Books like The Season of You & Me: 82 fan favorites

A girl’s discomfort with puberty is only part of the story. The other part is 11-year-old Margaret growing up in an interfaith family with a Jewish father and Christian mother.

Margaret struggles to find a religious identity. She must contend with her father’s mother who hopes she embraces Judaism and her conservative Christian maternal grandparents who reject their daughter’s interfaith marriage. This powerful coming-of-age story has gotten recent attention from a recent film and challenges from book bans. For me, it’s another example of Judy Blume’s insight, humor, and humanity.

Everything about this book screams New Jersey. The setting, the voice, the colorful cast of characters surrounding the main character, Dave Raymond, a guitarist for a wedding band called The Wishbones with a serious case of arrested development. Musicians and those on the cusp of marrying one (like I was when I first read this novel) will fall in love with this book for all its humor and quirky charms. I’ve read and loved every one of Tom Perrotta’s novels and short story collections, but this is the book that inspired me to proudly embrace my inner Jersey girl when I finally decided to write my first novel.

I was honored to read an early draft of this novel by fellow human and Jerseyite, Val Emmich, and was immediately taken with the voice of Joan, a 10-year-old girl with a special condition that gives her the ability to remember everything, but is afraid of being forgotten. To remedy that, she wants to win a prestigious songwriting contest by writing a song that makes people both want to dance and cry (two of the strongest feelings in her opinion). So she strikes a deal with Gavin, an adult songwriter who she believes can help her make that happen. Jersey City is the primary setting for this novel, a city that along with its many other charms, offers spectacular views of the New York City skyline. 

Years ago, a fellow writer recommended the Stephanie Plum series to me as a must-read because the writing was so laugh-out-loud funny. She wasn’t kidding. Not only did I find this incredibly entertaining, I laughed all the way through the book and became a huge fan of the series.

Hanging out in the Jersey “burg” with Stephanie and her family, for me, is just plain fun. Is it improbable that an unemployed lingerie buyer could become a successful bail-bond recovery agent and apprehend a savvy cop on the run? Especially when she has some personal history with the guy? You bet, but thanks to Janet Evanovich’s deft comic touch with all the characters populating Stephanie’s world, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and funny page-turner.

Dominick Mazzagetti retells the history, culture, and landscapes found along the Jersey Shore in his nonfiction book The Jersey Shore: The Past, Present & Future of a National Treasure.

This book is a well-researched labor of love and discusses how the area from Sandy Hook to Cape May rose from being undeveloped sandy acres of land in the late 1600s to grand tourist resorts in the late 1800s.

I’ve used Mazzagetti’s book as research for articles and other works I write, especially about shipwrecks and Superstorm Sandy’s devastating impact in 2012. His clear voice engages and informs in a way that makes the place I call home come alive.

As a lifetime shore resident, I gravitate to books set at the beaches of New Jersey, and such is the case for Katie Runde’s debut novel The Shore.

Her core growing-up memories stemmed from both living at the shore and from her family’s boardwalk/beached based businesses. She used her experiences to craft a deep and moving novel about how Brian Dunne’s wife, Margot, and two teenage daughters, Liz and Evy, come to terms with unimaginable grief and loss.

When I interviewed Runde for an article I wrote for Jersey Shore Magazine, we bonded over shared experiences of transforming grief into writing beautiful stories set at similar shore locations despite very different journeys for our main characters. The Shore helped me to examine my own grief through different lenses.

I loved this short story. The main character picks up an antique doll during one of his travels for his daughter. The doll’s name was Alice, and she was very creepy. I could imagine every feet patter and slam against the door with the author’s great way of describing details in the setting. The doll was on a mission and nothing was going to stand in her way. I enjoyed the twist regarding the bed and breakfast owner.

There are a lot of legends regarding New Jersey and its role in the Civil War, including bogus stories that the state was considering joining the Confederacy. This book was the first attempt at relating the actual story of the state and the war. While it can be criticized in some respects, it is largely correct, and details the history of each of New Jersey’s units in the conflict. It is an invaluable starting point and a resource for anyone writing about the state and its role in the Civil War.

Billy, an injured Iraq war vet, returns home and finds no real place for him at his former job. Milo, a German shepherd trained by the same police department, has aged out at seven years and is also unwanted. Since Milo and Billy previously worked together, they team up, and with Rosenfelt’s tongue-in-cheek humor, commit robberies to survive. Why not use the dog’s training to grab items from criminal hands and remove them? But on the fourth outing, things don’t go as planned.

Milo takes off and buries an envelope he took from the perp, Billy is framed for murder, and attorney Andy Carpenter, who loves dogs, agrees to represent the dog, jailed for his own safety. Carpenter’s snarky sense of humor leaps off every page as he twists and turns the justice system for yet another dog-related cause. Rosenfelt has rescued thousands of dogs through his Tara Foundation and… show more.

I couldn’t compile a list of books without including Judy Blume. In the forty years since I read my first Blume novel, a lot of things have changed, and—many have stayed the same.
Forever, first published in the mid-70s, is mildly erotic—and raw, and sensuous, and tender, and all the things that love and sex are. The sensual scenes are peppered in with great dialogue between the characters.

I especially love this book because no matter how many experiences I’ve had, I can still find a small piece of myself in protagonist Katherine—first sex, first love, first breakup, first death, and the many “firsts” that I’ve carried through my own life (divorce, pandemic, post-divorce love).

Forever may not always last, but it never fails to define chunks of our lives—always.