100 books like We All Want Impossible Things

This novel is elegantly written and emotionally authentic, and while it is a light and zippy read, the more you think about it, the more it seems to say. 

It is about a week in the life of Melbourne man Simon Larsen. Things are not going very well for Simon. He was a successful architect but during lockdown his business failed and his beautiful home had to be sold. Now Simon has moved his family to a tiny flat, and he is unemployed, broke, and can hardly get off the sofa. 

While Simon seems hopeless, the family he has married into are formidable, from his beautiful wife Tansy to his terrifying mother-in-law Gloria. I loved the Schnabels but still, I’m not sure I would want to be related.

Bittersweet, funny, and wise, this is an entirely perfect novel about life and love in a small town.

Jane moves to Boyne City, Michigan to work as a schoolteacher. There she falls in love with the amiable and handsome Duncan. Unfortunately, he has slept with pretty much every available woman in town and remains closely bound to his ex-wife. 

When a single event shatters Jane’s life, she discovers how friends can become your family, and how sometimes they need you as much as you need them. 

I loved every single word of this quirky and wonderful story.

This gently-paced and richly atmospheric story is a real experience to read.

It is filled with myths and wonders, raw sadness, and exquisite beauty. The main character Esther is not always easy to like. She can be self-centred and destructive. But her journey over the course of this novel is deeply moving.

Esther is grieving for her elder sister Aura who is missing presumed drowned. The story begins a year after her disappearance as Esther returns to her childhood home in coastal Tasmania for Aura’s memorial. There her parents ask her to do something she isn’t sure she can manage.

They want her to travel to Denmark, where Aura spent time before she died, to find out what happened there and why she returned home such a different person.

This novel totally swept me away.

Often while I was reading, it felt like I was right there, in the Australian town of Ballarat, a part of a small community as everyone’s lives are being reshaped by a war raging across the world.

Connie Starr is a watchful misfit of a child who lives in a dream world. But this is as much a story about the people who surround Connie – parents and siblings, neighbours and friends – and the way their lives intertwine. We rarely witness any violent acts of war in this novel.

Instead, it is focused mostly on the people left behind at home, on their heartbreak and loneliness, the friendships that sustain them, and the determination that gets them through the toughest times.

How are women supposed to behave, discreetly? Are their friendships always a saccharine Hallmark card? Not in this novel. Living loudly, louchely, in chaos, with hedonistic nights out and all-day hangovers, Laura and Tyler are a tight, whip-funny twosome… except one has a wedding on the horizon to a teetotal stable man, and she’s wrestling with whether marriage is a legitimate life milestone anymore. The friendship portrayal here is a messy, clever, and foul-mouthed foray into the moment when inseparable friends face the prospect of their familiar relationship disappearing through the unstoppable forces of adult life. And we’ve all had impossible choices when we haven’t known which loyalties to put first – one’s duty to oneself or to one’s best friend?

Who doesn’t love a middle school con artist with a heart of gold? Jackson Greene thinks he’s out of the scam business forever, until he believes that the fix is in on the next student council election. The only way he can take down the school bully and student council president candidate, Keith Sinclair, is to pull off the biggest con the school has ever seen. The diverse cast of characters makes this book feel like Ocean’s 11 for tweens. Each kid has his or her own “specialty” and Jackson is the guy who brings them all together. The book also reminded me of the Kiki Strike series, but in a more realistic setting. Could anything like The Great Greene Heist really happen in a middle school? Well, no, but the book is just a great time from beginning to end.

This sweet story brings me back to the rush of heady (albeit sometimes fleeting) infatuations and reminds me that simple friendship rules such as “Don’t let guys come between us” are not always as simple as they seem. The best part? Although Keiko ends up with the right romantic interest (there’s a scene that will melt your heart), she learns that self-love is paramount.

Even though today's South Asian families are extremely progressive when it comes to issues relating to their daughters, this was not always the case. Up until very recently, the choice between education and marriage was a very real one for a South Asian young woman. Devi captures this issue beautifully in her story which is set in the 80s. Devi captures this beautifully in the story of her protagonist, Heera, whose experience presses up against the expectations not only of her family but of what it means to be a brown woman in America in the 80s. 

Farah and her best friend Allie yearn to go to middle school at the exclusive Magnet Academy. But Farah decides to screw up her schoolwork on purpose, in order to stay behind and protect her developmentally disabled younger brother from bullying. I appreciated how this book portrayed Farrar’s struggles with issues very real to kids, that adults often miss, and the inclusion of Arab culture and language throughout the book. 

Jennifer always puts her characters through the wringer, and she keeps you on the edge of your seat with her clever plotting. This story has split timelines in which we get to see the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of a teenage girl and the horrible secrets her friends are forced to live with into adulthood when the truth finally comes out.