65 Books Like Clark And Division

Even though I lived across the country from San Diego where this story takes place, and even though I was several years younger than Millie McGonigle, the picture of home front USA during WW2 is familiar in many ways. Soldiers and sailors filled the streets of Chicago, and kids scanned the sky for “enemy planes.” There was the fear of polio, the struggles with rationing, and the shortage of bubble gum. 

This story is filled with humor and memorable characters. But most memorable of all is Millie, who tries to deal with the death of a grandmother and her worries about the war getting closer to home. And even though she’s obsessed with drawing in her Book of Dead Things, she comes to understand what her grandmother had told her when she said, “Whatever is lost stays alive if you remember it.”

I absolutely loved King’s novel Writers & Lovers, and her story collection did not disappoint! Here, too, are the struggles of writers—to find the right words and something meaningful from loss.

There’s nothing typical in King’s diverse array of characters, and her intimate portrayal of their desires—their strengths and failings, their glimmers of hope as they brave new starts—drew me in and kept me turning the pages.

Most people know Anson from The Amityville Horror, but this is a whole other horror, and gratefully, totally fictional this time. A couple moves into their dream home (sound familiar?), soon, strange and frightening things begin to happen at the house with the ominous address. Things that have happened in the same house, at other locations, in other times. I read this book years ago and the imagery of the final chapters still unnerves me.

The day I was born, the German U-boat U-505 lurked off the west coast of Africa, awaiting American and Allied ships. The submarine was part of the Nazi’s fleet of “wolfpacks,” terrorizing the Atlantic, and even the East and Gulf Coasts of the United States. The book tells about the capture of the submarine after it had carried out a dozen patrols, sinking eight ships. It was secretly towed to Bermuda where the crew interned at a U.S. POW camp. Codebooks, an Enigma machine, and other materials found on board bolstered Allied codebreakers.

The U-505 was eventually donated to the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, one of only four German WWII U-boats to survive as museum ships. The submarine was towed 3,000 miles from Portsmouth, NH, through the St. Lawrence River, and across four of the Great Lakes to Chicago. The logistics of getting the huge boat across traffic… show more.

I discovered this book in 1985, reading and re-reading the book during high school and, eventually, buying the worn-out copy from the library before graduation.

While it may seem to be a dystopian story – it takes place after a nuclear-biological armageddon, after all – it’s an early example of hopepunk. Candy Smith-Foster repeatedly puts the good of others, including her macaw, Terry (short for Terry Dactyl), ahead of her own welfare. Not bad for a preteen facing the destruction of all she knew.

How much of an impact did this have on me? One of the reasons Kendra’s name starts as Foster-Briggs is to honor Palmer’s masterwork.

No look at F. Scott Fitzgerald would be complete without a good biography of his life.

This book does the job, capturing with copious quotes from Fitzgerald and those who knew him the tortured creative life of this golden boy of 1920s literature. What struck me most was how insecure Fitzgerald was about his class status all through his life, how he always felt like the outsider among the rich and famous he came to hobnob with.

It explains a lot about how his most famous protagonist, Jay Gatsby, came to be—in many ways, he’s a stand-in for Fitzgerald himself, a man in search of acceptance who never gives up on the one great love of his life—Daisy in Gatsby’s story, Zelda in Fitzgerald’s.

My mother gave me this book to read when I first started writing my novel (in order to write, you have to read all the time), and it profoundly affected me and gave me so much inspiration for my book. It had so many similar stories in it that my own family had gone through during the war, so it was the perfect story for me to sink my teeth into, to find a voice for my characters. This book is so so good, for anyone who loves historical fiction.

Sometimes a book is “more than the sum of its pieces.” It can appear to be a book for middle school students, filled with silly crushes, teenage angst, and family drama.

Yet when those pieces are added together, we find ourselves reading a rich story full of profound lessons on life. One of the most important lessons to be learned is that “most people don't look beneath the surface until it's too late.”

In this novel, the characters flip their perspective, and as a result, they are never the same again. Those who read this book will also be challenged to look beneath the surface and flip their perspective, which means that they may never be the same again as well.  

Peter Orner creates a startling intimacy with his characters. In these short, pithy vignettes, we see estranged siblings, dying spouses, missing fathers, and a marriage that is ending.  Orner’s gift is to drop us right into the conflict and emotional action of his characters. Every protagonist feels like someone we know and maybe even loved. His writing is breathtaking. Spanning America of the 80s, his stories take place across the country from California to Chicago to the East Coast.

I loved this story about a Japanese-American boy who accidentally becomes pen pals with a French Jewish girl. Alex isn’t thrilled to find out Charlie is a girl, but as time passes, their friendship becomes an unshakeable bond—and then Charlie’s letters stop coming, and Alex’s family is forced into an internment camp by the US government. Alex siezes an opportunity to volunteer for a Japanese-American infantry regiment (the highly decorated 442nd), hoping all the while that he can somehow, miraculously, find Charlie.

This book is bittersweet and infuriating, cleverly juxtaposing the prejudice and mistreatment faced by Alex’s family with the ever increasing restrictions and cruelties faced by Charlie in German-occupied Paris, and it contains some of the best depictions of combat I’ve read in a YA novel.