My journey from a teen struggling with self-harm, drug use, and overwhelming emotions to a DBT-Linehan Board of Certification Clinician™ and director of Creative Healing, Teen Support Centers, uniquely positions me to understand the deep emotional challenges teens face. Having navigated my own tumultuous youth and now parenting a "Fire Feeler" teen, I use my personal and professional insights to guide thousands of teens and their parents. I am passionately committed to creating environments where teens are supported while the entire family learns skills to improve and work together.
I was deeply moved by Firefly Lane because it captures the essence of lifelong friendships transcending family dysfunction. I cherished how Tully and Kate's relationship reflects the idea that sometimes, the family we choose holds the key to our healing.
This book resonated with me on a personal level, reminding me of my bond to my best friend, which has been a cornerstone through life's tumultuous phases.
From the New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah comes a powerful novel of love, loss, and the magic of friendship. . . . now a #1 Netflix series!
In the turbulent summer of 1974, Kate Mularkey has accepted her place at the bottom of the eighth-grade social food chain. Then, to her amazement, the "coolest girl in the world" moves in across the street and wants to be her friend. Tully Hart seems to have it all---beauty, brains, ambition. On the surface they are as opposite as two people can be: Kate, doomed to be forever uncool, with a…
I learned to read at four and have been telling stories ever since. Books were my escape from unhappiness into a new and endless world. Left to myself, I’d read ten or so weekly, and my mind was packed with characters, dialogue, jokes, prose, and poetry like an over-brimming literary reservoir. Words are my thing, and I am an avid collector of them. I was reading David Copperfield at eight and specialised in 18th and 19th-century literature at university. I’ve written five books and am working on the sixth. I love writing humour but have also authored Jane Austen Fan Fiction and poetry. Without books, my world is nothing.
I simply loved this book. It took me straight back to the long, hot summer of 1976 and to the confusing feelings around being a teenager. The smell of phone boxes, flares, awful hair – it was all there.
The main character, a 14-year-old would-be poet, has lost her mother and is living with her alcoholic father. She’s an attractive and engaging character, and when she was fostered by a local family, I assumed her life would get better. Not the case. The teenage daughter loathes her, and there are more secrets in this respectable family than in her own.
Funny, poignant, sad, and I hated to say goodbye to the characters. A fabulous read.
'Fresh, authentic and darkly funny. It's a beautifully told story full of warmth and emotion without ever being sentimental - I absolutely loved it' Ruth Hogan, bestselling author of The Keeper of Lost Things
It’s the heatwave summer of 1976 and 14-year-old would be poet Jackie Chadwick is newly fostered by the Walls. She desperately needs stability, but their insecure, jealous teenage daughter isn't happy about the cuckoo in the nest and sets about ousting her.
When her attempts to do so lead to near-tragedy – and the Walls’ veneer of middle-class respectability begins to crumble – everyone in the…
My
aunt-in-law, a well-known poet, recommended this book to me largely because the
main character was a pastor, and I grew up as the son of a preacher man.
Franzen expertly portrays the complexities of individual characters’ psyches,
as well as the intricacies of family dynamics. Every character is
three-dimensional with a backstory, relatable foibles, and the full suite of
human strengths and weaknesses.
Whether you grew up as a preacher’s kid or with
no religion at all, you’ll find a lot that pulls you into this story, start to
finish.
Jonathan Franzen’s gift for wedding depth and vividness of character with breadth of social vision has never been more dazzlingly evident than in Crossroads.
It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless—unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father. Clem’s sister, Becky, long the social…
Growing up in California, I was enchanted by the idea of New York City—largely due to the visions of it I found in the books on this list. I’ve now lived in NYC for 20 years and love matching real locations with their versions in my imagination. In my time in the city I’ve been a staff writer for Newsweek Magazine, an editor at Scholastic, and a freelancer for many publications including The New York Times and The Washington Post. I’m currently working on a second novel.
Miranda Sinclair is a latchkey kid who lives with her single mom on the Upper West Side of New York City in the late 1970s. I love the way Miranda navigates her dirty, dangerous, yet enchanting city – her street smarts, her fears, her relationships with the adults in the neighborhood who keep a watchful eye over her. And the book, while totally gritty and real, also has a lovely, melancholy element of magical realism that makes the story mysterious and poignant.
Miranda's life is starting to unravel. Her best friend, Sal, gets punched by a kid on the street for what seems like no reason, and he shuts Miranda out of his life. The key that Miranda's mum keeps hidden for emergencies is stolen. And then a mysterious note arrives: 'I am coming to save your friend's life, and my own. I ask two favours. First, you must write me a letter.'
The notes keep coming, and Miranda slowly realises that whoever is leaving them knows things no one should know. Each message brings her closer to believing that only she…
Growing up in a comfortable suburb, I was never encouraged to examine my privilege or to ask questions about our country’s social and economic arrangements. I knew shockingly little about U.S. history beyond the triumphalist narratives of great men and military victories; the dark side of that history usually came in footnotes, and always with the implication that our country’s sins are mere aberrations from its good intentions. I had to learn the most important truths about our history from literature, which shows us the impact that events have on individuals, painting a fuller picture of how America became the country it is, and the terrible price so many people have had to pay.
I moved to San Francisco in 2002 and stayed for almost 15 years, but I knew almost nothing about the Asian American community that has made the city their home for more than a century. I was never taught Asian American history; I never learned about the importation of Chinese labor in the 19th century, or the Chinese Exclusion Act, or the forced relocation of Japanese-Americans during World War II. I’d never really thought of Asian Americans as part of the Civil Rights struggle or understood the constant racism they’ve faced. I learned about all of these things from Yamashita’s rich doorstopper of a novel, which brings the San Francisco of the 1960s and 1970s to life more dynamically and inclusively than I’d imagined it before. It’s a wild, kaleidoscopic experience; reading it is like watching history take place in real-time.
Dazzling and ambitious, this multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America's struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco near the end of the 1960s. As Karen Tei Yamashita's motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies, and personal turmoil.
The tenth anniversary edition of this National Book Award finalist brings the joys and struggles of the I Hotel to a whole new generation of readers, historians,…
I’ve always been fascinated by the role of women in war: men may be on the front lines, but women deal with its impact and often struggle to have equal standing. I was inspired by stories told by my mother who was a nurse in World War II and participated in surgery under gunfire and helped liberate a POW camp in Germany. Yet, no one wanted to hear from her because she was “just a nurse.” Fast forward to Vietnam where women were still being marginalized. I wrote The Fourteenth of September to even the playing field by telling a story that was largely based upon my own experience in college during l969-1970.
When a girl is stuck between generations in the early days of feminism:
A classic coming-of-age memoir of the early ‘70s, where a 16-year-old who thinks she has it all figured out, hits the road. She is forced to learn fast as she encounters dropouts, draft dodgers, and communal living, all the while running up against the sexism that masqueraded as freedom and love as she discovers by trial and error, the liberated woman she wants to be.
In this coming-of-age memoir, Sharon takes you with her on a nail-biting adventure through the early 1970s after leaving her sheltered home life at sixteen years old to join the hippies. Yearning for freedom, she lands in an adult world for which she is unprepared, and must learn quickly in order to survive.
As Sharon navigates the US and Canada-whether by hitchhiking, bicycle, or the back of a motorcycle-she experiences love and heartbreak, discovers whom she can and cannot trust, and awakens to the growing women's liberation movement while living in a rural off-grid commune. In this colorful memoir, she…
By François Vigneault and Jonas Madden-Connor
Author
Why are we passionate about this?
We’re a couple of award-winning graphic novel creators who happen to have been friends since middle school. We’ve been enmeshed in films and comic books for our entire lives, and always enjoyed discussing them with each other, sharing hidden gems, and staying up late to pore over what went right (or wrong) when a favorite comic was made into a movie or TV show. We’re in the middle of an ongoing wave of cinematic adaptations, with billion-dollar blockbusters and indie gems alike looking to graphic novels for inspiration. Read these five books now before they show up on a screen near you, and you’ll have the sweet pleasure of pronouncing “The graphic novel was better!”
Black Hole is a striking tale of a sexually transmitted plague running rampant amongst a community of teenagers in suburban Washington in the 1970s, all illustrated in creator Charles Burns’ almost inhumanly precise and dark art style. Mind-bending and terrifying, this graphic novel has come close to being adapted many times over the year, and its mix of eminently relatable interpersonal drama and existential dread make it a perfect fit for the screen, a horror story with heart and soul.
“The best graphic novel of the year” (Time) tells the story of a strange plague devastating the lives of teenagers in mid-1970s suburban Seattle, revealing the horrifying nature of high school alienation—the savagery, the cruelty, the relentless anxiety, and the ennui.
We learn from the outset that a strange plague has descended upon the area’s teenagers, transmitted by sexual contact. The disease is manifested in any number of ways—from the hideously grotesque to the subtle (and concealable)—but once you’ve got it, that’s it. There’s no turning back.
As we inhabit the heads of several key characters—some kids who have it,…
I love music and books about the music industry. Fiction or nonfiction–the drama of a musician’s rise and efforts to sustain a career never gets old to me. I can relate to their determination to make a living doing something they love. Also, as a resident of Memphis, Tennessee, I’m fascinated by the musical history here and often meet people that had ties to the music industry and are now “regular people.” My latest novel Intermissionis about a singing group. I’ve read numerous books in this genre, from Motown bios to the five listed. What a great way to combine my two favorite things–music and books!
This book piqued my interest because it was on former President Obama’s reading list. On the surface, this is a story about an interracial rock duo’s rise to fame and their breakup. But it is really about how race impacts black women and the choices we have to make that others don’t.
The story is primarily set in the 1970s, and as a baby boomer, I enjoy reading about this time period. In 2016, they considered a reunion, but of course, secrets and unresolved issues got in the way.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVOURITE BOOKS OF 2021 | LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE 2022
'A thrilling work' TA-NEHISI COATES
'Lovely and lyrical . . . warm and wonderful' KILEY REID
A queen of punk before her time. A duo on the brink of stardom. A night that will define their story for ever.
Opal is a fiercely independent young woman pushing against the grain in her style and attitude, a Black punk artist before her time. Despite her unconventional looks, Opal believes she can be a star. So when the aspiring British singer/songwriter Neville Charles discovers her one night,…
I started singing and playing guitar in garage bands in high school, about the same time that I began thinking of myself as a serious writer, so for me the two endeavors have always gone hand in hand. Over the decades, I’ve continued to write creatively—while teaching thousands of students along the way—and also to play in a number of bands that have specialized in everything from country-folk to raucous punk. Like many writer-musicians, I love reading good stories about the challenges and joys of people joining together, and falling apart, as they attempt to transcend ordinary life through the power of music.
Taylor Jenkins Reid is not the first or only person to adapt the nonfiction oral history format into a work of fiction, but she does it with the most panache.
Loosely based on the mid-seventies romance between Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, Daisy Jones & the Six offers a nonstop procession of drama and conflict, but there’s a tender heart beating at its center and a heartbreaking reveal at the end.
I love great writing and great storytelling too. As a child I liked nothing more than when my father made up bedtime stories for me. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to appreciate how writers work exceptionally hard not just at getting the plot of a story right but in the words they chose. Being Irish, I love to support the wealth of enviably good writers that seem to spill out from these shores. In each of these books you will find love and loss and laughter. It never fails to make me smile when abroad to see one of these guys on the shelves of the bookshops I visit.
I love Donal Ryan’s work and thankfully he is a prolific writer. Really, I could have chosen any of his books, but this one is his most recent and had me rereading sentence after sentence because his prose is so full of beauty. Paddy and Kit Gladney’s daughter disappears in 1973. They know nothing of where she has gone and if she is alive at all. Five years later she returns, with a son, changing the course of her family’s life forever. This a beautiful and devastating exploration of loss, alienation, and the redemptive power of love and affirms Ryan as one of the best storytellers Ireland has ever known.
"Mr. Ryan writes conspicuously beautiful prose... The fleeting happiness and abiding melancholy of the asymmetry, heightened by the intimately rendered surroundings, brings out Mr. Ryan's most sensuous and emotive writing." -The Wall Street Journal
From the Booker nominated author of From a Low and Quiet Sea, Donal Ryan's new novel follows the Gladney family across three generations seeking the true meaning of what it is to find home and love.
In 1973, twenty-year-old Moll Gladney takes a morning bus from her rural home in Ireland…
