as his essentially romantic identification with the region he first visited as the vacationing child of mainstream parents was encouraged by editors and tempered by his scientific training. In The Ozarks, originally published in 1931, we have Randolph's first book-length portrait of the people he would spend the next half-century studying. The full range of Randolph's interests - in language, in hunting and fishing, in folksongs and…


Book cover of The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks

Brooks Blevins Author Of A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 1: The Old Ozarks

From my list on the Ozarks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.

Brooks' book list on the Ozarks

Brooks Blevins Why did Brooks love this book?

It may be pure fiction, but Harington’s saga of the remote community of Stay More (home, of course, to the Stay Morons) is still the best, most entertaining history of the Ozarks in existence. Beneath the postmodern devices and 1970s-era subversiveness, Harington’s abiding love for the Ozarks and its people shines through. From the backcountry dialect to the intricacies of a century and a half of regional history, it remains – for my money – the best thing ever written about the Ozarks.

By Donald Harington,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Jacob and Noah Ingledew trudge 600 miles from their native Tennessee to found Stay More, a small town nestled in a narrow valley that winds among the Arkansas Ozarks and into the reader's imagination. The Ingledew saga-which follows six generations of 'Stay Morons' through 140 years of abundant living and prodigal loving-is the heart of Harington's jubilant, picaresque novel. Praised as one of the year's ten best novels by the American Library Association when first published, this tale continues to captivate readers with its winning fusion of lyricism and comedy.


Book cover of Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks: Schoolcraft's Ozark Journal, 1818-1819

Brooks Blevins Author Of A History of the Ozarks, Vol. 1: The Old Ozarks

From my list on the Ozarks.

Why am I passionate about this?

I can’t say that I was even conscious of having grown up in the Ozarks until stumbling upon a regional geography book in college. Once I learned that the rural community of my childhood was part of a hill country stretching from the outskirts of St. Louis into the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, I dedicated my life’s work to explaining (and demystifying) the Ozarkers – a people not quite southern, not quite midwestern, and not quite western.

Brooks' book list on the Ozarks

Brooks Blevins Why did Brooks love this book?

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft may have been a condescending, greenhorn Easterner when he ventured through the sparsely settled Ozarks more than two centuries ago, but his descriptions of the terrain he traversed and the frontier settlements he saw are an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and geography of the region. Cultural geographer Milt Rafferty’s maps and annotations put us in the woods and on the streams with Schoolcraft every step of the way. 

By H. Schoolcraft,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Rude Pursuits and Rugged Peaks as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In the winter of 1818, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft set out from Potosi, Missouri, to document lead mines in the interior of the Ozarks. Intending only to make his fortune by publishing an account of the area's mineral resources, he became the first skilled observer to witness and record frontier life in the Ozarks.

The journal kept by Schoolcraft as he traveled ninety days in the rugged terrain of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas was originally published in 1821 and has become an essential record of Ozark territorial society and natural history documenting some of the earliest American settlers in the…


Book cover of With

Kevin Brockmeier Author Of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories

From my list on ghosts.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve written and published one hundred very short ghost stories, plus a handful of longer ones, and have spent a lifetime reading and watching and thinking about stories of ghosts and the afterlife. My expertise, such as it is, involves ghosts as beings of narrative and metaphor. I’ve encountered great numbers of them on the page and on the screen—nowhere else—but I confess that I would love someday (though don’t expect) to encounter them in the flesh. My flesh, that is to say; their fleshlessness.

Kevin's book list on ghosts

Kevin Brockmeier Why did Kevin love this book?

Harington was one of the great unheralded—or at least under heralded—novelists of the last fifty years, bursting with stories and whole populations of flawlessly captured human voices, and With was one of his highest achievements. It follows the fortunes of a kidnapped girl in the Arkansas Ozarks who befriends the woods’ menagerie of animals, as well as the ghost (or, as Harington would style it, the “in-habit”) of a twelve-year-old boy whose body did not die but moved away and abandoned him. Recommended if you like your ghosts warm-hearted and aching for home.

By Donald Harington,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked With as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

With is the sensual, suspenseful and irresistible tale of Robin Kerr, a young girl abducted from her family and brought to a remote Ozark mountaintop, where she is left to fend for herself. Over the course of a decade, Robin grows up without human relationship, but with the company of animals and an inhabit, the half-living ghost of a young boy. In this magical novel in the Stay More series, Harington gives us one of the most original survival, coming-of-age, and love stories ever told.


Book cover of The Ruins of Gorlan
Book cover of Still Falling
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Interested in the Ozarks, Arkansas, and tsunamis?

The Ozarks 19 books
Arkansas 29 books
Tsunamis 11 books