100 Books Like Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen

I became fascinated with 16th-century and 17th-century Europe after reading Don Quixote many years ago. Since then, every novel or nonfiction book about that era has felt both ancient and contemporary. I’m always struck by how much our environment has changed—transportation, communication, housing, government—but also how little we as people have changed when it comes to ambition, love, grief, and greed. I doubled down my reading on that time period when I researched my novel, Dulcinea. Many people read in the eras of the Renaissance, World War II, or ancient Greece, so I’m hoping to introduce them to the Baroque Age. 

I have always been fascinated by religion from an intellectual perspective—the way it can be such a powerful force for both good and evil and is such a constant facet of humanity, regardless of the time or place. I’m also interested in community and the complexity of human relationships, so it’s only natural that I’m particularly excited about books set within religious communities. And, as much as I appreciate a true crime cult expose, I am a lover of great fiction first and foremost, so novels that explore religion with intelligence and artistry are my personal holy grail. 

I studied psychology in college and am fascinated with the human mind. The psyche holds so many joys, wonders, and the deepest horrors imaginable, all compact and functioning within our skulls. My love for psychology grew into the horror realm, where I read and watched anything revolving around the character study of an individual driven to the brink. Now, I write stories about the morality of actions taken by those who have found themselves in a peculiar position. I believe there is more to the clean-cut view of right versus wrong regarding the decision-making of one’s self-preservation.

When I was researching my novel, I learned why so many psychics are women: Spiritualism, founded in the 19th century, had both an intense following (more than 8 million followers in the late 1800s) and gave women equal importance to men, one of the few religions at the time (or since) to do so. Even today, women’s pain is dismissed by doctors disproportionately to that of men; women’s testimony is scrutinized more closely than that of men. I love books that invest women with abilities that seem super-human, perhaps as compensation for unequal access to resources. These books keep one foot in the real, one in the fantastic.

K is an INTJ, 5w4, and a cat person. She loves a pulse-thudding plot and a heat level hotter than a gun barrel on a battlefield. She enjoys accurate action sequences, scary villains, and smokeshow heroes with redemption arcs. T is an ENTJ, an 8w7, and a dog mom. She writes villains who square up, heroes who step up, and heroines who level up. She prefers her romance with a side of high-stakes geopolitical brinkmanship, because the only thing better than saving the world is celebrating the win afterward. K and T are long-time readers of high heat dark romances and look forward to sharing their writing with other spice aficionados.

I read every single day without fail. So I have read a lot of books over the years. I am always so impressed with- and love- a good, twisty, surprise ending. From children’s books to middle grade to adult… surprise me at the end, and I’m in! (Extra points for making me cry a little bit!) If you, too, love a good twist at the end of a story, give these books a try!

I love short-story collections. I’ve read dozens to hundreds of them, starting as a child reading Richard Scarry, and I still make them a regular part of my reading diet. I started trying my own hand at short fiction in 2012 and have since finished more than one hundred stories, including the ones in Animal Husbandry. I’m now working on my first novel after years as a short-story writer, and it gives me additional admiration for how many outstanding novelists are also able to master short fiction. It’s two different skill sets, and the five authors I mentioned here (among many others) excel at both.

Lots of us rely occasionally on technology to help us entertain a young child, but the connection we form when looking at a book together cannot be beaten. I have found, both personally and professionally, that great books are born when a kind of magical mix-up is created in a child’s imagination between the words you read and the pictures they see. It feels so wonderful when this happens that they want to revisit the book again and again. I have written many books for young children over more than 20 years, and I am always striving to help cast that magical spell.

I've always loved fiction, fantasy, and adventure stories. Growing up in the Star Wars generation, I was seven when A New Hope was released at the theaters. Living in the hollows of West Virginia there weren’t libraries close by, and movies were a great, though seldom, treat. Suggestive material and cursing was not something that we saw in books or movies growing up in a more simple period of time. I still thoroughly enjoy many well-written, clean, books or shows. As an active member of the body of Christ, I now serve with my writing, and hope that kids of all ages can enjoy epic fantasy and adventure books from a clean and wholesome perspective.

Since an early age, I loved getting lost in a good story and knew I wanted to be a writer one day. As an adult, I tried writing in many genres but it was when I had my children that I knew I wanted to write children’s bedtime stories. I loved that special time at the end of a busy day when I could snuggle down with my children and get lost in a story with them. I now write children's bedtime stories for a podcast called Koko Sleep. The stories are written in a soothing way and are designed to help the listeners drift easily to sleep.