100 Books Like Captains and the Kings

I came across this book as a young teen and was riveted by the colorful, behind-the-scenes depiction of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, as well as the intimate stories of three generations of star-crossed lovers.

The characters were so well drawn that they seemed real, as if they must have loved and grieved, lived and died, as given. I felt as if I had walked the streets of the city and could recognize the places described.

I was also impressed by the Author’s Note detailing Keyes’s exhaustive research; reading it allowed me to accept the story as being as true to its place and time as possible. Years later, I followed her fine example, adding an Author’s Note with research details to my own books.

Dorothy Eden was well-known as a Gothic/Thriller Romance author fifty-plus years ago, but her family sagas are where her skills really shine. The Vines of Yarrabee had me scared to keep reading because I knew tragedy was coming, but I couldn’t stop reading because I was invested in the less-than-perfect characters—most of whom I was angry over for much of the story. These fictional humans are tucked in a rich setting I could see, hear, feel, smell, and taste. I learned a lot about Australia and its settlers in the 1800s, but it’s the people in the story that I still carry with me, several years after reading it.

I adore sweeping family sagas with strong women characters and with tragedy, romance, and heartache set in Australia, The Thorn Birds is a beautiful example of the genre.

Meggie is rebellious and headstrong and makes questionable choices, but we empathize and root for her. All the well-rounded characters each come with their own secrets that will keep you turning pages.

The seven-book saga featuring the Eden family by Marilyn Harris is an amazing read, but I found The Prince of Eden to be the most moving. Not only is Edward Eden the most likable (though still questionable) of the men in the family, the book sheds light on an era of British history I wasn’t very familiar with, the 1830s-50s. I became a spectator of the social unrest, opium dens, and more within these pages. The fictional characters move alongside historical people and events, leaving their own footprints in the world of possibility within this emotional read.

Frank McCourt's classic book, the memoir of his childhood, is proof in the pudding that the origin of humor is the suffering of the low-status character. And that’s only one reason why I love it.

He had me at “Above all -- we were wet.” His descriptions of the impossible and undignified conditions of his childhood, where children had absolutely no control over anything and adults were at the mercy of life itself, brought me so close to him that I think I started believing we were actually related and scribbled him into the family tree as a long-lost uncle.

McCourt captures the hapless quality of gullible, unsupervised children let loose on an unforgiving world with a buoyancy that comes through every sentence and rises above the brutal conditions of his childhood. 

And the truth he finds in the details, from the brutality of religious authority figures to the abject… show more.

I first encountered Noel Ignatiev’s ground-breaking and hugely influential book, How the Irish Became White, after I moved from Ireland to America to work at UConn.

I was electrified by its thesis and found it very helpful in thinking critically about Irish-American identity and history. After all, that had become my heritage too once I crossed the Atlantic.

Ignatiev opens by outlining how the Irish fled to America from a motherland under British occupation and a colonial caste system that dehumanized them.

He argues that in America the new immigrants embraced a hierarchy based on race, as a result of which the oppressed became the oppressors: for Ignatiev, the Irish assimilated by becoming more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists, gaining “whiteness” by refusing to make common cause with Black fellow workers.

How the Irish Became White challenges the dominant story of how the Irish succeeded… show more.

Disfigured and jobless after a fire, Timothy Wilde takes a job with the newly formed NYPD. He is assigned to the Sixth Ward, right on the border of the Five Points, a ward notorious for the desperately poor who live there and the rampant crime. One night he finds a young girl running through the street in a nightgown soaked with blood. She tells an unbelievable story of bodies buried in a nearby woods. Wilde investigates and soon finds himself a target of the city’s wealthy, several of whom are guilty of the most heinous of crimes but feel entitled to escape any accountability. Written in the slang of the times, it reads with the immediacy and plausibility of a memoir. I loved this book because it treats such serious issues: income inequality and the lack of accountability for the rich and powerful—even when engaged in child prostitution and murder.

It has been many years since I first read this book yet I still remember how successful the author was in recreating the atmosphere presented by the movie, Gone with the Wind. She was so successful that this book is advertised as a sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s original work. If you want to know how civilian life was in the South during the American Civil War, you won’t be disappointed with this work. And of course, there is the tumultous relationship between Scarlett and Rhett Butler. 

In Central Park, there used to be a statue of J. Marion Sims, the so-called “father of gynecology.” Mercifully, it was removed in 2018, but the memory of his and other white doctor’s butchery on the bodies of several enslaved women isn’t so easily erased.

This book uncovers how Sims performed experimental (and anesthetized) cesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on powerless Black women and scores of poor Irish women. In turn, those medical “breakthroughs,” which were medical experimentations, were used to benefit middle–and upper-class white women’s reproductive lives. While properly eviscerating Sims, Owens also highlights the medical skills of the same enslaved women disregarded by doctors.

I was infuriated at the mental hopscotch needed to render these women both skilled practitioners and nameless bodies to be cut up at will. You won’t feel good when you finish reading this essential book, but you will remember Lucy, Anarcha,… show more.

This is a gritty story of the peril young Irish immigrants faced when coming to America, along with the hardships they were escaping back in Ireland. The fact that others were waiting to abuse and exploit the immigrants is certainly historically accurate. However, B.J. Hoff’s stories are always filled with hope and shine a light on hope in God. It’s Christian fiction, so readers should be aware of that. Also, this new edition includes two stories, a great deal. B.J. Hoff passed away in 2021 but left a long legacy of inspirational historical fiction.