Here are 100 books that Homer Price fans have personally recommended if you like
Homer Price.
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My passion for books began at a very early age. My mom will tell you I never played with toys but toddled around, always with a book in my hand. From the Little Golden books of childhood, I grew into children's literature like Heidi and Black Beauty. Then came the horse books. Seabiscuit and War Admiral. Misty of Chincoteague was a particular favorite. Animal books have always been one of my go-to genres. All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot started me on a series that I still return to from time to time. J. R. R. Tolkien is one of my inspirations as a fantasy author, along with C. S. Lewis.
This book is a bit different from my other recommendations. It’s not a fantasy. What it is is a series of books to make you laugh, cry, think, and most of all, want to go live in the imaginary town of Mitford, North Carolina. This is a small town where the phrase “Mitford takes care of its own” is sometimes hard but always rewarding. Reverend Tim Cavanough is a flawed man with a heart of gold who is in the mid to later stage in life and takes care of his flock of often eccentric, lovable townsfolk with a heart of love. I was with a friend one time walking through a little town in West Virginia, and we had both finished Ms. Karon’s books. The town and its folks reminded us of Mitford with its quaint charm.
The first novel in #1 New York Times bestselling author Jan Karon's beloved series set in America's favorite small town: Mitford.
It's easy to feel at home in Mitford. In these high, green hills, the air is pure, the village is charming, and the people are generally lovable. Yet, Father Tim, the bachelor rector, wants something more. Enter a dog the size of a sofa who moves in and won't go away. Add an attractive neighbor who begins wearing a path through the hedge. Now, stir in a lovable but unloved boy, a mystifying jewel theft, and a secret that's…
I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on, but my main loves have always been fantasy and sci-fi. Not so much because of the strange worlds their doors open onto, but because of what they tell us about being human. Because humans are odd and strange and beautiful and full of magic, and it seems more important than ever that we remember that. And not just remember it, but celebrate it, especially as it relates to those of us that are a little different and out of the ordinary. So I hunt out books that remind me how special it is to simply be delightfully, weirdly human. I hope you enjoy them!
A mix of coming of age in the first half of the twentieth century, and Bradbury’s peculiar brand of very earthly oddness and sci-fi strangeness, Dandelion Wine is full of all sorts of magic. It reminds you of what it is to be a small human again, when everything seems possible, and aliens and monsters are as likely (and as important) as long summer days spent outside, barefoot and sunburnt and a little feral. Even when we don’t recognise the details of the childhood described, we remember the feeling, and it reawakens a sense of wonder that’s incredibly precious.
Dandelion Wine is a 1957 semi-autobiographical novel by Ray Bradbury, taking place in the summer of 1928 in the fictional town of Green Town, Illinois — a pseudonym for Bradbury's childhood home of Waukegan, Illinois. The novel developed from the short story "Dandelion Wine" which appeared in the June 1953 issue of Gourmet magazine.
When I was in sixth grade, I was kidnapped by pirates, aka parents, who smuggled me from a city in Ohio to a desert island, aka a middle-of-nowhere, piney woods, East Texas town called Fred. The city limit signs were 0.9 miles apart, without a single stop sign or red light to get in the way. Not even a flashing yellow. To survive, I enrolled in a hands-on crash course in Small Town, aka baptism by fire. I regularly get notes from readers all over America saying Welcome to Fred transported them back to their childhood growing up in a small town.
In 1985, back when I had only one job at a time, we bought our first house, a 70-year-old, two-story monster built back when it was in the good part of town. The next Saturday evening, I heard something and investigated.
The guy next door was leaning back in a chair, his feet propped on the porch rail, sipping a glass of iced tea, and listening to a radio show. And thus, I discovered Garrison Keillor and Lake Wobegon.
I recognized the people. I grew up with them in Fred, Texas. They hang out at the Sidetrack Tap and the Chatterbox Café. They shop at Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, and the women get their hair done at the Curl Up and Dye.
The first chapter is written in a style I call Midwestern stream of consciousness. Read it and you’ll know whether you want to read the rest. I read…
"Lake Wobegon Days is about the way our beliefs, desires and fears tail off into abstractions--and get renewed from time to time. . . this book, unfolding Mr. Keillor's full design, is a genuine work of American history." The New York Times
"A comic anatomy of what is small and ordinary and therefore potentially profound and universal in American life...Keillor's strength as a writer is to make the ordinary extraordinary." Chicago Tribune
"Keillor's laughs come dear, not cheap, emerging from shared virtue and good character, from reassuring us of our neighborliness and strength....His true subject is how daily life is…
When I was in sixth grade, I was kidnapped by pirates, aka parents, who smuggled me from a city in Ohio to a desert island, aka a middle-of-nowhere, piney woods, East Texas town called Fred. The city limit signs were 0.9 miles apart, without a single stop sign or red light to get in the way. Not even a flashing yellow. To survive, I enrolled in a hands-on crash course in Small Town, aka baptism by fire. I regularly get notes from readers all over America saying Welcome to Fred transported them back to their childhood growing up in a small town.
That’s what a minute said to an hour Without me you are nothing
I know what you’re saying. First a kid’s book, now poems? Yes. Even though she has lived in St. Louis, Ramallah, Jerusalem, and now San Antonio, you would swear that she probably lived right down the street from wherever you are. In fact, she lives right down the road from me.
The wind never says Call me back, I’ll be waiting for your call. All we know about wind’s address is somewhere else.
Even though we share a birthday with Jack Kerouac and James Taylor, we have never met, but when I read her poems, I feel like I’m having a cup of coffee with a close friend, the friend you haven’t seen in years, but you know that if they walked in the door right now, you’d just pick up where you left off and talk…
"Nye once again deftly charts the world through verse."-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A beautifully constructed, thoughtful, and inspiring collection."-School Library Journal (starred review)
Young People's Poet Laureate and National Book Award Finalist Naomi Shihab Nye's uncommon and unforgettable voice offers readers peace, humor, inspiration, and solace. This volume of almost one hundred original poems is a stunning and engaging tribute to the diverse voices past and present that comfort us, compel us, lead us, and give us hope.
"I think the air is full of voices. If we slow down and practice listening, we hear those voices better. They live…
William Heath has a Ph.D. in American Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He has taught American history and literature as well as creative writing at Kenyon, Transylvania, Vassar, the University of Seville, and Mount Saint Mary’s University, retiring as a professor emeritus. He has published two poetry books, The Walking Man and Steel Valley Elegy; two chapbooks, Night Moves in Ohio and Leaving Seville; three novels: The Children Bob Moses Led (winner of the Hackney Award), Devil Dancer, andBlacksnake’s Path;a work of history, William Wells and the Struggle for the Old Northwest(winner of two Spur Awards); and a collection of interviews, Conversations with Robert Stone.
Historians of the Midwest were deprived of one of their finest by the early death of Andrew Cayton. Frontier Indiana is the best of a series of books published by Ohio State University Press on the states of the Old Northwest. Combining chapters on various men and women, Little Turtle’s Miami resistance, and William Henry Harrison’s land-hungry settlers, Cayton’s impressive research and thoughtful writing go a long way toward illuminating the frontier of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
"The research and scholarship that went into the work are excellent; so good, in fact, that the book should be on the required text list for all Transappalachian frontier courses." -History
Cayton's lively new history of the frontier period in Indiana puts the focus on people, on how they lived, how they viewed their world, and what motivated them. Here are the stories of Sieur de Vincennes, John Francis Hamtramck, Little Turtle, Anna Tuthill Symmes Harrison, Tenskwatawa, Calvin Fletcher-along with many more familiar (and not so familiar) early Hoosiers.
I'm a New Yorker with a background in the performing arts. Though a lifelong reader and bookstore loiterer, my early writing career was focused on the stage as well as the pursuit of a career in screenwriting. This led to many years writing and producing theatre as well as working in film and TV both as a writer and in production. The books I've chosen, I feel influenced the American language in the last century, an influence reflected in the tone of the novels and films from that period described by scholars as “Between the Wars.” It's a period that fascinates me for it exists now only in books and movies and is therein preserved.
Dawn Powell is one of the most overlooked literary figures in America from this time. Her acid wit (and gender) immediately begs comparison to Dorothy Parker. A New Yorker transplanted from Ohio, she wrote many plays and novels from the 30s to the 60s. Wicked Pavilion was published in 1954 and is a delicious satire of a group of artists who frequent a small bistro near Washington Square Park – hard-drinking writers, poets, and painters. It features a hilarious subplot of a painter who stages his own death so the value of his paintings will increase. The antidote to Henry James, Dawn Powell writes like Edith Wharton on laughing gas.
The “Wicked Pavilion” of the title is the Café Julien, where everybody who is anybody goes to recover from failed love affairs and to pursue new ones, to cadge money, to hatch plots, and to puncture one another’s reputation. Dennis Orphen, the writer from Dawn Powell’s Turn, Magic Wheel, makes an appearance here, as does Andy Callingham, Powell’s thinly disguised Ernest Hemingway. The climax of this mercilessly funny novel comes with a party which, remarked Gore Vidal, “resembles Proust’s last roundup,” and where one of the partygoers observes, “There are some people here who have been dead twenty years.”
My first memoir, Overlay, has been called “the very best teenage suicide prevention tool ever created” for which I am eternally grateful. I've been told that it's a miracle I survived my childhood at all, but I don't take credit or satisfaction in that statement. Instead, I've aspired to understand what it is that gives some of us the grit that allows us to power through the unfathomable. Voraciously reading similar stories from my fellow authors continues to inform me that we all have the power to push through the pain of a disadvantaged childhood. Whether it's an inner light, luck, fate, a higher power or some combination of some or all of the above, I don't know. I do know that the children like me who grew up to tell their story with the hope of helping others deserve a read. And sometimes, a good cry.
You think you had a tough childhood? Meet Tim Green. Born blue into an uneducated, poor, and incestuous family in 1950s Ohio, it's a wonder this child lived at all. However, grit and forces of luck arrived to meet Tim when he needed help. Luck involved the right policemen, care workers, social workers, and foster parents. Grit involved the resolve of Tim himself.
Like Frank McCourt, Tim Green learned early to look on the bright side of life. You'll read the most shocking things you can imagine in this book that will leave you shaking your head at the things people will do. But Tim maintained the idea that not only was he worth something, but so was everyone around him. He learned how to forgive, and that was his rocky path to the fabulous life he lives today. This book is LGBTQ positive.
"This is a book that should be read while alone, to your friends, to a congregation of survivors of abuse – in other words, it should be read by everyone. Sensitive and honest, gain a new perspective on being alive by infusing Tim’s words into your mind. Highly recommended." Hall of Fame Top 50 Reviewer, Grady Harp
ANOTHER HILL AND SOMETIMES A MOUNTAIN is the powerful testimony of Tim Green's determination to rise above his beginnings ... despite the sting of abandonment and the dark secrets surrounding his birth family. In his painful yet at times wry memoir, Green recounts…
Around age thirteen I discovered Perry Mason and put Nancy Drew on a back shelf. By the time I discovered Raymond Chandler’s mean streets, I was hooked. A vastly over-protected child, I longed to explore places that would make my mother faint. To paraphrase Chandler, I wanted to read about the best woman of her world and a good enough woman for any world. The kind of woman (or yes, a man) who would never ever need to be rescued. And when I sat down to write, I wanted to write about men and women who could handle themselves on those mean streets without turning mean themselves.
This book is the first in a strong series about another woman pressed into a “man’s job” when her husband, the sheriff, is murdered. The streets of Lily Ross’s town in 1920s Ohio may seem bucolic at first, even cozy. But Montgomery delves deep into the vicious side of small towns.
I grew up in some mean streets in Ohio, which is why I picked up the book, and this series made me believe they ain’t changed much. And you gotta admire a woman who takes on vicious killers and corrupt authorities in between raising kids and canning tomatoes. By the way, the book is based on a true historical person. You can look it up.
“The Widows kept me on the edge of my seat. Montgomery is a masterful storyteller.” ―Lee Martin, author of Pulitzer Prize-Finalist The Bright Forever
Kinship, Ohio, 1924: When Lily Ross learns that her husband, Daniel Ross, the town’s widely respected sheriff, is killed while transporting a prisoner, she is devastated and vows to avenge his death.
Hours after his funeral, a stranger appears at her door. Marvena Whitcomb, a coal miner’s widow, is unaware that Daniel has died, and begs to speak with him about her missing daughter.
From miles away but worlds apart, Lily and Marvena’s lives collide as…
Lori Benton is an award-winning, multi-published author of historical novels set during the 18th century North America. Her literary passion is bringing little known historical events to life through the eyes of those who lived it, particularly those set along the Appalachian frontier, where European and Native American cultural and world views collided. Virginia Governor Lord Dunmore’s campaign against the Shawnee nation on the eve of the Revolutionary war, culminating in the Battle of Point Pleasant, is a fascinating, complex, and poignant example of the armies and individuals that planned, fought, and resisted the campaign.
A comprehensive examination of the Ohio Valley native nations during the decades leading up to Dunmore’s War. Though the covering of the actual campaign makes up a small portion of this book, any researcher desiring a balanced view of the conflict for land in the Ohio couldn’t ask for a better resource than A Country Between.
The Ohio Country in the eighteenth century was a zone of international strife, and the Delawares, Shawnees, Iroquois, and other natives who had taken refuge there were caught between the territorial ambitions of the French and British. A Country Between is unique in assuming the perspective of the Indians who struggled to maintain their autonomy in a geographical tinderbox.
I hold degrees in history and social science with a focus on women’s history at the turn of the century. I’ve studied the hysteria pandemic and its lasting results for over a decade. As someone who struggles with depression, anxiety, and the effects of psychological abuse, I find I know these women all too well. As a writer, I’ve been inspired by other classic gothic novels like Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. In addition to writing novels, I’m also a blogger and marketing consultant in southern California where I live with my blind dog, Mr. Magoo.
Similar to Mas’ work, McGinnis paints a disturbing picture of how medicine treated “hysterical” women in unregulated asylums. The main character in this crime drama is remarkably sane considering the tortures she escapes when a detective recognizes how she can assist his search for a true madman. I especially enjoyed the juxtaposition of criminal psychology with the nonsense used to diagnose the women in the asylum. The delicious suspense and mysteries that follow keep you turning the pages for hours.
Mindy McGinnis, the acclaimed author of Not a Drop to Drink and In a Handful of Dust, combines murder, madness, and mystery in a beautifully twisted gothic historical thriller perfect for fans of novels such as Asylum and The Diviners as well as television’s True Detective and American Horror Story.
Grace Mae is already familiar with madness when family secrets and the bulge in her belly send her to an insane asylum—but it is in the darkness that she finds a new lease on life. When a visiting doctor interested in criminal psychology…
