94 books like The Ventriloquists

I’m a geek for a good undercover story because of the constant underlying tension. Place that undercover story in an alternate world, and you’ve got my attention! Leviathan takes place in Scott Westerfeld's fabulous re-imagining of the events surrounding WWI. It’s a world where the secrets of DNA were discovered far earlier and put to use as natural “machinery.”

Our star is Deryn Sharp, one of my favorite middle-grade heroines. She’s a commoner disguised as a boy in the British Air Service. She's a brilliant airman, brave and fearless and clever… and living in constant fear someone will discover her secret. Even so, she faces conflict head-on and is quick on her feet.

She fights on the side of the Darwinists, using extraordinary genetically altered creatures, against the Clankers and their steampunk-style weaponry. They’re no match for Deryn, though, as she saves the day again and again with her mind… show more.

The Thousand Names has one of the most unique protagonists and refreshing settings I’ve seen. Winter Ihernglass is disguised as a male soldier in a world of gunpowder and muskets, and ancient demons that can be released with the right magic. I loved watching Winter advance through the ranks and prove her brilliance time and time again. She continues to disguise herself throughout the series, even as women are allowed into the army and more people become aware of her gender, leading me to believe that the look is less a disguise and more her actually living as she truly wants to: as a transgender man in a world that doesn’t yet have a name for it.

This is slightly outside the boundaries of a wartime novel, as it takes place in the Old West, but it’s a fantastic book for this list, and shouldn’t be overlooked if you love this trope. Jess Harney makes a name for herself as a notorious male sharpshooter and outlaw. Her first-person voice is one of the most interesting I’ve read, and I loved how she fit in as one of the guys while never sacrificing who she was. She barely even thinks about her gender as she so naturally considers herself male. Books like this really highlight the blurred lines between cross-dressing out of necessity or desire, and I’m excited to see more authors addressing this trope with the nuance of queerness which is often part of it.

This book is a fantastical retelling of the Hongwu Emperor’s rise to power, with the emperor re-imagined as a non-binary afab person. It’s billed as Mulan meets The Song of Achilles, but I vastly preferred it to both those narratives; the nascent emperor, Zhu Chongba, becomes gloriously ruthless in a way that defies their gender. There’s also a gay eunuch point-of-view character with an incredibly tragic backstory, who almost steals the show.

It’s very character-driven, which helps temper its epic scope. I don’t usually love stories with this much military/political scheming, but I absolutely loved this book. It’s a duology, with the second book expected in 2023.

This is one of the best Native books I’ve ever read. As a white-passing Native who lived away from the tribe, I really identified with Louise Wolfe’s experience as one of the few Native families in their mostly white, middle-class Kansas town. Lou’s struggle against racism on a macro and micro scale is relatable, and the story is wonderfully rewarding. It's a must-read.

A collection of American humorist Dave Barry’s newspaper columns, which I’m often re-reading and laughing a great deal. Definitely ‘of it’s time’ in parts (aka a bit dated), but it also contains plenty of general observations about life, family, and defending your home against tornados. A good one for the loo, as shaking with laughter might help you ‘move things along’. 

The Stoics were expansive philosophers, in that they were concerned about many diverse aspects of our existence: politics, ethics, epistemology, therapy, cosmology. The Stoics also aimed for their philosophy to be practical; hence, they wrote in accessible, readable fashion, so their teachings could reach many. The New York Times philosophers’ column, “The Stone,” shares Stoic concerns in applying philosophical thinking to a wide variety of topics, in a manner accessible to many. The Stone Reader is an anthology of some of the most popular essays from the New York Times column; the essays touch on many subjects, such as violence, anxiety, happiness, faith, and political power.

This is the tenth in a charming series of children’s books about Freddy the Pig and the other talking animals on the Bean farm that began in the early 20th century, two decades before Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Freddy has been called a renaissance pig—a detective, poet, pilot, newspaper editor, and much more. 

In this story, the rapacious owner of the local newspaper employs various underhanded tactics to shut down the rival paper edited by Freddy. The scheme is thwarted when Freddy’s lawyer, Old Whibley the owl, convinces a judge that the would-be monopolist engaged in “kidnapping, theft, and conspiracy in restraint of trade.”

As is evident, by the 1940s, when the book was published, antitrust was recognized in popular culture as the legal tool for protecting the victims of unfair competitive tactics—which is still how we see it today. 

I discovered The Onion late in life as well, and also through their website. Which, yes, I have bookmarked as well—I love most just their headlines. And discovered, again, they'd actually published a book of headlines! 'Nuff said.

Robin Robertson’s noir narrative The Long Take might seem like an unusual choice for this list.

Essentially a long noir poem, The Long Take concerns Walker, a Canadian veteran of D-Day with acute PTSD who finds life unraveling in the urban landscapes he inhabits after the war.

With a poet’s precision, Robertson follows Walker as he moves from city to city, taking it all in. Homelessness, crime, race—nothing is spared.

Why, you’d think you were in a 40s film noir, reading about it all, and then you find Walker on the streets of LA in 1948 seeing some of those very films being shot, films like Act of Violence and Criss Cross.

An outstanding achievement, The Long Take is a wholly original work of art.