100 Books Like Mare's War

I was immediately drawn to this book. I knew this story. A childhood friend’s family had fled the Russian army when they invaded Estonia during World War II. So it is easy for me to believe, counter-intuitive as it may seem, that an unlikely group of Eastern European refugees would flee the advancing Russian army, hoping for safety in Germany.

I loved their “found family.” How many of us, far from where we grew up, turn to friends for support? But Sepetys’ group boards the ill-fated Wilhelm Gustloff, a German ship carrying 10,000 refugees. Based on the true story of a maritime disaster, the novel highlights how war creates victims on all sides but also how people rise to help each other face unimaginable challenges.

I love this story of resilience and bravery. Malala is a model for everyone who believes in equality, education, and life! Today, there are calls in many communities to censor books and teachers. It worries me. What is next?

In her nonfiction book, Malala describes what happened when the Taliban invaded her village in Pakistan and banned girls from attending school. She defied that order and spoke openly against their oppression. Would I be that brave? What could affect women's and girls’ lives in such a profound way in the U.S.?

Malala was shot by the Taliban and almost lost her life–but she continued her work and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Both a Young Readers and Adult edition are available.

I love the book’s gentle tone and message that action can create healing. My husband and I have been honored to host many amazing Young African Leaders in the last few years–some with stories of survival and all with inspiring projects to help their countries and the world.

So, I connect personally with the book's premise of a refugee boy’s resettlement in Minneapolis and coming to terms with his mother’s disappearance during the war in Somalia. Knowing our “African family” makes it easy to believe Kek’s story, written in clear verse, about the fallout of that war. And who can’t cheer for Kek and his brother as they fight to save a well-worn cow? A cow who, in reality, saves them. 

I’ve been lucky to work on projects with several tribal elders who’ve shared how indigenous peoples’ lives have been disrupted since the earliest European colonization. It’s not a perspective I was taught in school, but it’s so important that we know what happened and the consequences of those actions today.

This is beautifully written by Joseph Bruchac, a member of the Abenaki tribe. It’s set in 1759, during the French and Indian War, one of the bloodiest encounters between warring European factions in North America. Native people were drawn into the conflict, including Saxso’s family, who lived in a French mission village near the St. Laurence River. I love that Saxso isn’t a victim but a young man driven by love to save his family. 

Sara Brooks was one of seventeen children raised by landowning African American farmers in Alabama. Hers is a lively and evocative account of growing up on the land in a loving family and a harsh coming of age at the hands of an abusive man. Like many southern black women of the era, Brooks is able to escape the bleak conditions of her life by moving first to Mobile and then to Cleveland where she worked as a domestic, eventually acquiring her own home and reuniting with the children she had been forced to leave behind. Hers is a hopeful and richly textured story of resistance and resilience.

Tales of enemies who become lovers – whether from warring families or rival gangs – are as old as Pyramus and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, and Tony and Maria.

Setting this story during an actual war heightens the tension. This book will draw you in from the start.

Josef Landermann sails aboard a German U-boat, hunting Allied supply ships in the waters of the Gulf Coast. Helen Mason is the embittered Alabama widow of a US Army Air Force pilot killed by the Luftwaffe. How Josef and Helen come together is a remarkable, enchanting true story.

Woven around themes of love and forgiveness, The Heart Mender is a thrilling page-turner that will touch your heart.

Coleman got very famous, and very rich, from Beulah Land, a trilogy of plantation life in the pre-Civil War South that was variously viewed as a much racier Gone with the Wind or simply dismissed as an interracial soap opera. What a surprise, then, to find he wrote this beautiful coming-of-age story about a sensitive boy who is a budding writer. The novel richly depicts Mark’s life in Alabama and Georgia during the 1930s and early ’40s. We are as elated as he is when he finally finds people who understand him, most notably his teacher, who is the kind of quietly strong woman character all too often overlooked in such a milieu, and equally, the unexpected young man with whom Mark finally finds a romance both exhilarating and heartbreaking.

Patricia McKissack introduces the quilts of Gee’s Bend to young readers in this charming picture book. McKissack not only read about Gee’s Bend but she visited and learned how to quilt. Her text is written in poems that capture the lilt and rhythm of Gee’s Bend women. The speaker, “Baby Girl,” describes how she learned how to quilt from her grandma. The soft, painterly illustrations by Cozbi A. Cabrera resemble Gee’s Bend quilts, and depict the colorful scraps of material the women used. The story includes the visit of Dr. Martin Luther King to “the Bend” on his way to Camden, then Selma, to march for the right to vote. And the aftermath of that march. A superb picture book full of history and hope for readers of all ages.

I moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama for graduate school in 1986, eleven years after this book was published, thirteen years after Nate Shaw’s death.

Reading the life of a man whose parents had been enslaved, a cotton farmer and sharecropper who bravely joined a union and stood up for other Black farmers, opened my eyes to the reality of life in the twentieth century for Black farmers in the state I now called home.

Told in expert storyteller Nate Shaw’s (a pseudonym for Ned Cobb) voice, based on interview transcripts, the book introduced me to a person and a way of life unlike anything I had encountered growing up in the city of Little Rock, Arkansas.

William James Edward is the grandfather of the author Donald Stone. The author does a great job of highlighting the importance that William J. Edward placed on lineage at the beginning of the book. The author shows the forgotten legacy of Edwards as one of Tuskegee’s first graduates. Edwards goes on to start a secondary school in Wilcox county Alabama, following the legacy of Booker T. Washington. The school was called the Snow Hill Institute and in its prime employed over 20 teachers and had over a dozen buildings on the campus. The curriculum was like Tuskegee, where the students learned trades and received a formal education. Under the leadership of William James Edwards, the school thrived until it was forced to close in the 1960s. Donald Stone mostly uses primary sources to paint a picture of the opposition that Edwards faced in trying to operate a school outside of… show more.