The most recommended books about Nebraska

I thought Love & Terror was a book about a killing in Chadron, Nebraska, which was correct. . . sort of. Ballantine’s sparkling prose and grim compassion hooked me immediately. The book does examine a death—suicide? murder?—but we don’t meet the victim, Steven Haataja, until page 62. 

Ballantine drives past the shuffling Haataja the night before his death and tells us Haataja “limped slightly from a recently broken hip. If I’d known what was going to happen to him, I would have run him over . . . hard enough to break his other hip, put him back in his wheelchair,” in order to prevent his death. 

When I first read Love & Terror, I learned crime doesn’t need to be the center of a true crime.

In a world with superpowers, two abilities mean you’re a Super and none means you’re Normal.

The Twist? Merrin Grey has a single power, meaning she’s half a Super called a One. And when she’s forced to transfer to a normal high school she meets Elias who is also a One. When they combine their powers, they can fly! 

One is a love letter to superheroes and comics and plays with the idea of what makes someone a superhero vs a less than. I loved all the sci-fi tropes stood on their heads in this book. And Merrin and Elias are the cutest. This was one of the first indie-published novels I read. It showed me the art of possible, and how fantastic the world of indie publishing is.

Slogum House is a fairly brutal account of the dynamics between a gentle patriarch who married a shifty woman and the influence her brutality had on the family. Parts of this novel are disturbing and hard to read, but this is an interesting tale of a desperate and driven woman who will literally stop at nothing to get what she wants, and how that ruthlessness colors her family and children’s lives. The setting is the remote western sand-hills of Nebraska. Brilliant writing.

I liked this story so much that I read it a second time. Author Mary Connealy took me to the Nebraska Sandhills and showed me the beauty of the country while painting the beauty of the woman who lived there. Such a sweet love story of a mother who gives all she has for her sons—and the man who surprisingly gives back to her something she never dreamed she'd have again. 

On the other end of the spectrum is a light and funny, extremely well-written, and poignant middle grade novel about a boy growing up with his mother inside prison walls. (Full disclosure, I cried at the end of the book.)

While it’s not realism, it brings attention to its readers, that the law is not perfect, and often the wrong people are in prison. The happy ending helps make this realization palpable for young readers, who nonetheless will get the message about criminal justice and being quick to judge. 

“You ought to write inspirationals.” Every time a reader told me that, I’d shake my head and reply, “They’re too preachy.” But then a dear friend’s death made me reconsider the direction of my writing, and I began to research the inspirational market. One of the first books I read was Secrets on the Wind, the first of Whitson’s Pine Ridge Portraits trilogy. To my delight, she combined meticulous research, sprinkling her story with “telling” details that brought the Nebraska prairie and Fort Robinson to life, and unforgettable characters to create a story that’s lingered in my memory for more than a decade. Best of all, she demonstrated that faith-friendly fiction doesn’t need to be preachy. I’m deeply grateful to her because Secrets on the Wind convinced me that this was the right market for me. 

This is the story that inspired my novel. It takes place in a small Nebraska railroad town in the bitterly cold winter of 1898. My novel takes place in the bitterly cold winter of 1947, shortly after WW2, mostly in the same blue hotel in the same snowbound town as in Crane’s story.

Crane’s story “is one of the most well-known of the short stories in the collection The Monsters and Other Stories. Although it appears to be a reasonably simple tale about a man who encounters trouble following a stay at the Palace Hotel, several complex themes underpin the story and define many of the overarching themes in novels like Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and more generally, Crane’s corpus. Stylistically, the story breaks free from the norms of the period, often entering the realms of Expressionism, an unusual style to encounter in American literature.”

The premise of this book gets big points for originality: Lexington Willow is orphaned as a toddler by a tornado, literally blowing into the life of elephant Nyah, who protects and comforts the little girl in the storm and forms a mysterious connection with her. The wind is also a character in the book, hanging around long after the tornado. It knows things Lex doesn’t, and sometimes whispers to her.

The Elephant’s Girl portrays friendship, secrets, and a family’s pain in search of healing. Toss in a ghost for good measure, and what’s not to love?

Of all twenty-some books (and counting) in Child’s Jack Reacher series, this one stands out. In an interview, Lee once said, "I just wrote this one by the numbers." To me his final solo effort feels like he finally figured out how to say what he always wanted. It’s personal, yet geopolitical. Empathetic, yet very tough. In this tale of two half-cities run by rival gangs, the Armenians and the Ukrainians, he does so simply and brilliantly.

The story’s government is corrupt, as so many are, full of bribe-taking politicians who are unable to protect the citizenry from organized crime. To fill that void, in steps Jack Reacher with some intuitive detecting, a little romance, and a lot of bad-guy killing.

Horse stealing was more than theft of valuable and essential property. Matthew Luckett explains that on the Great Plains horse stealing “destabilized communities, institutions, nations, diplomatic relations, and cross-cultural exchange.” Luckett challenges many popular notions about horse thieves (for starters, they were not hung).  There were different kinds of horse theft and horse thieves. Don’t be misled by “Nebraska” in the title—this book shows that horse stealing had regional and national repercussions.   Luckett is an engaging writer, and this book is extremely readable and filled with compelling stories. I particularly recommend the chapter “The Horse Wars” about the role of horses in the war the U.S. Army waged against the Indians.