Here are 100 books that The Ghosts of Rose Hill fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
Long Way Down does an incredible job of telling such a contained story, telling everything within the span of a single elevator ride.
Reynolds uses the elevator trip to make the protagonist encounter ghosts of multiple dead people in his community, all connected to his murdered brother, and question if vengeance is the right answer to his grief. This is a well-deserved classic, and a must-read for all novel-in-verse fans!
“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of…
I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
Lawless Spaces uses the novel in verse form to capture multiple voices over several generations, voices of women who all carry the same trauma of being sexualized as women in a patriarchal world.
The verse allows readers to see the patterns between characters in a really compelling way, and think about what has and hasn’t changed in our world regarding how women are viewed.
Perfect for fans of Deb Caletti, this “powerful, absorbing, and beautiful” (Booklist) coming-of-age novel in verse follows a teen girl who connects with the women of her maternal line through their journals and comes to better understand her fraught relationship with her mother.
Mimi’s relationship with her mother has always been difficult. But lately, her mother has been acting more withdrawn than usual, leaving Mimi to navigate the tricky world of turning sixteen alone. What she doesn’t expect is her mother’s advice to start journaling—just like all the woman in her family before her. It’s a tradition, she says. Expected.…
I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
This book tells a beautiful and compelling story about a village girl coming to the city for her education.
We as readers feel the stakes so clearly, and are pulled into Kavi’s journey of reconciling with her identity away from home and the assumptions she makes about others. This story has great nuance and it’s so satisfying to see Kavi grow as a character. Her story challenges readers to think about the assumptions they make about others in their own lives.
Caught between two worlds—a poverty-stricken village and a fancy big-city school—a young Sri Lankan girl must decide who she really is and where she really belongs.
1998, Colombo. The Sri Lankan Civil War is raging, but everyday life must go on. At Kavi’s school, her friends talk about the weekly Top 40, the Backstreet Boys, Shahrukh Khan, Leo & Kate… and who died—or didn’t—in the latest bombing. But Kavi is afraid of something even scarier than war. She fears that if her friends discover her secret—that she is not who she is pretending to be—they’ll stop talking to her.
I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
One is a novel in verse I keep coming back to for the way it uses form to make the reader feel the emotional journey of its protagonists.
Crossan uses verse to capture the emotional intimacy of a relationship between two conjoined twins as they encounter challenges in everyday life, including grief. This book uses visual form so smartly and subtly to show us how these two depend on each other, as well as what it means for Tippie to find herself away from her twin.
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Winner of the Carnegie Medal * Winner of the YA Book Prize * Winner of the Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Award
Tippi and Grace share everything—clothes, friends . . . even their body. Writing in free verse, Sarah Crossan tells the sensitive and moving story of conjoined twin sisters, which will find fans in readers of Gayle Forman, Jodi Picoult, and Jandy Nelson.
Tippi and Grace. Grace and Tippi. For them, it's normal to step into the same skirt. To hook their arms around each other for balance. To fall asleep listening to the other breathing. To…
I can’t remember a time I haven’t been drawn to and fascinated by the link between absurdity/humor and horror. Both genres involve setups and payoffs. The tension built up needs to be released in either a gasp or a laugh. In my own writing, I try to make myself giggle in joy at the ridiculousness of a situation and then recoil at the underlying horror that anchors it to the real world. It’s a balance I constantly try to reach and that I personally find is a joy to read.
I read somewhere that Franz Kafka would laugh so loud when writing his stories that he woke up his neighbors. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I get it. It’s not what is commonly thought of when someone talks about Kafka’s stories. I mean, his name has come to mean a certain style. “Kafkaesque” is used to describe stories that are absurd, nightmarish, offensive, and heavy with bureaucratic pretentiousness and deceit.
Where is the humor? Oh, it’s there. I think sometimes readers get caught up in the horror and bizarreness of it all that they miss the subtle, absurdist, dark, and very dry humor dripping in all these stories in this collection.
THE TRIAL; THE CASTLE; AMERICA- Both Joseph K in THE TRIAL and K in THE CASTLE are victims of anonymous governing forces beyond their control. Both are atomised, estranged and rootless citizens deceived by authoritarian power. Whereas Joseph K is relentlessly hunted down for a crime that remains nameless, K ceaselessly attempts to enter the castle and so belong somewhere. Together these novels may be read as powerful allegories of totalitarian government in whatever guise it appears today. In AMERICA Karl Rossmann is 'packed off to America by his parents' to experience Oedipal and cultural isolation. Here, ordinary immigrants are…
As a retired opera singer, I have sung many of the songs that are featured in the book. I first became interested in Terezin when I sang with an opera company that was performing Brundibar, a children’s opera (composed by Hans Krasa, who was imprisoned in the camp) performed more than 50 times in Terezin. As a psych major (having written several medical/psych thriller books as well) I am constantly questioning the idea of choices and the consequences that fall from them. War challenges our notion of humanity, hope, and choice, and perhaps writing helps me work through some of those questions I have…what would I do in that situation?
There are several books I could recommend written by adults who were imprisoned as children in Terezin during the war, but this one stands out because of its artwork interspersed with factual accounts of daily life. Indeed, it’s the factual perspective she takes in her descriptions that makes them so heart-wrenching. Her map was my primary tool in writing descriptions of the camp, and her artwork, imitating her writing style, comes across as stark and factual. Written as a diary, not a novel, I cried at the cruelty with which her life unfurled before her. At the same time, however, she manages to capture the beauty of being a child, full of hope and promise. That balance makes the book a jewel.
In 1939, Helga Weiss was a young Jewish schoolgirl in Prague. As she endured the first waves of the Nazi invasion, she began to document her experiences in a diary. During her internment at the concentration camp of Terezin, Helga's uncle hid her diary in a brick wall. Of the 15,000 children brought to Terezin and deported to Auschwitz, there were only one hundred survivors. Helga was one of them. Miraculously, she was able to recover her diary from its hiding place after the war. These pages reveal Helga's powerful story through her own words and illustrations. Includes a special…
I teach writing for children and I’ve analyzed the elements that make a winning story. One of these elements is the magic of three. My idea for Finley Finds his Fortune, was sparked by a desire to write a folk tale with the magic of three and also by my visit to Whitechurch, the last working watermill in England. I was awed by the power and beauty of its water wheel so I wove a water mill into my story. To do this, I had to first study how a mill works. That’s what I love about writing children’s books―that I can explore my own personal interests and passions.
Peter Sis is an acclaimed international writer, artist, and filmmaker. He’s created several award-winning children’s books. In The Three Golden Keys, Sis recaptures his lost childhood in Prague and takes the reader on a dark, mysterious adventure through Prague to find the three keys that will unlock the three rusty padlocks of his childhood home and of his own childhood memories.
I like his art more than his storytelling which is often so personal as to be cryptic. So why am I recommending this book? Because his illustrations of Prague are so beautifully detailed, surreal, and mysterious. It’s a work of art that’s personal, poignant, and poetic. It’s a gorgeous book but perhaps enjoyed by adults more than children.
“The Three Golden Keys” is professional contortionist Samuel Palmer’s method of correcting and maintaining perfect body alignment, which enables him to continue to perform at top physical condition. It is a technique for reconfiguring the body’s neuromuscular patterns to enable one to achieve the greatest precision and efficiency in both posture and movement. These principles of alignment are based in geometry and are demonstrated mathematically to show the definition of correct alignment. This information serves as the ideal foundation for all forms of physical training, as well as basic health care.
Life is stories, man. Telling stories. Listening to stories. One day, somebody had the brilliant idea to start writing these stories down. And that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. Trading yarns. Figuring things out. Reading and writing. I wrote my first story in middle school. My first novel in college. My first published novel (This Way Madness Lies) in my late twenties. Now it’s thirty years, twenty-five novels, fifty short stories, and three books of poetry later, and I’m still as obsessed with and passionate about storytelling as I was as a young buck backpacking around Europe with a notebook and a beat-up copy of Down and Out in London and Paris stuffed into my leather satchel.
I was on an extended trip to Eastern Europe, back when Eastern Europe was not such a dandy place to visit, and I found myself with nothing to read. In a used bookstore in Prague, I found a tattered paperback, translated into English, of this next pick. It was falling apart, the pages stained by coffee and God knows what else. I bought it anyway.
And over the next few weeks, I was, for the third time, blown away by words on a page, by an author’s imagination. It’s been said that Don Quixote, written around 1600, was the first novel ever written. It may also be the greatest novel ever written. Adventure. Humor. Pathos. Crazy amounts of imagination. The Whole Damn Human Condition.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HAROLD BLOOM. Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.
I’ve loved the gothic genre ever since I first read Jane Eyre as a student of Victorian Literature. My PhD thesis focused on Dracula, another Victorian gothic novel, and The Curse of Morton Abbey pays homage to classics like these. What I love most about the genre is its symbolism: like vivid dreams, gothic novels express our deepest fears and longings. It’s no accident that Jungian archetypes show up in gothic novels as often as they do in dreams, and I’ve enjoyed analyzing these texts in my work as an English professor. Also, I just really like stories that send chills up my spine and give my lifelong insomnia a purpose!
Bohemian Gospel is an unusual book. I wasn’t sure I’d like it at first because it has more supernatural and fantasy elements than the novels I typically read, but it is truly stunning. Set in thirteenth-century Bohemia, it features Mouse, another badass heroine, trying to survive in a world filled with dark powers that threaten to destroy her. While this novel isn’t strictly a gothic novel, it has the requisite spooky atmosphere and a compelling heroine in deadly peril. The highest compliment I can pay this book is that when I was reading it I was nearly late for my own book launch because I was so caught up in the story!
Thirteenth-century Bohemia is a dangerous place for a girl, especially one as odd as Mouse, born with unnatural senses and an uncanny intellect. Some call her a witch. Others call her an angel. Even Mouse doesn't know who-or what-she is. But she means to find out.
When young King Ottakar shows up at the Abbey wounded by a traitor's arrow, Mouse breaks church law to save him and then agrees to accompany him back to Prague as his personal healer. Caught in the undertow of court politics at the castle, Ottakar and Mouse find themselves drawn to each other as…
Prague has fascinated me my whole life. I first explored the city while an English teacher in the Czech Republic in 1993, shortly after the end of Communist rule there. I’ve been wandering Prague’s streets ever since, always seeing something new and intriguing, always stumbling upon stories about the city and its people. Below are some of my favorite books about a city that continues to surprise me. The author or co-editor of four books, I teach European history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Under Communism, two hundred thousand spectators gathered every five years to fill the largest concrete stadium in the world, Strahov Stadium, on a hill not far from Prague Castle. Why? To watch tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen perform synchronized gymnastics movements. Why? They were all taking part in a ritual, called the Spartakiad, which tells us much about Communist ideology as it evolved over time. For many participants and spectators, the Spartakiad was also an opportunity to visit their capital city and return with memories that were not part of the Communists’ ideological script. In Roubal’s telling, the Spartakiad also shows that Czechoslovak citizens were not simply cogs in a totalitarian machine. In 1960, for example, performers staying in Prague dormitories forced organizers to remove high-calorie butter cakes with cheese curd. They got beef goulash instead.
Every five years from 1955 to 1985, mass Czechoslovak gymnastic demonstrations and sporting parades called Spartakiads were held to mark the 1945 liberation of Czechoslovakia. Featuring hundreds of thousands of male and female performers of all ages and held in the world's largest stadium-a space built expressly for this purpose-the synchronized and unified movements of the Czech citizenry embodied, quite literally, the idealized Socialist people: a powerful yet pliant force directed by the regime.
In this book, Petr Roubal explores the political, social, and aesthetical dimensions of these mass physical demonstrations, with a particular focus on their roots in the…
