9 Books Like Loving Sylvia Plath

I loved the adventure story and the main characters strength and resilience in overcoming all that falls her way.

I love books that reimagine a story that is well known, challenging reader's assumptions about the characters or the circumstances they find themselves in, while also standing on its own for readers that haven't read the inspiration. JAMES brings Huck Finn's companion to life, giving him wit, intelligence, and agency. I read it twice, back-to-back. Easily my favorite read of 2025!

This is a wonderfully textured story about the consequences of war and occupation.

I’m a sucker for a good mystery or police procedural, and in fact I always have one by my bedside, along with a memoir and non-fiction.Stella Sands published six true-life crime thrillers before turning to a fictional who-done-it with an unusual investigator, and the result is wonderfully original. Her heroine is neither a detective by profession nor a police officer; she’s a college student who’s preternaturally gifted in linguistics, especially drawn to forensic linguistics, the use of language as evidence in criminal cases. Maggie, our heroine, is rough-and-ready, with tattoos, beer, cigarettes and motorcycle, yet a genius at finding clues to mysteries that are not apparent to anyone else. I will bet that there’s been no female detective quite like Maggie in the realm of mysteries.

Since humor and romance are features of fiction I find appealing, this novel had me at Maggie’s high-level banter with a police detective who… show more.

What an amazing book! I'd had it on my TBR list for a long time, but I kept myself from reading novels and especially anything medieval while I was getting The Last Highland King completed. This was a treat and a treasure after a lot of studying and writing. I knew Marie de France somewhat, as the writer of lais and courtly romances, but this evocation of the scholarly writer places her at the help of an English abbey that she remakes into a female utopia, protected from the outside world by a massive labyrinth. Wildly inventive, but also emotionally charged as Marie comes to terms with her own intellectual, sexual, and political nature.

Lacy Crawford’s memoir of sexual assault at the elite St. Paul’s School straddles the precarious line between lyric and reportage. Crawford shies from nothing: we are there as she is held down and orally raped by two upperclassmen; as she describes the consensual sex she undertakes in an attempt to reckon with her rape, as even her own parents abandon her.

Crawford spends the last third of the book untangling the web of documents that prove the school knew of both the assault and her resulting STI (oral herpes that went so far into her throat that doctors couldn’t identify the sores, leaving her sick for months). The horrific burning of her throat keeps her from being able to speak or sing in the school choir, a metaphor for St. Paul’s deliberate destruction of evidence of her rape and subsequent illness to ensure legal protection for her rapists and the… show more.

I love nothing more than a book that unsettles me, that I grasp almost bodily in the reading but have to return to again and again to truly understand. Lose Your Mother is that kind of book. In Chapter Seven, Hartman tells us that, while working in the archive of the Atlantic slave trade, she came across a scandal: on board the slave ship Recovery, two African girls—one named Venus—are murdered by the captain, John Kimber.

A trial ensues. A mate is put on the stand, who admits there was a book on the ship, a list of all its horrors, The Dead Book, but it’s lost now. Lose Your Mother is Hartman’s attempt to write her version of The Dead Book without committing the same violence against the girls that they endured in their short lives. How she wonders, can we reimagine life for Venus when all we know… show more.

Likely the origin of my love for books within books, especially those lost or deliberately destroyed, this is the third book in the Emily Starr trilogy, the lesser-known series by Canadian author L.M. Montgomery, of Anne of Green Gables fame.

In it, budding novelist Emily decides against going off to college in the city with her three best friends to remain on her aunt’s Canadian farm, New Moon, and write. She finishes her first novel, A Seller of Dreams (what a title!), in a fit of creative joy but struggles to find a publisher.

Close to despair, she gives it to her bookish friend Dean Priest, an older man who’s in love with her, asking if it’s any good. Aware that her devotion to writing will keep her from him, he lies that the book is “artificial” and the characters “wooden.”

Emily throws it on the fire in her… show more.

Emma Tennant was one of Ted Hughes’s lovers in the 1970s, at the height of Sylvia Plath’s early fame. I arrived at her memoir as research for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, but I stayed because Tennant’s writing is so witty and clever, full of riotous anecdotes of her time publishing chic literary magazines in 1970s London (she tries to steal, and sell, a family snapshot of Princess Margaret, nude on a French beach, for seed money, which ends in hilarious disaster).

Tennant never descends into self-pity or high drama in describing the dark and mysterious Hughes, who believes a random fox on the road is his dead wife returning to him and tries to convince Tennant that frozen salmon at a third-rate London restaurant is fresh and delivering life force to him. Instead, she sneaks in the violence done to her by Hughes in moments drenched in myth… show more.