Books like Forbidden Notebook — picked by fans

I wrestled with big questions as a child, particularly concerning gender inequality. I was aware of the issue as young as 7 years old. I didn’t even feel comfortable challenging the way things were until I was a young adult. Thus began my journey of researching, studying, and embracing women’s rights and gender equality. I feel very passionate about presenting those big questions earlier in the lives of girls, so they start feeling comfortable challenging the places where things don’t make sense, or the areas where inequality still exists. There is a need for more books like these in the market, but I hope you enjoy this list!

I have been passionate about making, reading, and studying comics for my whole life. When I first encountered autobiographical comics, they were all by women who I looked up to for their ability to tackle their lives with both words and images. This is a small list and biased towards the cartoonists I first encountered in the world of female autobiographical comics. There is so much more out there. I love how the flexibility and history of the comic form have allowed for so much blending of genres and styles. 

As a writer and a mom, and a former teacher, and someone who constantly has to pay attention to the world we live in today, I feel especially compelled to find a good balance for parents to help their kids love reading without compromising their childhood innocence. As adults, we know we live in a broken world. But telling kids about these things without giving them a reason to hope for a better future or without giving them a good role model is more detrimental than helpful. It dooms them to nihilism and cynicism, and only a mature mind is able to successfully break free from that mind trap. 

Social history has always been my passion: unless you know how people thought, felt and lived, even down to how they dressed and ate, it is often impossible to understand why they acted as they did. And no period is as fascinating to me as the inter-war years; after WW1, the greatest conflict the world had ever seen, the upcoming generations determined to break barriers, discard the last vestiges of what they saw as hidebound custom, to invent new, freer ways of writing, painting, dancing - and to have fun. And for most of this post-war generation, there was nowhere like Paris.

I’ve been an avid reader since I was a child, and my favorite protagonists are readers and writers. The Kansas tallgrass prairie horizons where I grew up fueled my imagination, and I wanted to write like the girls in my novels. I discovered Anne of Green Gables as a teen, and since then, I’ve researched, published, and presented on the book as a quixotic novel. As a creative writer, my own characters are often readers, writers, librarians, book club members, and anyone who loves a good tale. I hope you enjoy the books on my list as much as I do each time I return to them.

I’m the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once. I often say it’s a book about being a mess in your twenties, but to speak more personally, writing it was a necessity, a way to make sense of both the intensity and mundanity of my own experiences. I love a book where you can palpably feel the author working to make sense of their own life, through language—and, in turn, sorting out what it is for any of us to be a person. Books like these are essential reading when life feels thorny, beautiful, and impossible to make sense of, and all you can do is try to write it down.  

I am a 1.5-generation Filipina who migrated to Australia in 1977 at the age of 17. As a migrant, I know the challenges of moving to a new country without friends and extended family. I have a PhD in history from the University of Michigan and am a professor of History at the University of New South Wales in Australia. I have written five books mostly on Filipino women’s history. My book on Filipino migration, which won the NSW Premier’s General History Prize (Australia) in 2022, analyses the migrant's heroic narrative—an account that resonates with my own migration story. 

I pride myself on my independence and sense of adventure. I started traveling the world with my family when I was 3 and I haven’t stopped since. When you travel, you have to cope with new situations on a daily basis and navigate different obstacles to meet your needs. An interest in adventure and how people cope with new situations are the biggest reasons why I have a passion for books dealing with overcoming obstacles. Before I retired to Spain, I was a teacher of students between 10 and 15 years old. I chose two of the books I recommended to read to my students when I was a teacher. 

I started writing about golf years ago… I went from freelancing to working for Golfweek and pretty soon had a career! I thought I had a brilliant idea: a series of mysteries with a golf theme! Then I learned there were about 267 other golf mysteries already out there, starting with Dame Agatha’s Murder on the Links! Oops.  I eventually wrote seven Hacker novels, finally getting my golf-writer-turned-sleuth through all four majors. I also published a historical novel set in Scotland (sorry, no golf) and just launched the new Swamp Yankee Mystery series, set in a small Rhode Island town remarkably similar to the one I live in!

As an independent traveller, and throughout a career supporting international nature conservation, I’ve been fortunate to see many far-flung places of the world. Over the years, technology (eg. smartphones, internet, social media) has radically changed the way we travel, and indeed our expectations. Nowadays we want instant access, instant answers, instant results; we hate waiting for anything. However, long-haul travel still demands us to wait... in airport lounges, at train stations, bus stops, and onboard our transport while we endure long hours before reaching our destination. While some aspects have changed, patience, humour, and a good book still remain the best companions for any long journey.