Books like Dear Sister — picked by fans

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.

Until I read this book, I didn’t realize that my work with criminalized survivors had a rich historical context. One example: I didn’t know about Joan Little, who stabbed the correctional officer who sexually assaulted her with an ice pick, or about the grassroots survivor defense campaign that sprang up around her.

I could not have situated that specific campaign in the broader context of a non-carceral anti-violence movement that opposed the build-up of the criminal response to intimate partner violence (a battle they ultimately lost). Emily Thuma gave me that historical context—and a lot more to be angry about.

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. 

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!

I love this small-town romance with its strong characters and emotional plot.

I enjoyed Thea’s unique backstory. To survive it, she needs to be tough and careful, meaning she has walls that Shep has to learn to scale. Thankfully, he’s up to the task.

The Colson family is full of found family and real family, a fabulous combination that proves love comes in all forms and for all people. I loved the emotional roller coaster and, of course, the happy ending!

We all have that one boss that we’re pretty sure is cursing our name and our work. In this book, the boss may just be an evil wizard who has actually cursed four women to hide his misdeeds.

What drew me in was the fairy-tale elements of this novel. Again, it’s set in a modern context but uses fantasy elements to drive home the absurdity of modern work culture and the horrors that women experience at work, no matter how good they may be at their jobs. Especially if they’re good at their jobs.

It’s also a powerful story about fierce and angry women who find common ground and work together to improve their collective situations. Anytime women work together to destroy an evil villain, I’m in. 

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.

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.