100 Books Like All Our Trials

We don’t usually hear about the toll that incarcerating a mother, a daughter, or a sister takes on the family left behind. Michelle Horton’s beautiful memoir gives us access to that experience. Horton’s life was upended after her sister, Nicole Addimando, was arrested for killing her partner in self-defense.

Horton documents the next several years of their lives as she, her parents, her son, and Nicole’s children (who Horton took guardianship of while Nicole was in prison) navigated Nicole’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment. Illustrative in the mechanics of putting together a successful survivor-defense campaign, it is heartbreaking and infuriating in its description of the toll Nicole’s prosecution took on the family.

Coming out of law school in 1994, around the time of the passage of the Violence Against Women Act, I firmly believed that criminalization was the way to address intimate partner violence. As a new legal services lawyer, I encouraged my clients to turn to the criminal legal system because I believed it would keep them safe. 

This book introduced me to the reality that that system was punishing survivors and showed me how Black survivors of violence were uniquely vulnerable to criminalization. I owe a massive debt to Beth Richie’s work.

Most domestic violence shelters have this message on their voicemails: “If you are in immediate danger, call 911.” But for many survivors, particularly women of color, calling the police can lead to disaster. Ritchie’s book came out at a time when people were beginning to talk about police violence against Black men, but before #SayHerName, Sandra Bland, and Breonna Taylor were regularly included in that conversation.

You might have known that Eric Garner was choked to death by the police in New York City; you didn’t know that several weeks later, police also choked Rosann Miller, then seven months pregnant, to death. Ritchie documents how police officers verbally, emotionally, physically, and sexually abuse women of color—and how we can resist police violence.

When Kim Williams overdosed, Leigh Stubbs and Tami Vance sought help and performed CPR on her until paramedics arrived and took her to the hospital. The doctors who examined Kim said that she had been sexually assaulted. Police focused on Leigh and Tami, mainly, if not exclusively, because they were lesbians.

Leigh and Tami were wrongfully convicted of the assault and sentenced to 44 years in prison. Beety, an innocence litigator, highlights how medical malpractice, unscientific expert testimony, prosecutorial misconduct, problematic judicial rulings, and, above all, homophobia led to Leigh and Tami’s (and other manifestly unjust) convictions.

Prior to my sister’s arrest, I didn’t spend much time thinking about the prison system. I also didn’t realize that up to 90% of women’s prisons are filled with victims of domestic violence and/or gender-based violence caught in the criminal legal system.

This epidemic is best articulated by Leigh Goodmark, a law professor and prolific writer, who clearly distills the issue in this book, while prescribing common-sense abolitionist solutions. This book is a concise and thorough education on criminalized survival, using the voices and experiences of survivors. 

I like this book because it takes on the troubling theme of consent in the case where one person is an adolescent and the other a significantly older adult. I think in all cases of this power dynamic, the confusion a young person feels when she is eager for the love and attention of the older man blurs the meaning of consent for her.I know it did for me.

Yet the truth is a young teenager isn’t capable of consent; she is unaware of the price she’ll pay for what seems like love but is actually abuse. When the perpetrator is a well-liked or respected leader, like a coach or teacher, the confusion is worse because we are all led to believe this is a trustworthy person.

I loved this very emotional read. I loved the characters, the writing, and the story. The romance is steamy yet tasteful—extremely beautiful.

This is another book that gave me all the feels, but another story that left me feeling happy with the ending rather than feeling like I was left wanting more.

I’ll never quite wrap my head around what Machado has done in this memoir about an abusive relationship. It’s written in the second person, which imbues it with a chilling immediacy. The setting is a home the two women share: a cabin in Indiana, the Dream House of the title.

The Dream House is also the concept of an idealized queer relationship and family life that are not available to the narrator, try as she might, in the context of this relationship. Machado takes fever-dream diversions to places where the narrator is gaslit by a charismatic, emotionally vampiric partner. The Dream House is many-chambered; each holds a vision of the narrator denying her very being, and she has to fight to recover it.

All of Higashino’s books are great, but this is one of the best, and it happens to be the first novel in the Detective Galileo series, where a physics professor helps a detective solve crimes. Imagine Sherlock Holmes, except set on the streets of Tokyo. We follow Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police as he tries to piece together the mysterious events surrounding a murder where we, the reader, already know who committed the crime.

The format is so very different from your normal crime novel, and that is one of the truly interesting things about this book. It’s still a marvel to me that Higashino keeps you wondering the whole time, even as you already know key parts of the outcome. If you want to understand the Japanese mind in advance of a trip (or move) to Japan, this is a great place to start!

Some books may shy away from taboos, but Heather Levy writes fearlessly, dragging topics into the open and spotlighting them, so talking about them is unavoidable.

This isn’t only the story of a woman trying to clear her or her stepbrother’s names after the man who abused her throughout her adolescence turns up murdered; it’s a coming of age as she leans into what she desires and steps into that power.

I love that this is set in rural Oklahoma, a part of the country I feel gets overlooked as far as thrillers and noir go, and the second chance romance and potential that builds between Sam and Eric. This book does feature frank discussions of BDSM/kink and how an abuser exploits it, so please read the content warnings before diving in!