Fans pick 100 books like The Fox Woman

This is a must-read for me to understand the archetypes inherent to women. I have not only read it but also reread it and studied it with other women. 

I love anything wild, and so does Dr. Estés. She believes that within every woman, there lives a powerful force filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. The wild is instinctual and endangered. Civilization demands women become rigid in roles contrary to the life-giving messages of our own souls. I have always believed this, and this book reinforces my beliefs.

Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés uses mythology, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories to assist the reconnection to our wild nature. Her interpretations are so rich, just reading the forward from time to time makes me weep with recognition of truth.

This has very strong and life-giving implications for me as a writer, but it truly is an astounding book… show more.

I very nearly stopped reading this book–even though it’s so short as it starts off unbelievably abstract. I didn’t know what was going on, and the descriptions only added to the confusion. But I’m so glad I kept going.

The main character does amnesia in the most charming way, and discovering his past and the strange world he seems both lost in and totally at home in was absolutely enchanting. This has stuck with me ever since, like the most vivid fever dream.

Some novels lean into the alienness of their historical settings, making them feel almost like secondary worlds.

The Buried Giant is one of those. It takes place partly in legend, after the death of King Arthur, and follows an elderly married couple in a society that has quite literally lost its memory. I struggled with this book at first because the prose is so unassuming, but it got under my skin.

Ishiguro's simple prose creates a feeling of unsettling ordinariness, like the way your dreaming brain accepts a logic your waking brain never could.

The same way hearing “soap opera” used as a pejorative upsets me so much I want to fake my own death, frame my estranged father for murder, and wrest control of his business empire, hearing “fairy tale” used that way makes me want to wave a wand and turn the detractors of science fiction and fantasy into horny toads.

John Crowley’s Little, Big, winner of the World Fantasy Award, is not only a fairy tale with actual fairies, but also one that’s an actual tale. So many novels described as literary forget to tell a story. This is not one of them. In Little, Big, you’ll meet the charismatic Drinkwater family; I would say more, but it’s best if you see for yourself where this tale takes them.

Do you want a crash course on Japanese yokai and spirits like trickster kitsune fox, grandmother badger, flesh-eating ghosts, tree spirits, and oni demons? Hankering to go along on an adventure tale through samurai-laden alternate historical Japan to find a monk who knows the hidden location of a temple or swoon after a YA romance?

So maybe the story’s main plot is a search for a MacGuffin, and the characters are solid archetypes, but the fun in this book is going along for the crazy ride a la Alice in Wonderland as they meet and defeat various folktale dangers.

As a Japanese Studies major, I read Japanese myth-based books with the intention of enjoying them—but also with the fear that the author might have weirdly coopted the stories I know and love.

No fear here. Kitsune-Tsuki does a good job presenting a “who is the kitsune” mystery in the context of a nobleman’s impending wedding and portraying some cool Onmyouji (shamanic curse worker) chants and rituals. Best of all, because I love new spins, there’s a shadow wolf character—a kind of ninja-like policeman—who provides tension.

There are clues sprinkled throughout the hunt for the kitsune spirit about the twist ending, but I didn’t see it coming until just before it happened; so delightful to be fooled by a clever fox!

I fell in bittersweet love with the kitsune from Gaiman’s retelling of a classic Japanese tale. A badger and fox wager that they can drive a monk from his temple. The fox turns into a woman to woo him—and falls in love.

The story is haunting, but Amano’s dreamy illustrations make it unforgettable. While the other authors are all Western-raised, this version of kitsune comes to life from a specific Japanese fable and the pen of a Japanese illustrator. A classic not to be missed. 

I was instantly drawn into an alternate, magical feudal Japan where trickster foxes, dragons, witches, boar-headed guardians of the forest, and okami-wolves live secretly alongside the usual human lords and warriors because of the central love triangle.

Rin is cursed into speechlessness and sent to sabotage the human lord, Hikaru’s, treaty with another powerful family, but instead falls in love. She is helped by Shin, Rin's Okami friend, who secretly loves her. Hijinks ensue, helped along by magic. This had a very manga/anime vibe but was the least “traditional” regarding the fox magic.

The crime scene generally occurs near the start of a mystery—something incomprehensible and threatening the reader and detective will endeavor to explain by the book’s end. Sometimes, though, the world is the crime. In almost painfully beautiful language, this book sets us down in a frightening fairytale forest. We’re traveling with a failed detective looking for a runaway wife, but much of the investigative work emanates from the reader attempting—and often failing—to break through the atmosphere, through the visceral but unmappable feelings of danger and loss the text produces in order to find something that can be named, explained, neutered.

This is the kind of book that affected me sidewise; I never saw it coming, but it got me over and over again. The Spanish edition includes illustrations, the English a suggested playlist.

I’ve reread this book almost as many times as Love in the Ruins. Although the book isn’t as well-known as some of the others I’m recommending, the title’s appropriate because reading these pages walloped my brain.

The novel within a novel written by a character who escapes from an asylum combines conspiracies, mind-control, flying sting rays, doppelgangers, and a delicious writing style. What keeps me engrossed is the love Spenser shows for his characters and his ability to craft a complex storyline from what is basically a fairy tale.