35 books like The Story of Guadalupe

I read this novel when I was twenty-two years old.

I remember exactly where I was (in the kitchen of a dilapidated apartment I loved) and what time of day I read it (early afternoon until early evening). I cackled and sobbed (I am not a sobber), and afterward, I couldn’t get the main character’s voice out of my head for days. He narrated everywhere I went and everything I did.

Before then, I’d always written casual nonsense for my own entertainment, but I knew afterward I wanted to do that—I wanted to make people laugh, horrify them, and put their hearts through the wringer. 

I love Warner’s work because her books address big questions about belief and meaning, such as those behind beloved fairy tales or the heroic history of Joan of Arc. 

In this book, Warner traces shifting legends about the Virgin Mary buried in theological debates, literature, and art over 2000 years of Christianity. Warner reminded me that, although the Gospels seem full of Marys and Mariams, Scripture offers little information about the mother of Christ, which has allowed generations of believers the freedom to envision her as they saw fit. 

I came away from the book wondering why the Virgin’s appearance and wardrobe have not changed much over 2000 years. She is always a beautiful, usually young woman wearing droopy robes and a veil, sometimes a crown or halo, and often carrying a book or a baby. Maybe it’s so the faithful can recognize her when she descends in a cloud… show more.

I thought religious apparitions went out with modern secularization, but Zimdars-Swartz’s engrossing report set me straight. I admire Zimdars-Swartz for not trying to persuade readers that apparitions are real or fake. Instead, she documents a growing trend in modern apparitions of the Virgin that began in 1830, when Mary appeared to Catherine Labouré in the Convent of the Sisters of Charity in Paris. After that, Mary began appearing to select visionaries in public places all over 19th-century Europe, speaking mostly to powerless women and children.

Zimdars-Swartz leads us through the famous serial apparitions at Lourdes, Fatima, Garabandal, and later outside Europe: Zeitoun, Kibeho, Lipa, Phoenix, and elsewhere. At Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina, The Mother of Christ still appears daily to some of the six teenagers who first saw her in 1981 and has delivered some 40,000+ fairly repetitive messages so far. 

The Catholic Church has never officially approved the apparition at… show more.

I adored the film version of this book when I was about ten, and I still remember the saintly Bernadette limping around the monastery, refusing treatment for her deathly disease. The novel’s author was a Czech Jew who left 1930s Vienna and found refuge in the town of Lourdes, where Bernadette Soubirous saw the Virgin in 1858.

As thanks, he wrote this tearjerker about Bernadette and the beautiful lady who appeared to her eighteen times in a grotto outside town. Word got around, and both religious and civic officials challenged Bernadette’s story, mostly because she was uneducated and came from a wretched family. They threatened her with hell and an insane asylum. Yet hundreds of people seemed to be miraculously healed by the waters of the grotto, and most of the skeptics were persuaded. Werfel romanticizes Bernadette’s life, but the story follows the visionary into a convent where she eventually… show more.

Christianity is a syncretic religion, incorporating elements from earlier religious traditions, not only in the eastern Mediterranean basin but also in the lands where it spread. In each of the national shrines to the Virgin Mary in Europe, for instance, she is depicted with indigenous symbols or elements. Nowhere is the presence of the preChristian, indigenous sacred female stronger in such syncretic blendings than in Mexico with the Virgin of Guadalupe. The editor of this anthology refers to her as Guadalupe-Tonantzin, one of the variations of her name in the indigenous Nahautl language. These essays are scholarly, cultural, and engagingly personal. Don’t miss the brilliant essay by the late Gloria Anzaldua, as well as other memorable pieces by several well-known Mexican-American authors. This is lived religion.

There are several books purporting to contain Nahuatl (or Aztec language) accounts of the conquest of Mexico.

This one by a late great scholar from UCLA is by far the best. His helpful introduction sets the scene, and the careful translations bring us right into the center of the action. The Spaniards may have thought they were impressing the Indians, but in this account by the Indians, we learn that they were sometimes laughing at the Europeans!

Many Aztecs studied with Franciscan friars. Later, they helped the friars write books about Christianity and compose plays for their people to present on holidays.

They took European ideas and reinterpreted them for a Native audience. For instance, Hephaistos, a Greek god who was a bit of a loser, is given the name Tizoc, a former Aztec emperor who was also a bit of a loser. It is fascinating to watch people digesting a whole new way of thinking.

Best of all, some of the plays were meant to be funny!

This is one of those books that I started and couldn’t stop until I finished reading.

It’s a charming, romantic, jet-setting story about two strangers who win a radio contest for a trip around the world. The only problem? The two couldn’t be more different.

With all the favorite elements of a second chance (and forced proximity) romance story, set against the international and every-changing backdrops (from Sydney to Mexico City to Mumbai and more!), readers fall head-over-heels for Dylan and Jack’s relationship.

Heartfelt and deeply moving, Wanderlust made me yearn for a chance to travel the world (and maybe start entering more radio contests!).

I enjoyed how this story takes an everyday person that we can all relate to, and with one urge of curiosity, she is easily sucked into a dangerous world of crime and murder.

Throughout her story, she finds herself investigating unseen and unknown by dangerous people. She herself may be unaware of any danger until she dives further into her curiosities. And within it all, there is a slow and natural element of romance.

I appreciate Moreno-Garcia’s characters for their realness and natural way of moving through the story. 

This book showcases the extraordinary writing of the novelist and journalist Elena Poniatowska. She weaves together the voices of multiple journalists, her own reflections, and above all the testimonies of dozens of survivors of the two earthquakes that battered Mexico City and surrounding areas on September 19 and 20, 1985. It is both a moving report of people's suffering as well as a stirring portrait of how common people stepped in and created search and rescue teams and offered relief when government efforts failed. Poniatowska masterfully captures what many historians consider a key before and after moment in modern Mexican history.