Here are 100 books that Betty fans have personally recommended if you like
Betty.
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In my high school creative writing class, my teacher once said that good writing was a bit like looking at a star. If you look directly at it, it gets a little fuzzy and hard to see. But if you look just off to the side, the star becomes vivid and clear. That, to me, is exactly the power of spooky stories for young readers. We all deal with monsters, to varying degrees, throughout our lives. Even kids. But if we look at it just off to the side, through the angle of a fun, spooky story, those monsters suddenly become much more comprehensible. More faceable. More beatable.
It’s been said by smarter people than me how writing horror for kids isn’t about scaring them, it’s about showing them how brave they are.
A Monster Calls is the perfect illustration of that. The scariness and the spookiness are a stand-in for the real-life horrors that this kid is facing. Kids deal with a lot, and this book is the perfect example of how to survive when the worst happens.
The artwork too—wow! I wish I could get some of this artwork to hang on my walls. Absolutely gorgeous book.
The bestselling novel and major film about love, loss and hope from the twice Carnegie Medal-winning Patrick Ness.
Conor has the same dream every night, ever since his mother first fell ill, ever since she started the treatments that don't quite seem to be working. But tonight is different. Tonight, when he wakes, there's a visitor at his window. It's ancient, elemental, a force of nature. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth. Patrick Ness takes the final idea of the late, award-winning writer Siobhan Dowd and weaves an extraordinary and heartbreaking…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I’ve always felt myself to be different, odd, and a bit of a loner. As a child, people said I was "too clever by half," and I both hated and loved being able to understand things that other kids did not. Being good at maths and science in a girls’ boarding school does not make you friends! Escaping all that, I became a psychologist and, after a dramatic out-of-body experience, began studying lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, psychic claims, and all sorts of weird and wonderful experiences. This is why I love all these books about exceptional children.
What I love about this book is that Christopher is such an unusual child and sees the world in ways that most of us do not.
In reading this bizarre and disturbing mystery story, we begin to see the world differently ourselves. I like, too, the fact that what is different about him is never named – it’s not some specific diagnosis or categorization – he is just Christopher, the odd, mathematically gifted, strangely reacting, teenager.
When he becomes terrified of what we might take as quite ordinary events and places, I begin to feel some of his difference – to feel what it might be like to be so much an outsider. It helped me to remember that we are all different.
'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwan
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the…
Maurice Sendak said, "Children do live in fantasy and reality, they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do." In other words, children do the impossible. Growing up, stories where the real and imagined collided were like fresh air when I felt like I couldn't breathe. They've always been important to me, and for many reasons, hold a special place in our literature. Now, as a full-time teacher, writer, and daddy, I get to be on the other side of that joy equation, guiding new readers and writers as they become travelers of the fantastic.
I love this book because it really erases the line between the real and the fantastic. I’ve been a Neil Gaiman fan since Sandman. This is a middle-grade book written for me. The path I took through this book led me back to my childhood and reminded me of Where the Wild Things Are, with its nearly seamless transition between the “real” world and the imagined.
Neil’s done this before with Caroline and the Graveyard. But Ocean is different. Here, I never lose touch with the real world. The turn to fantasy just makes the real world more dangerous. I think that’s an important change. When I was a child, when I daydreamed or pondered the things and people and dark corners that I didn’t understand, when I added the additional layer of the fantastic, it wasn’t really an escape.
'Neil Gaiman's entire body of work is a feat of elegant sorcery. He writes with such assurance and originality that the reader has no choice but to surrender to a waking dream' ARMISTEAD MAUPIN
'Some books just swallow you up, heart and soul' JOANNE HARRIS
'Summons both the powerlessness and wonder of childhood, and the complicated landscape of memory and forgetting' GUARDIAN
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'My favourite response to this book is when people say, 'My childhood was nothing like that - and it was as if…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I am fascinated by first-person points of view. In writing plays and screenplays, I couldn’t write the inner thoughts of my characters. Now, in novels and short stories, I do that almost exclusively, even if the stories contain multiple narrators. I love the Unreliable Narrator—whether it is someone too young to understand what they are witnessing, someone who is in denial, or mentally ill, or a non-human experiencing the world in an odd way—the discrepancy between their view and mine delights me. I love discovering all those inner thoughts, fears, anxieties, and desires. These first-person stories let me into another’s experience and allow me to empathize with a whole new perspective.
I was profoundly moved by this painful-redemptive story of a young girl navigating her dysfunctional family. To discover the world through her thoughts plunged me into a frighting life of loss and danger and confusion. Yet it is the voice of this character that attracts me with her fierceness and determination.
I was stunned by the writing and had to pause and re-read parts to get the incredible revelations subtly slid into sentences. Ellen Foster is an unforgettable character.
"Filled with lively humor, compassion, and intimacy." —Alice Hoffman, The New York Times Book Review
"When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy." With that opening sentence we enter the childhood world of one of the most appealing young heroines in contemporary fiction. Her courage, her humor, and her wisdom are unforgettable as she tells her own story with stunning honesty and insight. An Oprah Book Club selection, this powerful novel has become an American classic.
Winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Ernest Hemingway…
I am passionate about little-told stories of women’s lives. Too often, women have been either minimized or silenced, and in so doing, we have ignored the experience of half of humanity. I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in the South, where girls and women were not listened to. For this reason, among others, it was hard for me to speak up for myself, hard for me to write. I found the stories of strong, courageous women—bad-ass women—whether fictional or real, to be life-affirming and inspirational in my own journey as a writer. These stories have helped me to say, “It’s my turn. I’m talking now.”
Here's another amazing woman—angry, determined 18-year-old Adair—who travels through Missouri’s brutal Civil War landscape looking for her father. Jailed in St. Louis under horrid conditions for suspected Confederate sympathies, she brawls with a fellow prisoner, strategically worms her way into the prison matron’s good graces, then captures the heart of a Union interrogator who helps her escape.
I am not a horse person, but Jiles’s description of Adair’s relationship with her horse Whiskey is otherworldly and totally converted me. One nightmare scene follows another as Adair makes her way back to her family home, and I love the resourceful lies she concocts to save herself and Whiskey amid guerrilla warfare and martial law.
Beautiful language; Jiles is a poet, and it shows.
"A gritty, memorable book ... it is a delight from start to finish, without a single misstep." Tracy Chevalier
Missouri, 1865. Adair Colley and her family have managed to hide from the bloody Armageddon of the American Civil War, but finally even their remote mountain farm cannot escape the plundering greed of the Union militia. Her house is burnt, her father beaten and dragged away. With fierce determination, Adair sets out after him on foot. So begins an extraordinary voyage which will see Adair herself denounced as a Confederate spy and thrown in jail. Here she falls passionately in love…
I didn’t realize for a long time that I was drawn to reading and writing quiet, character-driven stories about found families–because I didn’t know that was a thing. But here we are. As an introvert, I love learning about people and exploring their relationships with one another, and I have devoted my writing and reading life to this endeavor (even before, again, I knew this was a thing). As a child, I spent my time in libraries, falling in love with these characters. Now, as an author and professor of writing, I believe these novels are also all incredible textbooks of character creation and storytelling.
This book, recommended to me by a professor many years ago, is a master class in writing voice. It’s not an easy book—filled with family trauma and abuse (big-time content warning here)—but it masterfully explores the complex relationship between mothers and daughters.
Ruth Anne is broken by her mother’s (and stepfather’s) actions, but the others around her help to put her back together. Yet another lesson is that those who find us can sometimes be the best family for us.
A profound portrait of family dynamics in the rural South and "an essential novel" (The New Yorker)
"As close to flawless as any reader could ask for . . . The living language [Allison] has created is as exact and innovative as the language of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye." -The New York Times Book Review
The publication of Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina was a landmark event that won the author a National Book Award nomination and launched her into the literary spotlight. Critics have likened Allison to Harper Lee, naming her the…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
I was intrigued to write this creative nonfiction book because it is a true story. It’s Mobile’s oldest and most famous legend. After extensive research, I discovered Boyington had two unqualified jurors, and all was based on circumstantial evidence. Still, he was hanged at age nineteen. A group of Mobilians formed the Boyington Oak Society, and we’ve applied for a posthumous pardon. My play is produced annually at Oakleigh Historic Museum. It has also been optioned for a movie, and the script is written.
Rick Bragg’s obsession with a grandfather he ever knew was fascinating. This was a man who lived during the Great Depression. He didn’t wear clothes with holes in them because that was popular, he did it because those were the only clothes he owned. It unveiled the ability of an ordinary man to do extraordinary things, an impressive accomplishment.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South.
This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression; a moonshiner who drank exactly one pint for every gallon he sold; an unregenerate…
I'm an author of dark fiction from Wales, UK, who, for many years, taught primary school children. In my own writing I often gravitate towards the child’s point of view, and the same can be said of the fiction I choose to read. As a teacher I dealt with children’s issues on a day-to-day basis, and sometimes you wonder how these kids survive, or at least you understand the trauma they carry for the rest of their lives. But what about those who manage to rise above it? Those are the characters whose stories I love to read. The child lurks in all of us, and we must never lose sight of that fact.
This is a short read, one you'll devour in just a few sessions, as it will hold your attention from start to finish. This is real-life horror, not make-believe. Yes, there are some graphic descriptions, but this tale does not set out to shock. There is no gore for the sake of it.
As horrific as Denny's (M.C.) situation is, there are beautiful, tender moments that will tug at your heart.
I don't know if it was because the whole of my career was spent teaching kids of Denny's age, but I found myself fully engaged in his story. Denny's situation resonated deeply, and I wanted to take him home.
The characters were so well drawn and the neighborhood vibe was spot on, too. Highly recommended.
A neglected 12-year-old boy does nothing to report the death of his mother in order to compete in a spelling bee. A tragic coming-of-age tale of horror and drama in the setting of a hot New Orleans summer.
"Original, touching coming of age."—Jack Ketchum, author of The Girl Next Door
"With "Of Foster Homes and Flies" Lutzke is firing on all cylinders. It's a lean mean emotional machine. Coming-of-age presented in a fresh direction. Bearing tremendous emotional weight and heart. It made me cry. "—John Boden, author of Jedi Summer and Dominoes
"Disturbing, often gruesome, yet poignant at the same…
I have been thinking a lot about what feminism means for me. In this interview, I said, "I wish more authors would write about strong women, beyond the strength and importance of motherhood, but not just emulating traditional male behavior." I feel that this is the kind of strong woman I am, as a woman forging a non-traditional path in mathematics. I have been on something of a mission to find books like this, and particularly ones written by women. I find such books frustratingly rare, so I wanted to recommend a few that I have found. There is more to being a woman than falling in love and having children.
This is a gorgeous, poetic, magical book, with a strong female character with a mission that is not about falling in love and having children. Although there are love stories in the book, they are unusual ones (as shown by the title) and that is not the main narrative arc of the central protagonist. I long for books where women do something other than fall in love, have children, or emulate men.
Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2011! 'Having sifted through everything I have heard about the tiger and his wife, I can tell you that this much is fact: in April of 1941, without declaration or warning, the German bombs started falling over the city and did not stop for three days. The tiger did not know that they were bombs...' A tiger escapes from the local zoo, padding through the ruined streets and onwards, to a ridge above the Balkan village of Galina. His nocturnal visits hold the villagers in a terrified thrall. But for one boy, the…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am a doctor, an award-winning writer, and lifelong lover of mysteries. Many mysteries feature smart characters. I prefer those with wise characters, who can teach me something about a life well-lived. Or not. Sometimes the mistakes are more instructive and more fun. Stories with older characters offer a plethora of life experience and wisdom, and usually poignancy and humor as well. From my life as a doctor and my daily visits to my mother’s retirement community dinner table, I see seniors who are strong, wise, vital, and often overlooked. I love stories that give voice to this robust and rich generation who have so much to offer.
A widow with a new lease on life thanks to her secretly wealthy aunt becomes involved in a murder.
Multigenerational, with the Italian grandma, her newbie journalist granddaughter, plus an ex-nun sister and an ex-sister-in-law.
This story involves food, jokes, and family love, albeit with much more brashness and outspokenness than any of the other books I listed, and also a lot more Italian, though the book is set in New Jersey.
For Alberta Scaglione, her golden years are turning out much more differently than she expected—and much more deadly . . .
Alberta Scaglione’ s spinster aunt had some secrets—like the fortune she squirreled away and a secret lake house in Tranquility, New Jersey. More surprising: she’s left it all to Alberta. Alberta, a widow, is no spring chicken and she’s gotten used to disappointment. So having a beautiful view, surrounded by hydrangeas, honeysuckle, and her cat, Lola, sounds blissful after years of yelling and bickering and cooking countless lasagnas.
But Tranquility isn’t as peaceful as it sounds. There’s a body…
