Here are 100 books that Grandmothers of The Light fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have learned about the nature of magic and the mythical firsthand. I have always been a seeker, fiercely curious and an avid reader to try to understand the world so as to find myself and my destiny. Wise women appeared to guide my path as I quested the heroine’s journey with its many helpers and spirits, its coincidences, and its marvels. When I dreamt about the Roma, I knew the story was important; I attended UCLA and got to work. My passion has never dwindled during the 20 years it took to manifest the Destiny's Consent book series.
I am not a fan of fantasy, but this is magical realism at its best. Not too much, not too little, just enough to remind everyone that the spirits are still working on behalf of true love and goodness and that justice prevails despite all obstacles…like a fairy tale with complications. Just my cup of tea.
How realistic is it that food transmits any emotions the cook may be feeling while making the food? This idea captivated me immediately; it was something I had never thought about. And yet, growing up in my family, women always made the food. So again, a very female tale.
In the beginning, Tita, the heroine, is passionate and in love, but she succumbs to tradition and rejects true love and passion to submit to tradition, which dictates she takes care of her mother. In time, Tita learns to disobey the injustice of that tradition…
THE INTOXICATING INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER ABOUT LOVE, COOKING AND MAGIC. PERFECT FOR FANS OF JOANNE HARRIS AND ISABEL ALLENDE.
'This magical, mythical, moving story of love, sacrifice and summering sensuality is something I will savour for a long time' MAUREEN LIPMAN
Like Water For Chocolate tells the captivating story of the De la Garza family. As the youngest daughter, Tita is forbidden by Mexican tradition to marry. Instead, she pours all of her emotions into her delicious recipes, which she shares with readers along the way.When Tita falls in love with Pedro, he is seduced by the magical food she cooks.…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I grew up in Michigan where I was outdoors in the woods most of the time, running around with my imaginary friends. I built an entire world in my imagination where girls and women were powerful and ruled the world. I wrote stories about that world, and I’ve never stopped writing or reading myths, folklore, and fairy tales. Stories are the best way to bring the mythic and hidden realms of our existence out into the open. When I catch a glimpse of other worlds through storytelling, it always feels healing. It gives me hope that there is more to our existence than what we ordinarily see.
The author went on a journey to discover all she could about the pink dolphins (the botos) of Brazil, but she soon found herself immersed in the folklore and myth of this very real animal. She learns that people who live with the botos believe the dolphins are shapeshifters who live human-like lives in an amazing underwater world—the Encante—where everything in life is better. Even so, they come out of the water as human beings to visit our world and interact with the locals. They can only be recognized by the hats they wear to cover the blowholes in the tops of their heads. I love the feeling this book gives that we are constantly walking with the enchanted.
By the acclaimed author of The Soul of an Octopus and the bestselling memoir The Good Good Pig.
When Sy Montgomery ventured into the Amazon to unlock the mysteries of the littleknown pink dolphins, she found ancient whales that plied the Amazon River at dawn and dusk, swam through treetops in flooded forests, and performed underwater ballets with their flexible bodies. But she soon found out that to know the botos, as the dolphins are locally called, you must also know the people who live among them.
And so in Journey of the Pink Dolphins, Montgomery-part naturalist, part poet, part…
I grew up in Michigan where I was outdoors in the woods most of the time, running around with my imaginary friends. I built an entire world in my imagination where girls and women were powerful and ruled the world. I wrote stories about that world, and I’ve never stopped writing or reading myths, folklore, and fairy tales. Stories are the best way to bring the mythic and hidden realms of our existence out into the open. When I catch a glimpse of other worlds through storytelling, it always feels healing. It gives me hope that there is more to our existence than what we ordinarily see.
In The Thousand and One Nights, Scheherazade famously told stories to keep herself alive. In this novel the wife of a man in a coma uses stories to coax him back to life. The storytellers she brings to his hospital bedside include a raven, a ghost, a centaur, and Scheherazade herself. Even a housegets a monologue here. I love how this book brings the mythic aspects of life into every day for the purpose of healing. The underneath here is the man’s subconscious. The entities speaking to him exist in the every day; we just don’t normally see them. This book brings them all to life. A beautiful story beautifully told.
Do stories have the power to heal? For Gary Hawken, life in a coma offers few perks. Nurses care for him and people sit by his bed and tell him stories, but the glorious mess of life passes him by. In a world where survival depends on his ability to understand his stories, Gary must recognize the value of his own soul. A hypnotic tale of one man’s struggle to find the truth in his own epic life.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I grew up in Michigan where I was outdoors in the woods most of the time, running around with my imaginary friends. I built an entire world in my imagination where girls and women were powerful and ruled the world. I wrote stories about that world, and I’ve never stopped writing or reading myths, folklore, and fairy tales. Stories are the best way to bring the mythic and hidden realms of our existence out into the open. When I catch a glimpse of other worlds through storytelling, it always feels healing. It gives me hope that there is more to our existence than what we ordinarily see.
Once again, the ordinary and the extraordinary are nearly one and the same. In this book, as in all of Charles’s books, the Otherworld—in this case the faery world—is with us now. Charles is a pioneer of urban fantasy and always writes entertaining and amazing books. I love his characters. They are alive and fascinating. He plays with names and gender: for example, Jack is a woman. He invites us to pay attention to the Otherworld. He also shows us that giving the faery realm its due is not running away from reality. In this novel, stories help us to heal and live in the here and now with joy and vigor.
De Lint at his best. When Jacky's boyfriend walks out, her life changes more than she could ever imagine. In a fit of angst she chops off her long blond hair then goes out to wander the streets of Ottawa. She's startled out of her reverie by a faceless gang of bikers attacking a small man whose body disappears, leaving behind only a red cap. The cap shows Jacky an unimaginable side of Ottawa and sets her on an impossible quest to save the good fairies from their evil counterparts.
Luck, magic, and love bring to life a perilous, rollicking…
I have been a dance teacher all of my adult life, and a poetry and word-lover even longer. I love the economy of language, immediacy, and the promise of surprise in poetry.
In middle age, I returned to writing just as my body began its slow rebellion, with the added shifts of remarriage and step-parenting a severely disabled son. I went back to grad school and wrote my first book, drawing on the experience of confronting change, just as these recommended poets have done.
Each of these poets has a very different story, but what they have in common outweighs their differences, and because of that we are able to see ourselves in their writing.
I like poetry that teaches me something, and I like how Harjo can teach me about Native American myth and culture (as a member of the Muscogee Nation)in a poem set within the context of something as mundane as an airport.
She expertly threads together the modern with the historical, and the sacred within the ordinary. “Once a woman fell from the sky. The woman who fell from the sky was neither murderer nor saint. She was rather ordinary…”
I am also struck with how Harjo unifies her own unique culture with the shared experiences of all of us, as in: “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last/ sweet bite”.
She draws from the Native American tradition of praising the land and the spirit, the realities of American culture, and the concept of feminine individuality.
Growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1950s I was very soon aware that I was living in a world of borders, some permeable and negotiable, and some almost impossible to cross. It was a city of Mormons and a city of those who weren’t; a city of immigrants like my grandparents, and about whom my mother wrote (and wrote well); and a Jim Crow town where Black men and women couldn’t get into the ballroom to hear Duke Ellington play. Finally, it was a city haunted by its Indian past in a state keeping living Indians in its many bleak government reservations. What to make of those borders has been a life-long effort.
Sallyis the moving account of the true story of a captive Indian girl who lived in the house of Brigham Young as a servant and cook, a “wild” woman who had been “tamed” by her civilized captors. When she had almost forgotten her own language Sally was sent off to a Mormon village as the wife of a Pahvant Ute chief in order to “civilize” the local surrounding Indians. Sally’s story asks us what these seemingly simple words “wild” and “tame” really mean, and to think about what they can hide.
In this remarkable and deeply felt book, Virginia Kerns uncovers the singular and forgotten life of a young Indian woman who was captured in 1847 in what was then Mexican territory. Sold to a settler, a son-in-law of Brigham Young, the woman spent the next thirty years as a servant to Young's family. Sally, as they called her, lived in the shadows, largely unseen. She was later remembered as a 'wild' woman made 'tame' who happily shed her past to enter a new and better life in civilization.
Drawing from a broad range of primary sources, Kerns retrieves Sally from…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
Reproductive justice – reproductive rights – reproductive self-determination – this has been my passion for decades. I’m a historian. The most important thing I’ve learned is how reproductive bodies have always been racialized in the United States, from 1619 to the present day. Circumstances and tactics have changed over time, but lawmakers and others have always valued the reproduction of some people while degrading the reproduction of people defined as less valuable – or valueless – to the nation. Throughout our history, reproductive politics has been at the center of public life. As we see today. I keep writing because I want more and more of us to understand where we are – and why.
This book is a first. Theobald gives us a really interesting and comprehensive history of pregnancy, birthing, motherhood -- and activism -- on the Crow Reservation in Montana. She explains the interventions of the federal government, for example, via coercive sterilization and child removal, and provides rich accounts of family, tribal, and inter-tribal resistance -- and claims of self-determination -- in the face of these interventions.
This pathbreaking book documents the transformation of reproductive practices and politics on Indian reservations from the late nineteenth century to the present, integrating a localized history of childbearing, motherhood, and activism on the Crow Reservation in Montana with an analysis of trends affecting Indigenous women more broadly. As Brianna Theobald illustrates, the federal government and local authorities have long sought to control Indigenous families and women's reproduction, using tactics such as coercive sterilization and removal of Indigenous children into the white foster care system. But Theobald examines women's resistance, showing how they have worked within families, tribal networks, and activist…
I am an Indian-American writer who moved to the U.S. for graduate school over thirty years ago. Growing up in a conservative Indian family, I witnessed women bound by unspoken rules, for example, expectations of modesty enforced not by law but by societal norms. And, of course, I encountered daily indignities, euphemistically referred to as “eve-teasing.” Only in adulthood, as my world expanded beyond those confines, did I begin to question and resent them. While I live in the U.S., where women’s circumstances are better, though not perfect, I remain deeply interested in how life for Indian women has changed and avidly seek out books set in India.
I had never read this author before, and I was immediately struck by Ambai’s powerful voice in these stories about the small but constant tensions in ordinary women’s lives in India. Having grown up in India, I felt as if I knew these women and their stories intimately. In particular, the title story instantly made me think of my mother and so many other women toiling at their housework in Indian kitchens, which in middle-class Indian homes are not that comfortable at all.
I found great wisdom, truth, and energy in these atmospheric stories. They are also a refreshing change from the writing style of Western writers in their directness and the incorporation of almost-surreal elements in many, which makes a reader feel them so much more sharply.
In A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, Ambai's narrators are daring and courageous, stretching and reinventing their homes, marriages, and worlds. With each story, her expansive voice confronts the construction of gender in Tamil literature. Piecing together letters, journal entries, and notes, Ambai weaves themes of both self-liberation and confinement into her writing. Her transfixing stories often meditate on motherhood, sexuality, and the liberating, and at times inhibiting, contours of the body.
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I was drawn to Harness’ incredible memoir because she speaks truth to power from an Indigenous perspective as a survivor of Indian adoption.
As an infant in the 1960s, Harness was adopted by a white couple and raised far from the rez, far from her birth community, and completely segregated from her cultural heritage. This story is about her weaving her way back home and making sense of her traumatic adoption.
As an adoptee myself I found her story gut wrenching and inspiring. Harness is a brilliant writer and a phenomenal woman. Her wisdom, authenticity, and strength reverberate through the pages of this beautiful memoir.
2019 High Plains Book Award (Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories) 2021 Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado
In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her "real" parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born-except they hadn't, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I’m just a guy, a normal guy who enjoys thinking and writing about things that can nudge humanity along towards peace. If everybody thought just a little bit about it, we’d have it.
Hatter Fox is one of those rare stories which causes me to lose my sense of self.
There is no who am I, how am I, or why am I, none of that matters, all that matters is the story. This story is so real, and shows so accurately what can happen to young minds when they are raised in an oppressive, prejudiced environment.
Hatter Fox also exemplifies the true power of fiction, in that it allows us to shed a tear. We steel ourselves against the harsh realities of life, and do not weep for the downtrodden, but for fictional characters, we are free to feel our sorrows.
