96 Books Like My Heart Will Find You

This book drenched me in the romance of a woman escaping her real life, and for most of the book, it made me want to fly to Positano and never return.

I loved how Serle uses magical realism to help Katy grieve the loss of her mother and explore how she feels about her own marriage. I was heartbroken and in awe throughout the book, and I’ve never seen a mother-daughter relationship explored so tenderly as Katy and Carol. 

A dream-activated time travel story. Now that's one I couldn't resist and fortunately, I didn't.

The reader follows the character, Quinn, on a journey as her dreams bring a man that stirs her like no other. Problem? Nick enters her real world, too. They have a history. Complications? Oh, he's dreaming about her, too.

Can they figure out a way to stay connected and understand what's happening? Let’s hope.

Warning: it's a series, but after reading the first book, you'll be glad there's more from this talented author. 

Author Kate Ryder describes Into a Cornish Wind as a romance with a "twist of otherworldliness."

That phrase set the hook for me to snag this book. Toss in character, Kat’s uncommon gift of when her paintbrush connects with a canvas, she’s capable of visioning her subject’s past, and you’ve got a story that delivers intrigue, historical interest, and a hero to love.

I enjoyed this fresh take in a time-travel love story and hope you do. 

Trapped in Time is the quincentennial weekend escape.

Thanks to a bump on Emma’s head, the story takes you on a time-travel excursion back to the Victorian era, where modern-day Emma suddenly finds herself. With no way back to reality, she navigates and manipulates her way into the arms of the aristocratic John to serve a secret purpose.

But as Emma confronts the struggles of women in this era, she faces critical decisions of mind and heart. This story resonated on many levels to see the hard won progress as women we’ve made and that our path continues with batons held high.

I have a particular fondness for stories involving mail-order brides, and this one stood out for me due to its unique twist. A well-intentioned neighbor takes it upon himself to order a mail-order bride for the protagonist without his knowledge. To complicate matters further, Evelyn arrives in town completely unaware that the hero has not been informed of her arrival or her reason for coming. Despite this rocky start, they enter into a marriage of convenience.

I found their humorous exchanges delightful as they navigated their emotional challenges while trying to make their marriage work. However, what truly captivated me was how friends and family play pivotal roles in guiding the couple onto their path toward love.

Billy is a high school student who wants to enjoy his summer. The problem is that he is ordered by a judge to spend his summer working for Old Lady Baxter after damaging her property. Billy’s friends are convinced Old Lady Baxter killed a bunch of kids years ago and got away with it. They want Billy to find the evidence to prove her guilty. 

Billy is facing a test of loyalty in his search for his identity. Will he be the person his friends want him to be? Who does he want to be? He’s done his fair share of boneheaded things. But he’s also got a good heart buried somewhere in there. And I’m rooting for him.

Lois Ruby is a YA veteran who has more than 20 books to her name, many of them historical fiction, including the beloved Steal Away Home, which appeared on basically every year-end best list back in 1994. She also happens to be my mom. And her latest book, which takes place during the “red scare” of the 1950s, is among her best. It’s a tense story about a baseball-crazy 13-year-old boy whose parents are accused of being communist sympathizers, turning his life upside down when he’s supposed to be studying for his bar mitzvah. The clock-ticking backdrop, leading up to the notorious execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for supposedly passing on nuclear secrets to the Soviets, gives the whole book terrifyingly high stakes.

I might have picked A Maiden’s Grave for the title alone, though you’ll have to read it to learn the subtle double meaning packed into those three words. But of course there’s a lot more to this fast-paced story of a school for the deaf caught in the crossfire of a police standoff. Jeffery Deaver deftly intertwines full-bodied characters, crackling tension, and emotionally affecting backstories. Reading it, I realized that it could have been a pretty ordinary police procedural and that only the author’s determination to add layers of depth and detail lifted it to a new level. 

Before being published I was very much a romance snob. I was a bookshelf elitist who thought that good literature did not include romance.

When my first book was labeled a romance novel, romance fans quickly let me know that what I’d written wasn’t true romance, but they loved the book. So, I had to learn how to write romance and what better way than to read it.

Night Song was my first foray into historical romance with characters who looked like me. It was life changing and one of the most beautiful tales I had ever read. Lesson learned! The romance genre includes incredible stories, superb writing, and bourbon-sipping storylines and I had been missing out.

The “deep map” that Least Heat-Moon unfolds for us in this revelatory book is the history of Chase County, Kansas, home of the largest and least corrupted stand of tallgrass in America. He takes us with him—by car, on foot, and in mind—as he explores this story-rich land, its plants, animals, and the homespun people who have struggled to occupy this forbidding landscape.

In one breath, he reminds us it was the tall grasses of the African savannah that first made humankind stand up. In another, he tells us that the humans who peer across America’s tall grasses have “prairie eyes.” In “a place where you see twenty miles sitting down,” you have prairie eyes if you take in the horizon with stoic calm, knowing it can bring the deliverance of rain or the destruction of a tornado, dust storm, prairie fire (the “red buffalo”), or locusts. 

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