Here are 59 books that The Farmer and the Clown fans have personally recommended if you like
The Farmer and the Clown.
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Fairy tales were my first love but I didn’t discover the true magic of children’s picture books until I left my 25-year career as an attorney to enter an MFA program. Wow, was I amazed. Picture books—books in which pictures tell an integral part of the story—not only create an instant connection between reader and little listener but stay with us into adulthood as memories. With this insight, I dove into the genre to discover what distinguishes picture books that are read and reread from those that fade. The answer turns out to be—tales that engender awe and wonder, yarns with heart, and narratives about friendship and kindness. Those are the stories that stay with us forever.
With
simple, colorful drawings and age-appropriate text, author-illustrator Lewis
relays the amazing journey of a Jupiter-striped stone through the cosmos,
including its brief billion-year stop on Earth. I absolutely adore this book
and use it as a mentor text in my classes to show new and experienced writers
how children’s picture books can touch the soul. Working with only 32 pages and
minimal words, Lewis captures the wonder of the universe and the never-ending story
of where we, as humans, fit into the heavens. The twist at the end is pure
magic.
This striking picturebook chronicles the journey of a small striped stone-which bears an uncanny resemblance to the planet Jupiter-from its beginning in the heavens to its landing on primordial Earth to its return to space. Award-winning author/illustrator Paul Owen Lewis has created a simple yet never-ending story which will inspire more questions than it answers. First new book from author of STORM BOY in six years!Will inspire readers to gaze at the night sky and wonder.Abundant cross-curricular possibilities.
Fairy tales were my first love but I didn’t discover the true magic of children’s picture books until I left my 25-year career as an attorney to enter an MFA program. Wow, was I amazed. Picture books—books in which pictures tell an integral part of the story—not only create an instant connection between reader and little listener but stay with us into adulthood as memories. With this insight, I dove into the genre to discover what distinguishes picture books that are read and reread from those that fade. The answer turns out to be—tales that engender awe and wonder, yarns with heart, and narratives about friendship and kindness. Those are the stories that stay with us forever.
Author Meg Kearney and Caldecott Honor Book artist E.B. Lewis join together to create the enchanting story of a three-legged street mutt who longs to find his forever home. After his canine mob is napped by animal control, Trouper watches each of his pals get adopted. Alone in his crate, he wonders if anyone will ever want him. Of course—with perfect pacing—the right boy comes along at the right time and oh my goodness, do we cheer. In a charming approach, Trouper is told from the dog’s POV. This book oozes with heart and humor and is a sure re-read for anyone who loves an underdog.
A moving story of a three-legged stray dog who finds a loving boy to call his own--illustrated by Caldecott Honor Book artist E.B. Lewis. Based on a true story.
Trouper ran with a mob of mutts who tripped over trash cans and pawed the cold streets for bones. They howled and cried and wished for a home. Until one day, the dogs are captured from off the streets and put in cages in a shelter as they wait to be adopted. Trouper watches sadly as, one by one, each of his dog friends are chosen. He's the only one left…
There is much in the world that we cannot change. This is much that can make us feel sad or angry. So, is there nothing we can do about all of this? I believe in the depths of my being that we can all reach out, be kind, and do good deeds. Instead of just complaining about wrong things, we can do something to try to make the world a little better, a little brighter, even if it’s just for one other person. That’s why I wrote my book.
I loved this book because Amos McGee was such a kind, wonderful man. When he got sick, it warmed my heart to see that the love he gave was returned to him. I really liked the illustrations, too.
Some of the story is told in wordless pages of art. I felt that the book worked well to teach children as young as two about compassion and empathy. Also, I think they’re young enough to absolutely accept all the fantasy of talking animals.
Every day Amos McGee spends a little bit of time with each of his friends at the zoo, running races with the tortoise, keeping the shy penguin company, and even reading bedtime stories to the owl. But when Amos is too sick to make it to the zoo, his animal friends decide it's time they returned the favour.
Fairy tales were my first love but I didn’t discover the true magic of children’s picture books until I left my 25-year career as an attorney to enter an MFA program. Wow, was I amazed. Picture books—books in which pictures tell an integral part of the story—not only create an instant connection between reader and little listener but stay with us into adulthood as memories. With this insight, I dove into the genre to discover what distinguishes picture books that are read and reread from those that fade. The answer turns out to be—tales that engender awe and wonder, yarns with heart, and narratives about friendship and kindness. Those are the stories that stay with us forever.
A
bear and a goose are so different. Bear is quiet and firm. Goose is loud and
pushy. How could they possibly be friends? But that’s exactly what happens in
this bestselling tale of a bear who wants to read in peace and a goose that
needs a friend. Author-illustrator Suzanne Bloom captures the concept of making
and keeping friends with toddler-appropriate language and sparse but colorful
drawings. The simple text paired with hilarious illustrations make this book
one of my all-time favorite read-a-louds. A Splendid Friend, Indeed is, indeed, a sweet
reminder of why friendship and kindness matter.
Bear just wants to read and write and think while Goose wants to talk and talk and talk. Bear is getting increasingly frustrated as Goose keeps interrupting him. Then Goose announces that thinking makes him hungry and he needs to make a snack. Goose returns with the snack and a note that he reads to bear: "You are my splendid friend." Bear responds by giving Goose a bear hug. They are splendid friends, indeed.
I come from a family of eaters. Food was often at the center of family stories and celebrations. I first became fascinated with apples while I was working on my Ph.D. in history, and my interest has since expanded to include all things related to food history. I’ve taught classes on food history, and a few years ago, I started collecting cookbooks. I blog about my cookbook collection and other historical food oddities on my website.
I think Sanora Babb is an underappreciated author. During the 1930s, Babb worked for the Farm Security Administration and was inspired to write a novel about Dust Bowl migrants. Unfortunately, her publishing contract was canceled when John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath.
As much as I love Steinbeck, I love Babb’s novel more. She paints a vivid picture of life in small-town Oklahoma through small, domestic details. I appreciated the range of characters across the economic spectrum. Her characters are strong, but they are also aware that they are cogs in a machine, caught in circumstances beyond their control. She manages to highlight the plight of farm workers while maintaining their dignity as human beings.
Sanora Babb's long-hidden novel Whose Names Are Unknown tells an intimate story of the High Plains farmers who fled drought dust storms during the Great Depression. Written with empathy for the farmers' plight, this powerful narrative is based upon the author's firsthand experience.
This clear-eyed and unsentimental story centers on the fictional Dunne family as they struggle to survive and endure while never losing faith in themselves. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, Milt, Julia, their two little girls, and Milt's father, Konkie, share a life of cramped circumstances in a one-room dugout with never enough to eat. Yet buried in the…
I believe that we betray the past when we treat it as the past, and we abandon our ancestors, actual and spiritual, when we dehumanize them as denizens of history, as fundamentally different from us in terms of their lusts and appetites and political nuances and strange senses of humor and nose picking and dance moves and love. Novels, I think, are a powerful mode for understanding and perhaps even undoing the cultural patterns that would have us believe that history is behind us and that the past is not part of the forever dance of the present.
This novel is haunting, poetic, dense, and exquisite. It is centered around a small town in New England and wends and weaves through the strange and terrible things that happen there. Allio's writing is exquisite and melodic, and while this book nominally takes place a century ago, in so many ways, it frighteningly and fluently depicts today's world.
"An elegant, luminous, moving work of lyric prose. Every page shimmers."-Carole Maso
"Fiercely imagined, alive with incandescent imagery, Kirstin Allio's Garner is a memorable debut."-John Burnham Schwartz
Landlocked, sail-shaped Garner, New Hampshire, is a town delineated by its Puritan ethics and its "Live Free or Die" mentality. Like the forbidding landscape of Wharton's Ethan Frome, this New England outpost keeps its secrets and shapes its inhabitants. Frances Giddens, a spirited, elusive girl born at the dawn of the twentieth century and now approaching womanhood, moves through the forests and rivers that mark Garner's borders as easily as she befriends its…
I love short-story collections. I’ve read dozens to hundreds of them, starting as a child reading Richard Scarry, and I still make them a regular part of my reading diet. I started trying my own hand at short fiction in 2012 and have since finished more than one hundred stories, including the ones in Animal Husbandry. I’m now working on my first novel after years as a short-story writer, and it gives me additional admiration for how many outstanding novelists are also able to master short fiction. It’s two different skill sets, and the five authors I mentioned here (among many others) excel at both.
Kinsella was a master at blending two of my favorite things—fiction with supernatural elements in a realistic setting, and also baseball.
The title story was expanded into the novel Shoeless Joe, which later became the movie Field of Dreams, and I was fascinated by how the story changed in those three formats. Plus, the collection is packed with cool historical Americana fiction laced with uncanny happenings.
I’m a historical novelist originally from Ohio. In Civil War lessons at school, we learned about battles and generals and read The Red Badge of Courage and other books centering on men’s experiences. With the exception of Florence Nightingale, women were largely absent from the discussions. I want to know about the women. As an adult, I lived in Roswell, Georgia, where I learned of the mill workers, mostly women and children, who, in 1864, were arrested and sent north by Federal forces for making Confederate cloth. Their fates largely remain a mystery, and I wrote my book in order to imagine what we may never know.
I love stories about ordinary women living through extraordinary times. In this story, the protagonist, Joetta, a North Carolina yeoman farmer who does not share the Confederacy’s view on slavery, attempts to stay neutral during the Civil War despite the ever-growing costs.
I admired the way Everhart deals with the relationship between Joetta and her teenage sons, boys old enough to assert their independence and choose their own way, no matter how much she may wish they chose differently.
From the author of The Saints of Swallow Hill, an evocative, morally complex novel set in rural 19th century North Carolina, as one woman fights to keep her family united, her farm running, and her convictions whole during the most devastating and divisive period in American history, perfect for readers of Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier and Enemy Women by Paulette Jiles.
Talk of impending war is a steady drumbeat throughout North Carolina, though Joetta McBride pays it little heed. She and her husband, Ennis, have built a modest but happy life for themselves, raising two sons, fifteen-year-old Henry, and…
I started my career as an academic social scientist and seem set to end it as a gardener, small-scale farmer, and accidental ecological activist. I’ve learned a lot of things along the way from these different parts of my life that I channel in my writing. I don’t claim much expertise. In fact, I think claims to expert knowledge that can ‘solve’ modern problems are a big part of our modern problems. I’ve always been interested in how people and communities try to figure things out for themselves, often by picking up the pieces when big ideas have failed them. My writing arises out of that.
Almost everywhere, there’s a local agrarian tradition in which people ingeniously figured out how to build autonomous livelihoods on their local ecological base. And almost everywhere it’s been destroyed by modern economic forces, which not only import energy and capital non-resiliently from elsewhere, but also import scorn for older rural ways once admired for their tenacity.
With a historian’s eye for detail, a storyteller’s gift for narrative, and an intensely human empathy for ordinary lives, Steven Stoll tells this story in the case of Appalachia in the United States. But the implications go much wider, and are endlessly informative for thinking through the basis of local agrarian societies worldwide today.
Short-listed for the Phi Beta Kappa Ralph Waldo Emerson Book Award
In Ramp Hollow, Steven Stoll offers a fresh, provocative account of Appalachia, and why it matters. He begins with the earliest European settlers, whose desire for vast forests to hunt in was frustrated by absentee owners―including George Washington and other founders―who laid claim to the region. Even as Daniel Boone became famous as a backwoods hunter and guide, the economy he represented was already in peril. Within just a few decades, Appalachian hunters and farmers went from pioneers to pariahs, from heroes to hillbillies, in the national imagination, and…
Because of the presence of my four beloved grandparents throughout my growing up years, (all four of my grandparents even attended my wedding), I’ve always enjoyed relationships with older people. My comfort with older people translates into my friendships where many of the women in my life are quite a bit older than me. These intergenerational relationships offer wisdom and experience that informs my own life. I hold an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and have written one novel for adults and one for middle-grade readers. My past jobs include being a television engineer, an adjunct professor, and a publishing professional.
Single and self-sufficient Dottie O’Connell farms her 300 acres with strength and independence, not needing anyone. When she finds herself the primary caretaker to her friend’s young daughter Mattie after the girl is orphaned by a tragic fire, Dottie suddenly is thrust into guardianship with a young person she had no desire to raise. While I admired Dottie for taking on such a life-changing responsibility, at times I couldn’t fathom Dottie’s choices involving the girl. Thankfully, the author peels away the layers of Dottie’s wounds, allowing us at least to understand her while maybe not agreeing with her. Each of us has a Dottie story that influences our decisions for good or for bad.
This is an unforgettable debut novel about the nature of forgiveness, the debts we owe, and the mysteries of what we call grace. When Dottie Connell adopts her best friend's daughter out of a combination of spite and loyalty, she must confront her ideas on motherhood, sexuality, and God. Set in rural Ohio, "This Heavy Silence" spans ten years in Dottie's life. She loves the land despite its bitterness and hardship. She raises her adopted daughter and farms her family's three hundred acres in a time and place unaccustomed to independent women. Her struggle to buy back the farm comes…
