Books like Letter to My Daughter — picked by fans

This book is all about relationships. It is about a relationship with God and his people and that we are certainly more alike than different. Woman Evolve takes the reader through the story of Eve and shows the reader just how she is relatable to each and every one of us. Eve was human and we are human. She had flaws and we have flaws. Her vulnerabilities are also ours and before we point the blame at her, or anyone else for that matter we can look right back at ourselves and understand how each and every one of us doesn’t necessarily deserve redemption, but God gave it anyway. Want a good read, this book will keep you turning page after page as the reader and author explores just how fallible, alike, and loved we all are.

This novel changed the way I looked a mental illness. Campbell was a tremendous author and her prose is clearly highlighted in this heart-wrenching novel about how mental illness not only impacts the sufferer but ricochets and touches everyone around them. 72 Hour Hold is an important timeless work that helps to uncover what many have suspected or even known about what their family members fight behaviorally and in the shadows of their minds. Depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety are real and so are the families they impact. What families experience and what we openly discuss are sometimes two separate realities. Pick up this book and see why Campbell attempts to pull the covers off of mental illness and discover just why mental health matters. As a mental health clinician and author sometimes seeing what the issue looks like can dive deeper that any label. 

I absolutely enjoyed this book from cover to cover. This book carries the heart and soul of many of the ancestors. It is unapologetically spiritual, charming, heartwarming, and downright funny. 

In a world of fiction and nonfiction as an author, I do believe we can mix it up. This nonfiction book will leave its reader feeling like they just ate a big bowl of gumbo. It highlights the complexities of life, family, community, and self. But, it intertwines the importance of lessons learned, value-added, and compassionate care.

This novel is simply beautiful. It surrounds the biblical character Esther and her unexpected transition from being snatched from her home and dumped into the harem of the king. This novel highlights coping with the unexpected path that life sometimes presents. It is also careful to highlight how culture can influence our experiences and decisions. Esther dives into how this young woman learns to navigate the road less traveled and finds a new one all her own. It is not a coming-of-age story, it is a coming of self story. The power of a woman is clearly outlined in this novel and how being buried under pressure can create a diamond indeed. 

My favorite gay autobiography. Humorous, explicit, and thought-provoking. Like my story, his is far from a neatly packaged “coming out” story of self-acceptance. He describes some way-out-of-bounds-for-most-people sexual adventures in detail but with no intention to shock or titillate. He is just telling stories he finds interesting, and he is a great storyteller. Not surprising, since he is a celebrated science fiction author.

Always surprising in a quirky way. Example: in the 1950s, he is at an outdoor gay cruising area at night when there is a police raid. It is only as the men flee that he grasps how many were there: hundreds. It is his first sense of being in a large gay male community, and it is empowering.

“I saw a little boy on the street today, and he cried so eloquently that I will never forget him.” Maeve Brennan wrote for the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section as ‘The Long-Winded Lady’ from 1954 to 1968. She roamed the city’s streets, bars, and restaurants, eyes wide open, weaving stories of vivid emotional detail from the most seemingly mundane moments. None of these are too long – in the waiting room concentration can be fleeting – but each sketch engages. Her story of the crying boy ends this way: “He might have been the last bird in the world, except that if he had been the last bird there would have been no one to hear him.”

This is the kind of book you want to savor, line by line. It’s a powerful and necessary exploration of black gay writing and life in the 1980s and 1990s.

Bost transports us to the world of important writers like Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and Melvin Dixon, showing us how their writing, their living, and their loving were all intertwined. With gorgeous, poetic prose, Bost shows how violent structures like racism, classism, homophobia, and AIDS may shape aspects of our lives, but they cannot stop our living.

Evidence of Being explores how these writers used their work to create community, belonging, and survival. My favorite thing about this book is that Bost gives us a vision of what he calls “black/queer optimism,” in which shared experiences and creative expression form a basis for LGBTQ+ life far into the future. 

This is a novel about Italian immigrants struggling to survive in New York City’s Little Italy during the early years of the twentieth century amid the growth of the Black Hand, the precursor to the American mafia. The book is unique in that most of the characters are the author’s actual ancestors and people with whom they had come into contact during that era. Similarly, the grisly central events described in the story all occurred.

It is beautifully written and filled with fascinating historical details. The characters and the descriptions of places and events come alive on the page. Fabiano includes an extensive Glossary of Italian Terms used in the book, as well as a multi-generational family tree. Elizabeth Street makes for very good reading!

Growing up in New York City, I’ll never forget my first experience, at around the age of seven, with people literally living underground. Our subway stalled in a tunnel in front of an abandoned station. The lights went off in the car and the platform outside was cast in an eerie orange glow by a single bulb.

Suddenly, a figure emerged from the shadows, charged my subway car, and started banging wildly and laughing maniacally, just on the other side of the glass to me. This continued for what felt like a million years before the train came back to life, and we moved on.

Decades later, I discovered this book about a parallel city below mine where people like that man live an alternative existence in miles and miles of dark warrens underground. I’m obsessed with it.

If you read one biography/memoir of a Gilded Age criminal, make it this one. It tells the story (often in his own words) of the celebrated pickpocket George Appo, an odd little half-Chinese, half-Irish, one-eyed fellow who could make $800 in a few days when most working men made less than that in a year. Appo would rivet New Yorkers when he testified about his second career as a “green goods” con man, working to swindle gullible out-of-towners who came to buy purported counterfeit money at a discount, only to discover that there was nothing but sawdust inside the packages they carried away. Appo refused to name names, though, as he was a self-described “good fellow.”