100 books like The Personal History of Rachel DuPree

This isn’t your typical feel-good, “I found myself on a hike” memoir. Strayed is brutally candid about her flaws, mistakes, and the emotional wreckage she carried along the Pacific Crest Trail. It's like she brought you on this grueling journey to confront her demons, and somehow, you end up confronting your own.

Her vulnerability is so palpable that you can practically feel the blisters forming on your feet. It’s raw, it’s real, and it makes you want to hug your inner mess a little tighter.

The first of Moberg’s 4-volume saga of Swedish immigrants, this book is so thoroughly researched that he invented a term, calling them “documentary novels.” The family in the story are farmers from a poor, remote parish in Sweden whose lives are constricted by both the church and the state. This reflects the painful realities of Europe in 1850, where almost everyone was poor, rural, oppressed, and completely unprepared for the journey ahead of them. Whether you read Moberg’s Emigrant Novels for the intense personal drama or for more understanding of why people leave their homelands, you will find these stories deeply emotional and insightful.

The Snow Child depicts a maybe real, maybe imaginary little girl bringing joy to a childless, homesteading couple in 1920s Alaska.

In this bestselling debut novel, released in 2016, a couple that yearns for a child of their own is visited by a nymph who appears and disappears in the snow drifts on their homestead. In her novel, Eowyn Ivy manages to sustain the reader’s belief that this girl could in fact be real, without directly saying one way or the other. 
Why do this in an essentially realist portrayal of hardscrabble life in rural Alaska? Again, I see it as a way to get past the character’s rational mind and open both the character and readers’ hearts to the ineffable.

Here, Mabel, the main character says it better. “You did not have to understand miracles to believe in them, and in fact, Mabel had come to suspect the opposite.… show more.

The Civil War west of the Mississippi doesn’t get much attention in historical fiction, but it’s an incredibly rich period, with storylines and characters to fill a hundred books. Morkan’s Quarry is one of my favorites from that period. It’s set in Springfield, Missouri, the site of one of the war’s first major battles. Michael Morkan operates a rock quarry just outside of town, and rock quarries have one product on hand that is highly prized during wartime – gunpowder. Michael and his son Leighton soon learn how thin the veneer of civilization is once a war is underway. The Civil War in Missouri was characterized by day-to-day savagery, private violence, and disrespect for the “rules” of warfare, and Morkan’s Quarry captures that spirit all too well. 

I love Lidie Newton. She is a newlywed who accompanies her abolitionist husband from Illinois to Kansas Territory, at a time when the territory is mired in partisan rage and violence. Lidie narrates the story, and her straightforward, often insightful accounts pulled me in immediately. I was right there with her as she forged her way through numerous exploits, some humorous, others heart-breaking. The story is populated with characters who are both colorful and believable, and I came away with a heightened understanding of the role played by events in Kansas and Missouri during the frightening months leading up to the Civil War.

Unlike the novels of warfare and suffering, The Moonflower Vine is an intimate portrait of family life, set in 1920s Missouri. It was a bestseller when it was first published in the early 1960s, but has since suffered neglect. But it richly rewards the reader with its heartfelt depiction of three sisters and their aging parents, whose passions, aspirations, and failures are portrayed with complex sensitivity. I don’t think historical novels have to focus on historical events – capturing the spirit of an era is just as important. And this novel took me into rural life of a hundred years ago with great generosity.

In a time when nature, natives, and competing religions were feared by many European settlers, a little Puritan girl was captured by Abenaki warriors during an attack on her fort by French and Indian forces and thrust into the midst of everything her people feared most. When captives were later being repatriated, she chose to remain in New France, not only never seeing her parents again, but rising through the ranks of the Catholic church. One can only imagine what she experienced within the deep forest and little Jesuit chapel among the Abenaki during her formative years which left such an indelible mark as to set the course for the rest of her life. 

As a little girl reading Heidi, I was wholeheartedly convinced that invigorating mountain air, wildflower meadows, laughter, and alpine cheese made from the fresh milk of goats grazed on lush Swiss grass was the cure-all for what ailed humanity. Even now, you would be hard-pressed to convince me otherwise. If ever there was a story that could feed the hungry spirit of a city child and inspire dreams of back-to-the-land living, Spyri’s enchanting classic is it. 

The lyrical and kid-friendly text in this book seamlessly blends information about the natural world in how it looked millions of years ago to a young girl’s journey in deciphering clues about prehistoric life that she found in her own backyard. By showing how Ruth Mason stuck to her desire for unravelling the mystery of the fossilized bones found on her ranch—even though she wasn’t a trained scientist—is a perfect launching pad to instill confidence in kids about their own observational abilities for things that interest them. Another book about perseverance and holding fast to one’s beliefs, A Dinosaur Named Ruth is a winner! 

I loved the searing honesty and historical drama of this book. Clarren bravely examines her family’s settler past, telling the story of how her great-great-grandparents fled antisemitism in Russia and settled in South Dakota. Then she tells the story of the Lakota indigenous people they displaced. I was so inspired by the moral integrity she shows as she interviews descendants of both sides of this conflict.

She asks hard questions about what happened in settler colonialism, why we know so little about it, and what we should do about it now. She includes resources to examine our own histories. A brilliant and motivating book!