Books like Every Last Cuckoo — picked by fans

This book is my favorite in Lisa Wingate’s Tending Roses series.

I could so relate to Karen Sommerfield and her struggles. Karen’s life is falling apart. The passion in her marriage has cooled, she is unable to have the children she longs for, and on the same day she receives frightening news from her doctor and is let go from a company she put her whole heart and soul into.

On impulse, she returns to her grandmother’s farm in the Ozarks to try and regroup. Right away the old tensions resurface between her and her sister, who seems to have it all together, and Karen feels returning may have been a mistake.

But then she begins to hear her grandmother’s wisdom whispering in the century-old sycamore trees and finds the courage to examine her heart and reconstruct her life.

I loved that Grandma Rose’s influence lived on in her granddaughters… show more.

What drew me to this book was the inspiring journey of the main character, Victoria Jones. A victim of the sometimes cruel foster care system, she learns to express herself through the Victorian language of flowers.

Each flower embodies a specific meaning, and Victoria uses this understanding to transform from a victim of trauma to a survivor, forging relationships with others along the way.

I loved this book from start to finish. The collection of characters in this dysfunctional family were extremely well drawn and their misadventures kept me turning pages until the very end.

Polly springs to life in a curious, quirky mixture of tough and tender. Loveable Willow, her ten-year-old daughter, whose father died young, lives in fear that she will lose Polly too. Her friends’ mothers are all young and fun, but in her fifties when Willow was born, Willow fears Polly’s time is running out.

She longs to uncover the secrets of Polly’s past-secrets which Polly is determined to keep hidden. A wonderful story of the complex relationship between a mother and daughter, told with a lovely blend of warmth and wit.

I came across this little gem at a garage sale. I am not a big reader of YA fiction, but the blurb on the back jacket spoke to me, so I bought it. I’m so glad I did!

This astoundingly beautifully written book chronicles the journey of twelve-year-old Grace in the aftermath of her mother’s death. A free but tormented spirit, Grace’s “Mama” could never seem to put down roots after leaving her small town behind as a teen. But Grace longs for a real home.

After her mother’s tragic death, she goes to live with the grandmother she never knew in a town she has never set foot in. All she knows is that her grandmother sent her Mama away when she was young and pregnant.

I love small-town stories and the town and its characters come alive in this book in the most loving of ways as Grace… show more.

The masculine voice in this novel is absolutely masterful. It’s tender, nuanced, earnest, and intelligent. Stegner offers a sweeping, unflinching story about friendships, marriage, the human ego, and the passage of time with a set of characters who are flawed, fragile, and therefore, very believable.

I’ve read this book more than once, and discover something new and lovely each time. This book honors a reader’s intelligence and heart. Again, the complexity in the characters and how they relate to one another gets me every time.  

Pioneer Species is a book of poems by friend and farmer-poet Ross Thurber. A small vineyard I work with in southern Vermont, my own agricultural essay and investigation on a sense of place different than my own, is part of Ross’s Lilac Ridge Farm. Like Mary Oliver, Ross is intensely bound to the natural and cultivated world of his farm in which he lives and his poems capture a language that brings forward the light, the shadow, the fog, the till, the butterfly, the flower, the cow. I am constantly inspired by his poems to be out in my own fields and to contemplate and communicate my own place in them. A delicious collection about a deeply personal and lyrical view of farm life.

I’ve always been a Thomas Perry fan going all the way back to The Butcher’s Boy, and thoroughly enjoyed his Jane Whitefield series. His novel, The Old Man, was recently adapted for television, starring Jeff Bridges, who’s perfect as the protagonist. The thing I’ve always appreciated about Perry’s books is his careful plotting and attention to detail, which is particularly noticeable in the Jane Whitefield books.  The other thing about his books is the way he can turn a villain —like the Butcher’s Boy—into a likable protagonist.  

There’s a valid argument to be made that Shadowland is perhaps more of a horror novel than fantasy, but it’s never really out-and-out scary.

It’s certainly more magical than bloody, concerning two friends in the 1950s who spend a hallucinatory summer at an uncle’s place in the Vermont woods. And man do things get weird.

After a long, lovely prelude at a boarding school, Tom and Del have to navigate their failing friendship and the strange happenings in the woods, but most of all they have to look out for Del’s uncle Cole, an old-school magician who, it turns out, is far from an avuncular old guardian.

Full of fairy tales and fables and wonderful digressions (with Straub, the digressions are often the point), Shadowland feels timeless in a way Stephen King never does. It might be the best book I’ve ever read.

I’ve always been fascinated by strange social enclaves and secretive, sealed-off, private worlds, and this book has both.

But in fact, the thing I admire most here is the sense of place and atmosphere. Tartt writes with a lush, immersive style which I found is increasingly compelling as the book went on.

Using a murder as the gateway drug to what’s really a literary fiction character study is both sneaky and brilliant: I was hooked by the story in the first chapter, but once I’d finished the book, it was Richard’s voice, those eerie characters, their strange insular co-dependency, and the biting Vermont winter landscape that really stayed with me.

This is a feel-good book with just enough punch to keep it from being cute.

It comes with a building project, some hurricane-induced drama, a bit of romance, and two dogs.

Cooper and Bubba are the canines who wind themselves around the main characters, as most dogs do in real life. Cooper is everyone’s friend, and he orchestrates introductions.

But he’s also a bolter who gets lost just as flooding begins and evacuation becomes unavoidable.

Catherine Drake’s books are always a respite between heavier reading, and this one is one of the best.