100 books like The Girl on the Red Pillow

The Astrocytoma Diaries by Ken Mooney is something I feel everyone absolutely must-read. At its most simplest, it's a first-hand account of what it is like to battle cancer. But its heart is much more than that. It's a detailed look at the human condition, of how a person can be given the terrible news that they have a tumor on their brain, and can choose to not only not give up, but face that battle head-on.

Read this book. It's heart-wrenching. But it's a book about survival. A book about war. A book about the human spirit. As well as being a book about cancer.

Loser girl turned punk rock superhero... Those six words should sell you on The Gospel According to St. Rage alone. But that still doesn't do this book any sort of justice because this isn't really a superhero book. Sure, Barbara may have the powers to cause flocks of birds to release their...um...payload onto her enemies with the simple flick of a finger, but she's not out to save the world, she's just out to finally live the life she's been hiding from.

Eisenbrey brought me back to my own high school days with this book that feels like a punk rock song. To those days of trying to make friends, of trying to define who I am. And she does so with rock star class.

Although this book is only 16 pages long, it tells a story that could easily have been a novel, which is that she is capable of condensing something so dense down to so few words without making it feel like anything was left out. Here we see a rather fantastical time travel tale, but one that, although at first seems quite light-hearted, ends up being one of the darkest of such tales I've ever read...and the most thought-inducing.

I loved this book and have a very difficult time reviewing it without giving too much away, but if you've got a spare thirty minutes (you know, for you slow readers), I'd highly suggest you pick this one up immediately.

Like a male version of Eat Pray Love, where the main character doesn't seem to really learn anything from the experience and already started out rather selfish, The Year of Dan Palace shows us Dan's ongoing struggle with love in a world where he believes the end is nigh. His constant internal battle with himself over how he wants to live his life is at the forefront of every single moment in this captivating text, as we find ourselves yelling at the book in an attempt to convince Dan to get over himself and just start living life for once.

This book will grab you and hold you until you finish the final pages, all the time hoping that Dan does find some happiness, or at least validation of his greatest fears, by the time the book ends.

This book is raw, brutal, and a tough read, but it’s also clean, and that’s what I appreciated most about Walker’s telling of a girl’s story who is stuck in sex trafficking. Yes, it is another sex-trafficking book, but for me, it is a masterful insight from the point of view of those caught in it or caught by it.

Besides being a raw account of sex trafficking trauma, it’s also a compelling story that kept me wanting to read to find out what would happen. It’s a thriller and has many moments of high suspense. Watching Emma move through the phases of “the life” broke my heart but also opened my eyes.

I applaud Mr. Walker for this book. It could not have been easy to write, but I’m glad he did.

If you're familiar with Hugh Howey's work, it's probably thanks to his Wool series of post-apocalyptic sci-fi. I, Zombie is a very different sort of book. It's still post-apocalyptic in subject, but the tone is even darker and filled with both horror and melancholy for the dying world. The zombies here are prisoners of their own bodies, forced to drift and commit horrific violence that they can feel but cannot prevent. You'll get to meet several such zombies in this book and really feel for them as you see each one's backstory and how they came to be part of the horde – and it's that pathos that makes this book something special.

I love this graphic novel, with its muted, earthy colours. Hamal, the gardener, can see ghosts. At the time the story starts he seems to have found his feet, but he talks about his depression as a teen, which is one of the reasons why I think it can be included here; that sort of thing is never entirely left behind. Another is the emotions of the ghosts he encounters and tries to help; a lot of what the ghosts are experiencing, even apparently-cheerful Blue, who is in love with Hamal, can be read as akin to the lost greyness of various degrees of depression. It's a gentle, thoughtful story, well-told with lots of humour, and it has lovely art. 

This book isn’t specifically about depression, but it helped me with my depression so, so much. Much of my depression was based on thinking I had to get people to like me, I had to accomplish so much, I had to… But this book reminded me in powerful ways that it’s not about what I do. It’s about what Jesus has already accomplished. This book will help with a lot of the “other things” that can make depression worse, so you can work directly on depression without having to worry about other spiritual pressures. 

This book is a beautiful, inspiring weaving tale of a psychiatrist who has recurrent depression and has worked with people with depression. She doesn’t disguise how hard depression is, she doesn’t patronise, she explains depression from her personal point of view, explores what happened in her childhood, and explains a clinician’s point of view of depression. 

It’s embedded with bucket loads of empathy, compassion, and hope. You hear about the patients she’s helped and you come out feeling humbled and grateful for her telling her story. Very useful for professionals working in psychiatry and mental health but equally useful for those of us with this terrible illness.

Where Happiness Begins is a clever picture book that depicts happiness as a character that can take any shape and form. Sometimes it is hard to find. And sometimes it is right there with us. The illustrations are bright and beautiful. To me, we should read it frequently as a gentle reminder that happiness always begins within ourselves.