Books like Absolution — picked by fans

I am recommending this book as it is a true story about the initial engagement of US conventional Army forces in a major battle in the Vietnam War. It set the stage for how all future battles in that environment would be conducted. The actions by both the US Army and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) were followed throughout the war for the next eight years.

I particularly like the book because both authors participated in the battle, and their participation made for a very accurate retelling of the events. I found exceptional examples of leadership in this book, which I employed during the course of my twenty-five years of active duty as an Army officer and a helicopter pilot.

I also liked the fact that the book does not label the PAVN as the bad guys but just others fighting for what they believed in. 

Vietnam was a war complicated by political lies, class antagonism, and generational trauma.

The author seamlessly blends non-fiction with fiction, creating verisimilitude which references memoir without always being bound by the weight of facts, freeing the narrative. The horrors and hollowness of war are recounted through intimate encounters, unrequited loves, and imagined lives. In doing so, he keeps alive the friends and lovers who have died.

I found a catharsis in the clarity and coolness of his internal voice, which needs no embellishment to deliver its emotional blow. In writing about the everyday violence both during and after the conflict, he reminds us of the importance of love and morality.

I was blown away by how Mason integrated the coming-of-age story of Sam, who lost her dad in Vietnam, and the healing of her uncle Emmett, who served and has PTSD. In Country is vivid and moving. It takes on the effects of the Vietnam War on both veterans and families at home with power and elegant prose. 

I loved the spot-on depiction of Sam’s coming of age. I loved Mason’s deep understanding of Southern culture and norms. I loved the thoughtful evolution of Uncle Emmet’s healing. I adored the artful use of backstory and the larger look at the broader implications of the war that echo long after it was over.

I loved this book for its innovative approach to time travel. It’s not concerned with altering history but about time travel on a granular level. Alice travels back to her 16th birthday, which her 40-year-old self knows was a pivotal night. 

In the present day, Alice has remained friends with her high school best friend, Sam. I suspect many authors would have had them lose touch as adults and I loved that the novel is not predictably about Alice revisiting their high school friendship.

I also appreciated how Alice is entranced, at first, by the freedom of being a teenager again, but she’s soon caught up in the same struggles. Sam is her through-line, her confidant, helping her decide what in her life should change and what should not.

I recommend The Last of Her Kind by Sigrid Nunez because I found it an absorbing portrait of a friendship in which I wasn’t sure if the two people in it even liked each other. Georgette, called George, is from a working-class family, and Ann is her wealthy college roommate. It is the late 1960s. For me, the book had a fresh angle on the protest movements. George’s focus in college is trying to pull herself up.

To me, George and Ann’s friendship is like a house on a cliff–dangerous, depending on what door you open. This book has stayed with me because it explores why people remain friends, even if the relationship is difficult to the point of pain. 

It is beautifully written, which is one reason I love it so much. I’ve re-read it several times. I’ve never been to Kentucky, where much of it is set, but everything Ann Patchett describes is as vivid as a photograph. The protagonist, Rose, leaves her husband when she finds out she’s pregnant and enters a Catholic home for unwed mothers, intending to give her baby up.

It touched me how the very private Rose bonds with her roommate, Angie. She feels protective of her, and Angie, in turn, leans on Rose. Yet they know they will leave each other behind. I found it poignant that all the young women in the home rely on each other far more than the nuns in charge.

Here is another book about strong women who supported each other as they served in battle, not as soldiers, but as nurses.

Reading The Women, I got to experience the evacuation hospitals designed to provide rapid trauma care near combat zones. The war-torn love represented in these pages is both platonic and romantic.

This is not a YA novel, but it is a very accessible read, and it raises important ethical questions. What makes a good war, exactly?

This book is both atmospheric and deeply eerie, and I didn’t guess what was really going on.

From the time she was born, Laura Shane has had a mysterious guardian who appears out of nowhere and intervenes in her life for the better. The question of who he is drives the novel. Laura is orphaned by the age of 12. In foster care, she meets Thelma. Their tough childhood bonds them for life, and I think their friendship is a poignant example of "found family." When the supernatural overtakes Laura’s life, I love that it’s Thelma she turns to.

It is definitely science fiction, but I never felt like the characters were merely devices to serve the intricate plot. Laura and Thelma stayed with me long after I finished the book.

I believe that good war stories are also good love stories. That’s why I so loved this one. I came of age during the Vietnam War and watched many young men–my cousins, their friends, our neighbors–go off to fight.

I remember my cousin David having to leave his fianceé behind. She planned the wedding alone, and I was one of the cousins who shopped for bridesmaid’s dresses and shower presents while David was in Vietnam. When he returned, he was too traumatized to go through with the wedding and called it off.

Although Alice Winn writes about the great tragedy of WWI, the novel focuses more on the love between two young boys who attended the same British boarding school. I was especially moved by the lists of the boys' names from the school who were killed or wounded in the war that begin each chapter. Unfortunately, young boys and… show more.

If you like graphic memoirs and want one on the Vietnam War, Marcelino Truong’s Such a Lovely Little War is for you.

It’s an autobiographical tale of Truong’s life as the son of a Vietnamese diplomat working for the South Vietnam government and a French mother. We see the war through his eyes, but we also see the world he encountered as a teenager in London, Washington, and then back in Saigon.

The dialogue and the graphics are superb. The juxtaposition between his family and this “lovely little war” turning around it makes this memoir of the Vietnam War a highly original one.