Books like Chained — picked by fans

Linda’s a graduate of the MFA program in Writing for Children and Young Adults, Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I’ve taught since 2006. I love it when my reading mind seems to make a conversation out of the books I’ve read. For me, this novel seemed to be speaking to all the other books on this list—through the large, tender presence of the elephant, Queenie Grace, especially in the chapters written in her first-person voice; the growing affection between the child, Lily, and the elephant; the shifting family dynamics, so that blame and guilt give way to communication and empathy; all kinds of chains and ways to loosen them and be free. I even found a surprising little nugget of historical information in the author’s note. 

Stolen jewels. A girl Robin Hood figure. Friendship. And an escape into the jungle with an elephant. Full of adventure and heart, The Girl Who Stole an Elephant provides a window into the lush setting of ancient Sri Lanka, and carried me along with its fast pace. Nizrana Farook’s descriptions are teeming with sensory details, and I thoroughly enjoyed them.

Ivan was a real gorilla. I saw him years ago, so I felt immediately connected to this middle-grade novel. The real Ivan was a roadside attraction at Tacoma, Washington's B & I Circus Store. He lived alone in a glass-sided room watching television.

My family and I watched him rocking and pacing in about 1983. Even my preschoolers wanted to leave. So I loved reading Appelgate’s book, which was inspired by his story and written from the animals’ point of view. The animals take charge and create a happy ending.

In real life, when the public took up the lonely gorilla’s cause, Ivan was moved first to the Seattle Zoo and then the Atlanta Zoo. Hooray for Ivan. Our actions can have good consequences.

I love historical fiction, and I love stories within stories and this novel is both! It’s set at the end of World War II, just after the Allied bombing of Dresden. We’re following 16-year-old Elizabeth, her Mutti, her little brother Karli, and a downed Swiss-Canadian airman as they flee to safety near Heidelberg in the company of—yes, really—an elephant! A story of survival, of endurance, of building lives. The human relationships, in a dark and dangerous time, are brightened by the unexpected presence of one remarkable animal. 

Linka’s art-thriller is smart, compelling, and almost impossible to stop reading. Not only does it tackle being a first-year student in an art school in Los Angeles, it examines a subject that is often glamorized without being scrutinized: living in poverty as a homeless-at-times college student and artist. The myth of the starving artist is torn apart in this contemporary, empathetic, and intriguing story as we follow Sabine Reyes into the world where she thought she belonged, only to find out it’s not as picture-perfect as it seems. There’s some good romance in here, too and Linka’s sharp, penetrating stare at the character’s choices makes us, as readers, question what would we do? Who would we trust? And what happens when we’re wrong?

This book hooked me from page one. It’s technically a Young Adult novel but is so literary that it appealed to me as an adult reader, too.

The protagonist, Reece, is a fierce sixteen-year-old at that pivotal moment between being a teen and a young adult that so many of us females can identify with. The story itself is very plot-driven–Reece is living in a motel with her dad, and we get the impression they’ve been on the run.

As the story unfolds, we get a close-up look at the circumstances Reece and her dad find themselves in and the things he’s done to protect her (or is it himself…). These are characters that will stay with me for a long time!

I loved this book because it captures childhood in the rawest way—messy, painful, confusing, and resilient.

Walls writes about instability and survival with such clarity that I found myself nodding through entire chapters. I related deeply to the burden of growing up too fast and learning how to take care of people before you ever learned how to take care of yourself.

What moved me most was the love within the chaos—the complicated, contradictory love between parent and child that shapes you long after you’ve grown. It reminded me that you can carry pain and tenderness at the same time, and both can be true.

Even some of my most historically aware students are often stunned to learn that the largest poor people’s organization of the 1960s and 1970s was the National Welfare Rights Organization. This is the story of the Black mothers who built one of NWRO’s most dynamic and creative local chapters. Through its dramatic, inspiring characters, this book made it plain to me just how much gender justice is indivisible from racial and economic justice. They staged massive protests in the Las Vegas strip with an amazing cast of allies. Then they moved on, and leveraged resources from far and wide to build "Operation Life," a social service, healthcare, and job training agency that they ran themselves.

The improvised communities that ring the cities of Latin America have a bad reputation as squatter towns. Not so fast.

Look beyond the surface and you will see communities with strong social ties, systems of self-government, and residents who are as committed to their neighborhood as any American suburbanite. Janice Perlman has spent decades studying the Rio de Janeiro that lies behind its beaches, and gives a clear-eyed look at some of the self-built communities on the city’s edge.

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.