100 books like The Giver of Stars

This masterpiece is a story of the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina—path-breakers in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements—interwoven with the story of Hetty, a young slave girl given to Sarah on her 11th birthday.

Hetty and Sarah find their way through the prejudice and barriers of a patriarchal society that views them as less than. Both learn to soar.

This book affected me deeply as a writer. Kidd is simply a master of words. But the story itself stripped away my naivety about what our society would look like had these women not taken on the patriarchal system. It is jolting to realize that the fight for women’s rights is not over, but ongoing.

We owe such a debt to those who struggled through the painful and sometimes deadly slings and arrows of culture to stand up for what was right. And we are not done.

Sometimes as a writer you read books that make you think, ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ and so it is with The Book Thief.

For me, the idea of casting death as a character is brilliant but to portray him as the narrator, and one with a sense of humour too is genius. Through his eyes we are able to see not just the horror but the humanity of the people living in Nazi Germany and particularly the main character, Liesel. She is a smart young girl reeling from personal tragedy and fascinated by words.

She steals books that are threatened with destruction to read with Max, the Jewish man hidden by her foster parents. Powerful and original, it tells you everything you need to know about love, death, and humanity.

This book was recommended by a creative writing teacher as a perfect example of how a plot should develop – the three-act structure, the perfect arc of the story, the pace, with rising and falling tension and edge-of-the-cliff plot points. 

But I love it because of the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, surely one of the most endearing heroines in literature. It’s a classic story of a character overcoming all the odds, and while it’s widely perceived as a dystopian novel for young adults, I found it much more than that.

I was gripped by Katniss and her challenges – all of which she finds a way to overcome – as well as the enormous themes of poverty, oppression, war, and survival. She’s young but steely, resourceful, clever, and feisty. 

Kesey’s great American novel shares with Frederick Wiseman’s first and most controversial film, Titicut Follies, a view of the nation as a mental institution.

Like Wiseman’s films, the novel resonates with American mythology, from the falsely mute Native American narrator, chief Bromden, to the boisterous protagonist, Randall Patrick McMurphy, who sports underwear with images of whales on it.

In the book, Chief Bromden refers to “The Combine” as a combination of the military-industrial complex and dominant ideology, the same phrase the governor of the Canal Zone uses to describe the political and economic control of Zonian life in Wiseman's Canal Zone. It is no coincidence that Milos Forman, the director of the award-winning 1975 film adaptation of Cuckoo’s Nest, had his cast and crew watch Titicut Follies multiple times before beginning production.

Honestly, this book crushed me, but in the most beautiful way possible.

It taught me that love can be found in the most unexpected places, even when faced with life's harshest realities. This narrative made me appreciate the small but significant moments in life, a lesson I try to convey in my own writing.

The Orphan Train is a novel about forgotten and neglected children left to fend for themselves in an antiquated welfare program. The story weaves memories of an old woman with the naiveté of a present-day teenager teaching the reader that everything is not as it appears.

Christina Baker Kline breathes life into a horrible moment of American history making us rip the bandage off, look at our past and see the unexpected silver lining.

Valentine handles some very heavy topics beautifully.

Many of the characters are connected by only one thread: they are women trying to survive in West Texas in the early 1970s. It centers around a brutal incident and the quest to find justice for a Mexican teenage girl who was violently assaulted.

Throughout the story we get such an intimate look at these women’s lives. I felt like I knew them. I felt like I was sitting right next to them in their kitchen or on their front porch.

These women were all hardened by the trials life had thrown at them, and were battling the urge to protect themselves with the urge to protect one another. I loved this book because it was just so honest. 

Circling the Sun is based on the true story of Beryl Markham, a young Englishwoman who became the first person to fly across the Atlantic from England to North America.

We follow her adventures through Kenya as she’s abandoned by her mother, learns how to raise and race horses with her father, then becomes a pilot flying across the Kenyan plains.

The story’s central arc is her sensual awakening to men, her stumblings and fallings, her love for explorer Denis Finch Hatton, and the ways she struggles to make peace with her desire and her individualist, fiercely independent womanhood.

Set in the 1920s and 1930s, this is a truly literary and arousing tale. I love sensuality that doesn’t have to struggle too hard to find its physical touch—and this book does that. It’s a viscerally-told journey—in life and in love, in the arc we all must face as independent women… show more.

I love how, as with my novel, the writer weaves together the stories of two women who lived in entirely different eras. I also appreciate how she brought real-world people and events, like JFK and the 1906 earthquake, into her fictional world. But what I found most evocative about The Obituary Writer were the author’s portrayal of the institution of marriage and how her “older” protagonist—the one dating further back in history—dedicated her life to helping others deal with grief and loss. This altruistic passion was similar to one that my historical protagonist discovered on her journey of personal growth.

I recommend One for the Blackbird, One for the Crow for three reasons. First, it’s set in the same general time and place as my novel and depicts many of the hardships that frontier women faced in the second half of the 19th century. It also tells a story about an unlikely but necessary friendship, thematically akin to my novel. And finally, the prose is lovely and a joy to read.