89 books like The Heart Mender

The thought of walking around an occupied town in France during WWII terrifies me. The prospect of running into Nazis, looking for any excuse to arrest me, is the thing of nightmares.

But my fears shrink to nothing compared to the experience of blind sixteen-year-old Marie-Laure attempting to navigate war-torn Saint-Malo from the memory of a handmade tabletop model. The strength of courage she shows in this story has never left me.

The title of this book really intrigued me. That, and the fact that the author had died very shortly after completing the novel, requesting her friend to see it through its journey, meant I felt compelled to read it.

The other hook for me was that the story is set in Guernsey, an island I have visited and where I was aware there had been a great deal of deprivation in WWII. I wasn’t disappointed. I loved the wit, the cast of wonderful characters, and the story that developed from a chance correspondence.

Multi-layered portrayals, and an absorbing, beautifully penned story shine through Sharon Maas’s The Soldier’s Girl, a novel at once heartbreaking and inspiring.

The protagonist, Sibyl Lake, works as a spy for the French Resistance in the Nazi-annexed region of Alsace. Two men vie for her affection: Jacques, her childhood sweetheart, now a Resistance fighter, and Wolfgang, a German officer and the target of her espionage mission.

Sibyl’s courage, identity, and very soul are forced to the brink as she fights for her beloved land, clutched in Germany’s oppressive control. Maas’s unforgettable characters reveal their humanity – through love and loss – and will abide in the reader’s heart long after the final page.

April in Paris presents a perspective not often seen in World War II fiction: the first-person account of a German soldier.

Fluent in French, Corporal Roth is assigned to interpret prisoner interrogations in Nazi-occupied Paris. Disturbed by the torture he witnesses, Roth escapes his repugnant duties by posing as a Frenchman when off-duty, attempting to shed his identity as “occupier” by blending in with the populace.

He encounters the beautiful Chantal and ardently pursues her, unaware that she is part of the Resistance. Love ripens between Roth and Chantal, but the outcome spins out of their control, as both are hurled toward the perilous consequences of their affair.

Wallner’s fast-paced novel is more thriller than romance, as human emotion collides with the brutality of war. 

Sara Brooks was one of seventeen children raised by landowning African American farmers in Alabama. Hers is a lively and evocative account of growing up on the land in a loving family and a harsh coming of age at the hands of an abusive man. Like many southern black women of the era, Brooks is able to escape the bleak conditions of her life by moving first to Mobile and then to Cleveland where she worked as a domestic, eventually acquiring her own home and reuniting with the children she had been forced to leave behind. Hers is a hopeful and richly textured story of resistance and resilience.

Coleman got very famous, and very rich, from Beulah Land, a trilogy of plantation life in the pre-Civil War South that was variously viewed as a much racier Gone with the Wind or simply dismissed as an interracial soap opera. What a surprise, then, to find he wrote this beautiful coming-of-age story about a sensitive boy who is a budding writer. The novel richly depicts Mark’s life in Alabama and Georgia during the 1930s and early ’40s. We are as elated as he is when he finally finds people who understand him, most notably his teacher, who is the kind of quietly strong woman character all too often overlooked in such a milieu, and equally, the unexpected young man with whom Mark finally finds a romance both exhilarating and heartbreaking.

After the Civil War, the South was in turmoil, with ruined farms, destitute people, and existential uncertainty about the future.

John Hollis Bankhead of Alabama was one who stepped forward to ensure that little would change. He voted against the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments and helped institutionalize convict leasing. As author Kari Frederickson writes, "Confederates may have lost the war, but white men like Bankhead were determined to thwart any possible political or social revolution."

Other Bankheads continued in the same vein including Marie who, as director of the Alabama state archives, embraced the Lost Cause narrative, rejected symbols of Reconstruction, and, in the name of state’s rights, opposed voting rights for women. Learning about this family’s success in molding the post-war South gave me new insight into issues of today.

Warren St. John spent a season with the University of Alabama fans who drive their RVs to every single Crimson Tide game, chronicling the lengths and depths of their obsessive fandom, the ways they build community and identity out of a bunch of kids playing a kids’ game... and this was before the Crimson Tide won six national championships in the last 15 years.

As I often tell my wife, an Alabama fan born and raised, “You people are insane.” Lucky for me I find their insanity captivating.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, Rick Bragg’s writing is poetry.

He grew up dirt poor in Alabama. I grew up in a middle-class suburb in New Jersey. He and I have little in common but our love for our mothers. This story touched me on many levels. All mothers sacrifice to some extent in raising their children, but Rick’s mother went above and beyond while facing dire circumstances to provide for hers.

It made me appreciate my mother even more. And though I hadn’t discovered this book prior to my story, it reconfirmed my commitment to my mother. 

William James Edward is the grandfather of the author Donald Stone. The author does a great job of highlighting the importance that William J. Edward placed on lineage at the beginning of the book. The author shows the forgotten legacy of Edwards as one of Tuskegee’s first graduates. Edwards goes on to start a secondary school in Wilcox county Alabama, following the legacy of Booker T. Washington. The school was called the Snow Hill Institute and in its prime employed over 20 teachers and had over a dozen buildings on the campus. The curriculum was like Tuskegee, where the students learned trades and received a formal education. Under the leadership of William James Edwards, the school thrived until it was forced to close in the 1960s. Donald Stone mostly uses primary sources to paint a picture of the opposition that Edwards faced in trying to operate a school outside of… show more.