199 books like P.S.

People kept telling me to read it, so I finally did–just in time to include it on this list. Rotating narrators–a White missionary’s wife and four daughters from the American South–represent disparate points of view concerning their family’s move to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

One thing I loved is the attention to historical detail and Kingsolver’s ability to include multiple, complex subplots to better frame the colonial history of this particular time/place and to better demonstrate the insidious ongoing brutality of colonization in terms of inequitable global wealth.

Language and religion play a major role in the plundering resource extraction industries, as do political and military interference, apartheid, and so much more. I loved her exploration of language(s): the power held in naming and misnaming. The youngest daughter sums it up best. “My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.” Characters are primarily White… show more.

Divine, divine, divine! This novel taught me so much about the landscape in Appalachia. The female characters were rich and deep. Running throughout the story was the thread of women standing for farming systems that partner with nature versus male characters who want to dominate or decimate.

It was musical and mystical, and I just adored being transported to the cabin in the woods and the rich gardens of the women who knew how Mama Earth rolls. There was also a wonderful exploration of female desire. It was lush and leafy, and I’m so grateful to Barbara for writing this book

This novel took much of America by storm, and I am no different.

I love the voice of Demon Copperhead, which bleeds from the Appalachian Mountains. He has endured more trauma over his early years than most people do in several lifetimes. I think what’s most endearing about this novel is that it is sadly believable. Demon is a boy whose local environment has doomed him before he took his first breath. He’s the kind of boy who is just hoping for a break, and as the reader, all I wanted to do was adopt him and give him a good home.

And of course, it did win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, so that probably means something!

One of the first contemporary novels to take climate change seriously, and still one of the best.

The plot concerns a woman who finds millions of Monarch butterflies living in the valley near her Tennessee home, only to discover once scientists arrive that they have been driven from their native home farther south by the accelerating pace of global warming.

The novel takes a strong political stance but still manages to avoid becoming didactic, a real achievement when you consider how polarizing a subject climate change has become.

This book helped me release shame after a colleague of mine told me my work wasn’t “science.”

Here’s the truth: to create a healing platform, I needed to tap into ways of thinking that academia sees as “woo woo” and “savage.” I looked to the stars. I meditated. I did rituals and read myths.

Dr. Kimmerer, trained as a traditional botanist, realized that the Indigenous myths and stories she was told as a child contained scientific knowledge passed down for generations by her tribe.

She realized there were scientific truths her community knew for millennia that traditional scientists only discovered within the last 100 years. This is the power of Ancestral Intelligence, disregarded by the same science that ultimately created AI.

What stories, fables, and myths have taught you valuable lessons about the world?

Set in Dublin in what could be the present—though it could be any city in a liberal democracy and any time in the coming years—this is a frighteningly believable story of the arrival and imposition of fascism. The focus is on one normal suburban family whose first response is to shrug. They think, "It doesn't concern us," but slowly, and then sometimes in quick shocks, it does.

The writing is understated. But the description of an incremental, daily drip-drip of tightening repression almost made me feel short of breath. There is no happy ending. It's not escape reading—more a cautionary tale.

Isabelle Allende is truly one of the great writers of our time, a strong recommendation in itself. What I found particularly thrilling about this book, however, was the way she shed light on how authoritarianism and fascism are disproportionately devasting for the most vulnerable among us – children.

By weaving together narratives about the displacement of and harm to children during the Nazi holocaust and under the brutal immigration policies of President Trump, Allende provokes outrage and inspires compassion.

South to Freedom tells the relatively unknown story of Americans who moved to Mexico for the most existential of reasons: to flee slavery in the 1840s-1850s.

Although Mexico has its own history of slavery, it abolished that evil earlier than the United States did, and this book provides accounts of Mexican officials and ordinary citizens risking their lives to protect fugitive slaves from pursuing slaveholders.

Southern states believed that annexing Texas and invading Mexico would ensure slavery's continuation, but as Baumgartner shows, those actions were instead among the proximate causes of the Civil War. Baumgartner’s important book enhances the sanitized version of Civil War history I learned in school and sheds light on this noble aspect of Mexican history.

If you ask American expats in San Miguel de Allende how they “discovered” this beautiful city in the central highlands as far from a beach as one can be in Mexico, a significant percentage of us will mention Tony Cohan’s lovely memoir, On Mexican Time, set in the San Miguel of 1985.

San Miguel is often referred to as magical, and most of us tend to think of whatever moment we personally arrived as peak San Miguel magic. The longer we’re here, the more nostalgic we grow for that lost era. The thing about magic, though, is that it can evolve. Today’s San Miguel de Allende is less sleepy and quirky than the town Tony described, but it is still abundantly charmed.

I read The Old Gringo in college before I had any inkling that I would one day be a not-too-old gringa making her home in San Miguel de Allende.

Fuentes imagines meaningful final days for Ambrose Bierce, an American journalist who in 1913 headed off into Mexico at the age of 71, never to be heard from again. I love this book for the way Fuentes captures and probes profound differences and lingering mistrust between our cultures as well as the universal human struggles for meaning, opportunity, security, and belonging.

While Fuentes’ old gringo, we are told, came to die a worthy soldier’s death in Mexico, the gringos of my generation are here to live fully and well.