Books like It Happened to Audrey — picked by fans

I read The Women’s House of Detention earlier this year and was introduced in its pages to a world of pre-Stonewall policing of queerness and transness. In our current moment, when state laws increasingly seek to restrict the lives of gender-expansive people, this book offers a window into both the origin of these laws and also, importantly, into the lives of queer and trans people who, in their resistance, created space for me to exist, and to name my own existence, today.

I found this book emotionally overwhelming in a way very few criminal justice books have ever been for me.

I have worked on many eyewitness misidentification cases, but this book personalizes the issue in such a human and heartbreaking way that it becomes impossible to dismiss as an abstract legal problem. What affected me most was not simply the wrongful conviction itself, but the extraordinary relationship that eventually develops between Jennifer Thompson and Ronald Cotton.

I admire the honesty both authors bring to the story. Nobody is demonized, and nobody is simplified. 

This book broke my heart. A college student goes for an exciting semester in Italy and has to deal with the tragic murder of her roommate, her own wrongful arrest for the crime, an internationally covered trial where she is portrayed as a monster, and more than four years in prison for a crime she did not commit.

I love this book because it not only tells the story of a wrongful conviction but is also the best book I have read about the prison experience that women around the world go through. It is beautifully written and tough to put down.

What I appreciate most about this book is how grounded and practical it feels.

Mark Godsey understands that wrongful convictions are rarely caused by a single evil actor or one dramatic mistake. Instead, they emerge from a chain of assumptions, pressures, tunnel vision, and institutional habits that slowly push cases in the wrong direction. I found myself nodding along constantly because the stories mirrored so many cases I have personally encountered over the years.

I also admire the book because it avoids sensationalism. It explains complicated legal and psychological concepts in a way that is accessible without losing nuance. That balance is incredibly difficult to achieve, and Godsey pulls it off beautifully.

Brian Banks was one of the best high school football players in the country when he was wrongfully arrested at the age of 16 years old for raping a classmate. He went to prison, and a decade later, his accuser admitted it never happened. I love this book because it gives a first-person view of what a child goes through when they are eaten alive by the criminal legal system.   

It is also a great book about hope and determination. Brian never gives up on his dreams and ultimately lives them on an NFL field after more than a decade-long ordeal. This book has something for everyone. 

While again, it’s not a magical world, it might as well have been. I was transported and transfixed to a different time and place. I could smell the linen baking dry in the sun as it hung in the open air and open fires that crackled and sparked as bacon sizzled on a cast iron pan. I shivered as they woke up one morning covered in a blanket of snow. I tasted the Christmas orange that was received with such joyful excitement. It made me want to like fruit–which, sadly, didn’t stick.

More importantly, it made me recognize the beauty of being grateful for things I took for granted. The mark of a good story is if you want to read it again as an adult, and I’ve read and reread this series more than once.

I’ve read all of this author’s work and the Rushed series is my favourite because although it’s a sinister paranormal fantasy, it is filled with humour. The world-building for each book is amazing – certainly daunting and nasty in parts, yet believable.

There are remarks in reviews that it’s confusing and weird, so maybe you have to be odd to understand and appreciate it. I did, so I must be.

When this astonishing debut novel about a complicated mother-daughter relationship came out, I wondered if the author had met my mother. Because Adele August believes there’s nothing for her in her small Wisconsin town, she sets off for Los Angeles with her twelve-year-old daughter and a dream—Ann will be a child star; Adele will make a wealthy marriage; they’ll live the lives they were meant to. Simpson’s writing is gorgeous: “My mother and I should have both been girls who stayed out on the porch a little longer than the rest… who strained to hear the long-distance trucks on the highway... girls who looked at the sky and wanted to go away… but who finally sighed, and calling the dog with a mixture of reluctance and relief, shut the door and went home.” Reality can’t live up to Adele’s delusions; mother-child roles are often reversed; but love underlies this tangled… show more.

A stunning assembly of archival photographs and newspaper clippings from Jackson County, Wisconsin, in the last decade and a half of the 19th century, and the definitive explanation of why nobody in old-time photographs is ever smiling—and, I choose to believe, the real reason the parts of The Wizard of Oz set in Kansas were filmed in black and white. Economic privation, unceasing bereavement, disease both physical and mental—in other words, Tuesday. Was there any joy in Jackson County? Somewhere, I’m sure. What’s documented here is a stark, powerful beauty. The most real book I’ve ever encountered, and one of two on face-out display on my bookshelves.

I love me a tomboy. And that’s Caddie Woodlawn, who lives on the Wisconsin frontier with her family in the 1860s, where there are still Indians in the woods, and all the richness of nature to explore with her two brothers. Plus lots of mischief to get into. The threat of a proper, domestic young lady’s life looms, but with her father to support her, Caddie resists it.

I love this book because it brings me back to my own childhood, where my siblings and I played for endless days in the woods and creek around our home, making pretend food out of sticks and mud, catching frogs and salamanders, and building forts. The kind of childhood that few children now have in suburban America.