Here are 100 books that The Witch Elm fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have not served in the military nor been subject to a manhunt. However, I have been battling PTSD for almost 5 years. There are many, many misconceptions of PTSD in the media, and finding it portrayed accurately is a difficult task. My goal with Polaris was to first depict mental illness as realistically as possible, with all its ugly messiness. Secondly, the social commentary of a dystopian-sci-fi setting fascinated me. Polaris came about when I combined the two. In my own personal experience, most people do not understand the totality of PTSD and how it overtakes one’s life.
This book is an intense game of cat-and-mouse with a protagonist initially an unwilling participant. What caught me by surprise was Reacher’s wit and humor in the midst of intense situations. He is essentially a more intelligent McGyver who can outmaneuver even the most formidable adversaries. The novel portrays Reacher as calm to the point of being detached, which is a rarely discussed symptom of PTSD.
Ex-military policeman Jack Reacher is a drifter. He's just passing through Margrave, Georgia, and in less than an hour, he's arrested for murder. Not much of a welcome. All Reacher knows is that he didn't kill anybody. At least not here. Not lately. But he doesn't stand a chance of convincing anyone. Not in Margrave, Georgia. Not a chance in hell.
I have not served in the military nor been subject to a manhunt. However, I have been battling PTSD for almost 5 years. There are many, many misconceptions of PTSD in the media, and finding it portrayed accurately is a difficult task. My goal with Polaris was to first depict mental illness as realistically as possible, with all its ugly messiness. Secondly, the social commentary of a dystopian-sci-fi setting fascinated me. Polaris came about when I combined the two. In my own personal experience, most people do not understand the totality of PTSD and how it overtakes one’s life.
I have loved this series for a long time. The social commentary on fascism in the book might seem outlandish, but is frighteningly accurate when compared to historical examples. Katniss’ PTSD is put on display in a more simplified format than some other examples, making it easier to digest.
Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. But Katniss has been close to death before - and survival, for her, is second nature. The Hunger Games is a searing novel set in a future with unsettling parallels to our present. Welcome to the deadliest reality TV show ever...
I have not served in the military nor been subject to a manhunt. However, I have been battling PTSD for almost 5 years. There are many, many misconceptions of PTSD in the media, and finding it portrayed accurately is a difficult task. My goal with Polaris was to first depict mental illness as realistically as possible, with all its ugly messiness. Secondly, the social commentary of a dystopian-sci-fi setting fascinated me. Polaris came about when I combined the two. In my own personal experience, most people do not understand the totality of PTSD and how it overtakes one’s life.
As one of the most unflinching, realistic depictions of PTSD in modern history, First Blood gave me shivers. It provides an intense dive into the psyche of someone traumatized by warfare and how messy and unpredictable one can become when attempting to adjust to civilian life. It may be hard for some to stomach.
From New York Times bestselling author, David Morrell, comes a classic thriller that introduced the character of Rambo, one of the most iconic action heroes of the twentieth century.
Called “the father of the modern action novel,” FIRST BLOOD changed the genre. Although the book and the film adaptation have similarities, they are very different, especially its unexpected ending and its greater intensity.If you’ve only experienced the film, you’re in for a surprise.
Once they were soldiers. Rambo, the ragged kid whose presence in town is considered a threat. And Teasle, the Chief of Police of Madison, Kentucky. Both have…
I have not served in the military nor been subject to a manhunt. However, I have been battling PTSD for almost 5 years. There are many, many misconceptions of PTSD in the media, and finding it portrayed accurately is a difficult task. My goal with Polaris was to first depict mental illness as realistically as possible, with all its ugly messiness. Secondly, the social commentary of a dystopian-sci-fi setting fascinated me. Polaris came about when I combined the two. In my own personal experience, most people do not understand the totality of PTSD and how it overtakes one’s life.
I was fascinated to see the skills of the protagonist at work in this novel. It made me feel as though I was right there in the colds of Siberia with him, running from his enemies and using his trapping skills to survive. Although the psyche of the protagonist might feel underdeveloped, the focus of the book is on his remarkable survival skills, and what he is willing to do to get himself to safety.
“For sheer adventure L’Amour is in top form.”—Kirkus Reviews
Here is the kind of authentically detailed epic novel that has become Louis L’Amour’s hallmark. It is the compelling story of U.S. Air Force Major Joe Mack, a man born out of time. When his experimental aircraft is forced down in Russia and he escapes a Soviet prison camp, he must call upon the ancient skills of his Indian forebears to survive the vast Siberian wilderness. Only one route lies open to Mack: the path of his ancestors, overland to the Bering Strait and across the sea to America. But in…
When I was four and a half years old, I found my mother passed out on her bedroom floor. She had overdosed—shortly after giving birth to my baby brother, and she went on to spend six months in a psychiatric hospital. While she was away, I remember sitting in the backseat of our car with my brother as my father drove us to the store when our car collided head-on with another vehicle. In the months that followed, I became parentless for a period that seemed like years. That experience set the stage for my lifelong interest in the impacts of childhood trauma. As a therapist, it also sparked my passion for healing others.
I love this workbook because it is straightforward in defining childhood developmental trauma. It explains the Autonomic Nervous System and how trauma stays stuck in the body today. I use diagrams and simple worksheets to explain why my clients feel the way they do.
I like that it explains that trauma is not just working out through the brain but includes the body, most importantly. I also believe that true healing from trauma has to include somatic body-based work, which this workbook explains.
Traumatic experiences leave a “living legacy” of effects that often persist for years and decades after the events are over. Historically, it has always been assumed that re-telling the story of what happened would resolve these effects.
However, survivors report a different experience: Telling and re-telling the story of what happened to them often reactivates their trauma responses, overwhelming them rather than resolving the trauma. To transform traumatic experiences, survivors need to understand their symptoms and reactions as normal responses to abnormal events. They need ways to work with the symptoms that intrude on their daily activities, preventing a life…
I’m a YA writer who likes to tackle difficult subject matter. My books cover things like euthanasia, drug abuse, coming out, and accessing sex as someone with a disability. If my books are found by even just one person who needs to see themselves in a story, then I feel like my job is done.
I really enjoyed this book. Both main characters had real problems to deal with and the ways they coped and reacted felt authentic, even when they frustrated me. Jonas and Brennan are sweet kids and I was rooting for them to work out ways to overcome their issues and realize they were better together than they were on their own.I also liked that their parents were part of the picture and were just as clumsy in the way they dealt with their kids' problems as their kids. It was clear they really loved them and wanted the best for them, but they were no better prepared to deal with these issues.
To get back up sometimes you have to fall down, hard . . .
What's the point of pretending nothing has changed when everything has? It's the last summer before college, and Jonas Avery knows he should be excited. Instead, he hides out at home, avoiding his friends, his family, and everything that resembles his old life. Because nothing will be normal again―because of The Accident, when everything started falling apart.
Brennan Davis knows she needs to stand up and face her anxiety―the deep, dark, debilitating dread that rules her everyday life. Because what stops her from going out into…
Riley Masterson has moved to Greenbrier, SC, anxious to escape the chaos that has overwhelmed her life.
Questioned in a murder in Alabama, she has spent eighteen months under suspicion by a sheriff’s office, unable to make an arrest. But things in gentrifying Greenbrier are not as they seem. As…
I am a writer and advocate for survivors of sexual abuse. Since 1998, I have encouraged them to find their voice and use it through my organization, Time To Tell. Being isolated is foundational to our experience, and our culture perpetuates the isolation by often refusing to address it, acknowledge it, or expose it, as well as not listening to–nor believing–survivors. This forces us to remain silent. I am certain that telling is healing. I lead writing circles for survivors to experience community and get support and encouragement. I recommend all these books not only for the wisdom offered but also the direct experience of not being alone in the reading.
This was by far the most essential book in supporting my healing. Reading it at age 45, eight years into my recovery, so many times Herman described the exact thing I was either going through or had to go through to recover.
Explaining that being abused in a family was like being a prisoner of war blew my mind. Like a POW, seven-year-old me couldn’t escape. She helped explain so much of my trauma, my reactions, and my struggle and gave me a mountain of hope to climb!
When Trauma and Recovery was first published in 1992, it was hailed as a ground-breaking work. In the intervening years, Herman's volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large. Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research in domestic violence as well as on the…
I grew up in the shadow of my mother’s untreated and very damaging mental illness, and despite how much I loved her, I struggled with having few ways to articulate or even understand how it shaped our lives. I went on to study biology and writing, and I now often weave psychology and neuroscience into my literary essays and memoir. I write to fill the gaps between my own experiences and the ways I have seen mental illness represented—or more often, misrepresented—in our culture. I write to explore mental health as it exists in real families and communities, and to tell nuanced, loving stories that fight against stigma.
In this intensively researched memoir, celebrated war reporter Jessica Stern turns her journalistic eye on herself, peering far into her past to examine a rape to which she was a victim as a teen—an event that caused her to develop post-traumatic stress disorder and dramatically altered the course of her life. She uses her personal story as the anchor from which to more broadly examine how we think about trauma, interviewing veterans and others to explore how PTSD damages personal relationships while also contributing, for instance, to the “fearlessness” that enabled her to work in war zones. In doing so, Stern delivers a well-rounded examination of her condition with insights on why so many, including herself, are apt to deny its presence in their own lives.
“Denial is one of the most important books I have read in a decade....Brave, life-changing, and gripping as a thriller….A tour de force.” —Naomi Wolf
One of the world’s foremost experts on terrorism and post-traumatic stress disorder, Jessica Stern has subtitled her book Denial, “A Memoir of Terror.” A brave and astonishingly frank examination of her own unsolved rape at the age of fifteen, Denial investigates how the rape and its aftermath came to shape Stern’s future and her work. The author of the New York Times Notable Book Terror in the Name of God, Jessica Stern brilliantly explores the…
Seeing couples that are still in love after being with one another for 50+ years has always warmed my heart. Seeing my grandparents hold one another’s hands and look at each other with love always made me hopeful to find such a love. I have not been blessed to have that kind of love in my life (yet) but that does not stop me from looking for it and finding it in books. The characters in my favorite books are ones I identify with on some level. They are loyal, do not give up and they love wholeheartedly, even if they make some missteps along the way, the end destination always ends up being deeply in love. And I love cheering on characters when they deal with everyday issues and roadblocks on this journey of love.
This romance caught me off guard. It was a dark romance about a kidnapped man and a woman. The heroine and her sister's fiancé who she disliked. I have to say this book isn’t for everyone as the sensitive subject matter is written about, such as rape and also a suicide attempt. However, because of Hartmann’s amazing way with words, I can’t stop thinking about this book and the characters. Hartmann’s exquisite writing style took me into the basement where the couple was kept. I felt fear and sadness for them. I felt hope. I felt so many things that left me confused at times, but as I was struggling with emotions, I found myself falling in love with these characters. This book was unlike any I have read before. It is a must-read.
WARNING: This book contains subject matter that may be sensitive for some readers, including dark and triggering content. 18+ only. Please read responsibly. When Cora attends her sister’s birthday party, she expects at most a hangover or a walk of shame. She doesn’t anticipate a stolen wallet, leaving her stranded and dependent on Dean—her arch nemesis and ultimate thorn in her side. And she really doesn’t anticipate waking up in shackles in a madman’s basement. To make matters worse, Dean shares the space in his own set of chains. After fifteen years of teasing, insults, and practical jokes, the ultimate…
After solving her first case, private eye Siobhan O’Brien is hired by Phillip Ahn, an octogenarian billionaire with his own personal island in the Pacific Northwest. Ahn, a genius in artificial intelligence, swears that Duke, his youngest child and only son, is an impostor. Is Ahn crazy, or is Duke…
I’m an English professor, a poet, a lover of reading, and a happy husband and father. How did all this happen; what historical processes made my good fortunes possible? I get answers to these questions from great fiction and great nonfiction. It’s hard to find two more sensitive and beautifully written novels about marriage’s personal and social dimensions than Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Their psychological insights are complemented by two marriage historians and one sociologist with broad knowledge about love’s evolution over the centuries. I’ve read these books multiple times and shared them with many students (and friends)! They never get old.
I love this novel because of its ravishingly beautiful prose and deep insights into sexual selfhood. Set one day in June 1923, this book takes us into the mind of its middle-aged heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, as she prepares to host a party and reminisces about her life three decades ago.
As a teenager, she loved a daring, aristocratic woman (Sally), a passionate but troubled man (Peter), and a comparatively boring but dependable man (Richard, to whom she has long been married). What did love mean to her thirty years ago, and what does it mean now? Did she make the right romantic choice, given the constraints of her society? Virginia Woolf leaves her readers space to ponder these questions for themselves.
The working title of Mrs. Dalloway was The Hours. The novel began as two short stories, "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street" and the unfinished "The Prime Minister". It describes Clarissa's preparations for a party she will host in the evening, and the ensuing party. With an interior perspective, the story travels forward and back in time and in and out of the characters' minds to construct an image of Clarissa's life and of the inter-war social structure.
In October 2005, Mrs. Dalloway was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels written since Time debuted in 1923.
