100 books like We Are Called to Rise

What I loved most about this book is true of all Louise Erdrich novels: she creates such warm, complicated, fully human characters that I delight in their presence and grieve when I have to leave them at the book’s end.

In this novel, history hit home in a devastating way when the U.S. government in the 1950s decided to solve its “Indian problem” by simply reclassifying Native people as no longer Indian—a kind of paper genocide that wiped out Indigenous people’s cultural identity and tribal rights, such as land rights.

Sadly, this is all historical fact; the fiction comes in when Erdrich re-imagined in riveting detail the (also true) story of how one small tribe in North Dakota fought back.

I’d always assumed that the Dust Bowl in the 1930s was a natural disaster. Nope. The scouring dust storms that destroyed thousands of lives and millions of farms in five states didn’t have to happen. They were the predictable—and predicted!—result of short-sighted human decisions, such as the government handing tracts of formerly Indian land to white settlers to tear out the nourishing native grasses and plant wheat instead.

The human hand behind extreme weather might seem obvious to us now, but it was eye-opening for me in 2006 when I read this riveting nonfiction drama of families trapped in a living nightmare. I have never forgotten its impact or its lessons.

Any book in which a journalist and a librarian are the heroes gets a gold star from me. In this gripping novel, a Black journalist from Detroit who writes about the Black Lives Matter movement goes to Birmingham, Alabama, in 2019 on a personal and professional quest.

Her great-grandfather was, she believes, killed there by a white policeman 90 years ago, and she’s determined to find out the truth. She also thinks his story can illuminate what’s happening nationwide today. Based on this compelling premise, the novel is a mystery, a love story, a history, and an examination of racial justice rolled into one. I enjoyed the behind-the-scenes view of exactly how a journalist builds a story.

With its taut, beautiful writing and ever-rising tension, this novel kept me reading late into the night. In 2008 Belfast, “the Troubles” are very much alive, and sisters Tessa and Marian have grown into adulthood in a combustible atmosphere of menace.

When Tessa discovers that her sister has been involved in the IRA and has now become an informer against it, she plunges into the world of spies to help Marian end the ceaseless cycle of violence and retribution. The novel is more than a hold-your-breath thriller. I loved its exploration of what “terrorism” means when the terrorists are your neighbors and family and how much two women are willing to risk for peace—and each other. 

I remember summers growing up when we were out of the house seeking freedom from parents as we streamed toward our teenage years, so I can identify with this story’s start. We’d follow deer trails through brush and trees to spots up in the hills we’d claimed as our own. This book begins with a prologue made vivid with three children and Tana French’s gorgeous prose.

The children go up and over a rock wall and into “A summer full-throated and extravagant in a hot pure silk skin blue…your tongue tasting of chewed blades of long grass, your own clean sweat…” “…long slow twilight and mothers silhouetted in doorways…” and the haunted last sentence, “These children will not be coming of age, this or any other summer.”

I can’t even tell you how much I love Aunt Ginny in Libby Klein’s Poppy McAllister Mystery series! She is an absolute hoot. While I love the whole series, the first introduction to Aunt Ginny in this book remains my favorite. 

Poppy is newly widowed and a grief-stricken disaster when she receives an invitation to her high school reunion. She heads home to Cape May and her eccentric Great Aunt Ginny’s house. As they do in cozy mysteries, a murder happens, and Poppy and Aunt Ginny are on the case.

Poppy and her aunt’s relationship, paired with Aunt Ginny’s crazy antics, always leaves me wiping tears of mirth out of my eyes. Such a fun read!

This is a crime novel set in 1919 Calcutta. We follow Captain Sam Wyndham, who is a former Scotland Yard detective seeking a fresh start after the emotional wounds following WWI and the death of his wife.

When a senior official is murdered, he doesn't hold back during his search from British mansions to seedy opium dens with his new sidekick, Sergeant Banerjee. Rising tensions, the clash of societies, the heat, dirt, and crowding all contribute to bringing this colorful period to life.

This is the debut novel and the first in a remarkably well-told series so interesting I found it impossible to put down. 

What if Jews settled in Alaska instead of Israel? There is a question I’d never asked, but I loved chewing on it. Alternative histories are great at exploring questions of cause and effect, the rippling power of people and places, and the very existence of fate.

They are not to everyone’s taste, so how about a murder mystery instead? Let’s call it that, and you won’t be put off by worries about excessive background and explanation. When exposition comes in the form of detective work, it is so much more palatable. And personal. Chabon feeds the reader ideas the way one might sneak a dog medicine–wrapped in something that goes down easy.

I enjoyed being along for this wacky ride as Finlay accidentally gets herself hired as a contract killer, disposes of a body, and navigates the criminal underworld–all while raising her two small children and dealing with her infuriating ex-husband. There’s a love triangle in this book, but the relationship I enjoyed most was the friendship that develops between Finlay and Vero, her former nanny turned partner in crime.

This story is completely absurd, laugh-out-loud funny, and very suspenseful. 

As with William Kent Krueger, I love all of Sandford’s Prey novels (and there are a lot!). This is the first one I read, and I guess I got hooked because I want to be—if I’m honest—either one of the main characters that persist through his books, and that appear in this one. Virgil Flowers is a lithe, laid-back, really smart guy who has long hair and wears band T-shirts; absolutely not the sort of person you’d associate with the U.S. Marshals Service, yet there he is! (He also has his own series, good for us!). Lucas Davenport is his boss, and Lucas is big, ruthless, and very rich—and loves hunting bad guys. But what I think I’m drawn to most is that he says exactly what he thinks, gets the job done by any means possible, and does not brook fools. At all. And, as I said, I am… show more.