Aside from my brief stint as a bossy know-it-all when I was little, I have always been that quiet girl no one notices. In high school, it took me at least ten minutes and five tries to get myself to wish my desk partner a happy birthday. I spent a lot of my adolescence trying to find myself, so I understand what it’s like to feel lost. My greatest wish is for my book to help at least one person feel how these books helped me.
I will never pass up an opportunity to discuss one of Zack Smedley’s books. This one is one of the most beautiful, truthful, and book-hangover-inducing stories I have ever enjoyed reading.
Its narrator, a boy struggling to tell and come to terms with a difficult truth, will live in my heart and mind forever. I advise people to check for content warnings, as Smedley’s work never fails to leave me an emotional wreck.
Owen Turner is a boy of too many words. For years, they all stayed inside his head and he barely spoke-until he met Lily. Lily, the girl who gave him his voice, helped him come out as bi, and settle into his ASD diagnosis. But everything unravels when someone reports Owen's biggest secret to the school: that he was sexually assaulted at a class event. As officials begin interviewing students to get to the bottom of things, rumors about an assault flood the school hallways. No one knows it happened to Owen, and he's afraid of what will happen if…
The truth is, I’ve never fit in. I'm always asking questions like: Why do we do it that way? And, what if we tried this instead? These types of questions, however, though intriguing to me and other creatives, make the keepers of the status quo really nervous. As a professor and narrative inquiry researcher, I study the stories of people who've been silenced—extracting the characters, plot, and setting these narratives have in common. For workplace abuse survivors, a salient theme is they think big! To support this mission, I'm on the Executive Board and serve as the Education Director for the National Workplace Bullying Coalition and am a regular contributor to Psychology Today.
As a narrative inquiry researcher, I study stories of people who have experienced a shared phenomenon, such as workplace bullying, sexual assault, or a natural disaster. Almost without exception, the initial plotlines are ones of devastation.
Over the years, I have attempted to come to a deeper understanding of where the hurt resides. Cohen answers that question, documenting for the reader how our desire to be a contributing member of a community is at the center of our striving, and how the surest way to wound another is by pushing them outside the inner circle. The cruelest of all acts is to revoke someone’s belonging to their community, and more tragically, themselves.
In Cohen’s masterful book, he shares stories and details the research on why our need to belong is an essential ingredient of being human and offers the reader fruitful ways to form more meaningful connections.
Stanford University psychology professor Geoffrey L. Cohen has used science to show that when people don't have a sense of belonging, negative consequences often follow: diminished performance at school and work, poorer health, increased levels of hostility and more divisive politics. This book offers concrete steps that we can all take to foster belonging.
Cohen is known for major studies revealing practical actions ("wise interventions") that creatively reduce conflict in all areas of life. Something as simple as affirming your core values before a test can markedly increase your score. Helping others in even small matters can improve health and…
When my family moved from sunny Florida to the cold, rugged mountains of Montana when I was in eighth grade, I thought I would hate it. Instead, I fell in love with Montana and its arresting landscape, especially Glacier National Park, which was only about a half-hour drive from our small town. When I began writing crime novels, I considered setting before plot or character because landscape was so central to me. I decided to place my stories in and around Glacier National Park where the backdrop is stunning, stark, and sometimes haunting. The following books allow you to luxuriate in atmosphere while being propelled by dynamic characters and interesting plots.
Hemingway once said that a writer should “convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself.” As a reader, I don’t always need to feel like the story has happened to me, but when a book is written in first-person narrative, I do enjoy feeling like it really happened to the narrator. I love it when the main character sounds authentic and the author fades to the background, making it seem like a memoir. Such a book is Faith, by Jennifer Haigh. AlthoughFaithisn’t categorized as crime-fiction, it involves an Irish Catholic family in Boston in 2002 during the height of the church’s pedophile scandals. As the narrator navigates her family dynamics after her half-brother is accused of sexual assault, she becomes a woman caught between faith and doubt, and she explores this limbo…
One woman's search for the truth after scandal rocks her family, and the explosive family secrets she uncovers, in this complex, moving novel from award-winning author Jennifer Haigh.
In Faith, Jennifer Haigh explores the repercussions of one family's history of silence, when a priest's sex scandal forces his family's untold past to surface. Art, Sheila, and Mike are siblings in a large extended Irish-American family from the Boston suburbs. Though their father is a non-believer, their mother is lace curtain Irish-Catholic, having raised her children to keep family secrets just that - secret - in a home where most subjects…
My interest in serial killers began when I was a teen watching horror movies with my mom. I learned all I could about them—even became a horror special-effects makeup artist. Eventually, I had to quit due to my connective tissue disorder (Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome). It put me on a path of writing. I love digging into the darker side of humanity—murder or mental illness. The story of a serial killer who could challenge the reader to see disability in a new light came to me, and I had to write her story, if not just so I could dive into the psyche of another serial killer.
Scarlett Clark is a bi serial killer who kills bad men. Carly Schiller is a queer student who just escaped an abusive father. Their storylines are equally gripping, with moments of unexpected intensity in both lust and fear. Layne Fargo creates a world so grounded in reality that, as a woman, it was painful to read at times—micro-aggressions, normalized inappropriate touching. Fargo doesn’t exaggerate it, she just exposes it as part of the narrative. Better yet, she gives a glimmer of equalization in the form of Scarlett who focuses her urge to kill in a direction that’s easy to root for, to want to read. It was wanting a serial killer to go on with her work that made this book and Scarlett a standout.
From the author of the “raw, ingenious, and utterly fearless” (Wendy Walker, USA TODAY bestselling author) Temper comes a dynamic psychological thriller about two women who give bad men exactly what they deserve.
Scarlett Clark is an exceptional English professor. But she’s even better at getting away with murder.
Every year, she searches for the worst man at Gorman University and plots his well-deserved demise. Thanks to her meticulous planning, she’s avoided drawing attention to herself—but as she’s preparing for her biggest kill yet, the school starts probing into the growing body count on campus. Determined to keep her enemies…
I grew up reading mysteries and quickly realized that, for me, the best stories were those that peered into the very heart and soul of the protagonist. I also favored books with deep roots; I wanted the present-day crime to be linked to the past. Through work and personal experience, I also understood the heavy toll of loss and grief and found myself drawn to writing a mystery series that related both in a way that was honest and real. When readers tell me that my protagonist’s pain is their pain, that his story is their story, I am both humbled and honored.
Lark Chadwick is my kind of protagonist – gutsy, smart, and burdened with a past that won’t let go.
When the aunt who raised her dies, Chadwick refuses to believe that suicide was the cause. Digging into the circumstances surrounding one death she discovers the truth about the deaths of her parents who were killed in an accident that only she survived.
A fledgling journalist, Chadwick talks herself into a job with the local paper, a first step in the many adventures that follow her in an exciting series that takes her all the way to the White House. Author John DeDakis, a former veteran CNN journalist, infuses the award-winning series with real-life drama and authenticity.
Orphaned as an infant, sexually assaulted as a naïve college student, strong-willed, impulsive Lark Chadwick is vexed and trying to figure out what to do with her mixed-up life. When she discovers the body of the aunt who raised her, Lark goes on a search for answers.
She is stunned to learn from a 25-year-old newspaper clipping that she’s the “miracle baby” who survived a suspicious car accident that killed her parents at a rural railroad crossing in southern Wisconsin. Lark convinces Lionel Stone, the crusty Pulitzer-Prize winning editor, to let her do a follow-up investigation of the crash. Two…
I am a writer who has written an assortment of over a hundred and seventy different articles, poems, and books. I worked for thirty five years as a psychologist and my late wife, Rosie Larner, was a social worker and lecturer. We have both dealt with cases of domestic abuse and have recognised the extent of the problem worldwide and the misery that it causes. We offer these tales under the pen-name of Rosy Stewart to show the diversity of the problems and to bring hope to the sufferers with the hope of resolution of each case to reach a wider audience.
This is told in the voice of a young girl living in a household of domestic violence in the 1960s in UK.
She is regarded as presenting difficulties for her parents right from the beginning with her difficult birth. It is written in short scenes and excerpts from her childhood. She adores her mother, but she is sexually assaulted by one of her mother’s boyfriends. The writing of this is realistic as seen by an innocent four-year-old girl.
When the mother marries another boyfriend the family dynamics change from being kind at first to much stricter. It is clear that the little girl will develop psychological problems in later life.
Cursed by her grandmother and trapped in domestic violence in 1960s Britain, Evelyn must find a way to protect her five young daughters. Aware that her firstborn, Kim, is doomed to repeat her own disastrous life choices, Evelyn places her in the care of one of her admirers to protect her from her fate.
Meanwhile, her daughter Bess carries a deep-rooted sense of shame and guilt that her birth nearly killed her beloved mother. Subjected to sexual abuse, she tries to make sense of her feelings and her place within the secretive family she grows up in, desperately seeking love…
As much as I enjoy traveling to real places in fiction, I find that authors who ask me to inhabit a world of their own making make me think more deeply, and these are also the novels I dream about when I’m not actually reading them, the pages I cannot wait to return to when I can pick up the book again. By exiting the world we inhabit, and occupying a world very much like our own, I end up reflecting more thoughtfully about the contemporary moment, and in a way, feel more connected. I tried to create such a world in The Stranger Game, and this is something I hope to do again in a future novel.
Doubling as both a political thriller and political satire, and set on an unnamed, maybe South American island, Idra Novey’s novel about a corrupt senator stars powerful women who are determined to uncover a past sexual assault and possible murder, ultimately speaking truth to power.
Named a BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR by * NPR * Esquire * O, The Oprah Magazine * Real Simple * BBC * PopSugar * Bustle * Kirkus Reviews * Lit Hub
"A gripping, astute, and deeply humane political thriller." -The Boston Globe
"Mesmerizing [and] uncannily prescient."-Los Angeles Times
A taut, timely novel about what a powerful politician thinks he can get away with and the group of misfits who finally bring him down, from the award-winning author of Ways to Disappear.
On an unnamed island country ten years after the collapse of a U.S.-supported regime, Lena suspects the powerful…
As an investigative journalist, I’ve spent my career interviewing and trying to understand the worst of humanity: murderers, child molesters and rapists. They are all predators, but rape is personal for me. I was a young journalist starting my career when a serial rapist assaulted my neighbor. He entered many things uninvited—homes, bedrooms, and my mind. For twenty years, I was obsessed—learning everything I could about him and sexual assault. I read these books to understand why the justice system and society sometimes fail survivors. Yet these remarkable survivors still manage to heal their trauma–at least, that’s what I found in each of these books.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve often fantasized about revenge. I think anyone who suffers some sort of trauma thinks about righting the wrong. In cases of rape, the punishment often does not fit the crime. And many women never get justice at all—if the rapist is not caught.
But in this book, that’s not the case. It could be argued that justice comes in the form of revenge when three women strike back at their abusers. Elizabeth Flock’s intimate narrative stems from her own experience as a young woman who was drugged and raped while in Europe in her twenties.
This beautifully investigated book forces you to contemplate the true meaning of justice.
'An arresting, deeply reported new book' Washington Post
'This gripping, inflaming book, itself an act of fury, shows how revenge can transmute into politics or be crushed by it' Larissa MacFarquhar
'Flock has a novelist's knack for creating suspense . . . This one will stick with readers' Publishers Weekly
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In this profoundly moving book, Emmy-winning journalist Elizabeth Flock explores the stories of three women living in deeply patriarchal places with destructive cultures of honour, places in which institutions - government, police, courts - failed to protect women from violence, leaving them no option but to stand up and…
As an investigative journalist, I’ve spent my career interviewing and trying to understand the worst of humanity: murderers, child molesters and rapists. They are all predators, but rape is personal for me. I was a young journalist starting my career when a serial rapist assaulted my neighbor. He entered many things uninvited—homes, bedrooms, and my mind. For twenty years, I was obsessed—learning everything I could about him and sexual assault. I read these books to understand why the justice system and society sometimes fail survivors. Yet these remarkable survivors still manage to heal their trauma–at least, that’s what I found in each of these books.
I don’t know how Karen Stefano did it...this brave memoir, thirty years in the making, is a perfect case study of PTSD and how trauma from sexual assault can rear its ugly head at any time—even after years in hibernation.
The daily struggle Stefano faced was real. She worked as a criminal defense lawyer fighting for those accused of heinous crimes—some as bad as the ones that were committed against her decades earlier while she was a uniformed patrol officer on a college campus.
I was touched by her honesty, moved by her courage, and blown away by her humanity. Please read this book.
On a summer night in 1984, nineteen-year-old UC Berkeley sophomore Karen Thomas leaves her uniformed patrol job and walks home alone in darkness. At the threshold of her apartment a man assaults her at knife point. After a soul-chilling struggle, she manages to escape.
Though she is left traumatized by her assault and the subsequent trial of her attacker, she herself goes on to become a criminal defense lawyer, defending those accused of crimes as heinous as the one committed against her.
Fast forward to 2014, thirty years after her assault, when her life, once again, appears to be crumbling.…
I fell in love with reading in fourth grade but felt like real girls weren't reflected in young adult books. The characters had friend problems and boy problems, but books about really big problems like sexual assault were rare because most people thought subjects like addiction and abuse weren't appropriate for young readers. It's one of those weird dichotomies: we know kids deal with big problems, but we're afraid to broach the subject. I used books to help me understand stuff I didn't feel comfortable talking about so I appreciate books that show people how to claw themselves out of a bad place and be their own hero.
The Fixis tough to read at moments, but so, so necessary. The Me Too movement showed us that just about every female has been subject to assault on some level. Childhood sexual assault is so common that many survivors don't disclose because they don't want to seem weak. Telling someone is the best thing survivors can do for themselves, and The Fix shows that sometimes you can't whisper the truth. Sometimes you have to shout it.
One conversation is all it takes to break a world wide open.
Seventeen-year-old Macy Lyons has been through something no one should ever have to experience. And she's dealt with it entirely alone.
On the outside, she's got it pretty good. Her family's well-off, she's dating the cute boy next door, she has plenty of friends, and although she long ago wrote her mother off as a superficial gym rat, she's thankful to have allies in her loving, laid-back dad and her younger brother.
But a conversation with a boy at a party one night shakes Macy out of the…
