Books like My Only Story — picked by fans

Each of us at times has felt isolated or disconnected. What does it take to pull us out of it? Sometimes reconnecting happens in ways that are unexpected. When we look back, we see we couldn’t have mapped out the path back with the most sophisticated GPS.

Then again, we’re not Monica Wood, who in, “The One-In-a-Million Boy” connects dots and lines between places and people so adroitly, we end up looking back at our crucial crossroads, the choices that have led us to where we are today.

One in a Million seems early as if it’s going to be a sad book. I found the opposite. I found that Wood gives hope to those who feel alone. Through her characters, she suggests we will likely find purpose and bridges in the most unlikely places. An 11-year-old boy and a 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant? Come on. And yet…

Will Ona Vitkus… show more.

I loved the characters in this novel, both the “ordinary” people and the quirky ones. And the non-human ones.

I loved how each character’s backstory and front story came out over time and sometimes merged and sometimes stayed quiet. I loved how the main and minor plots merged and separated and did not always go where I thought they would go. I loved that the story sometimes seemed predictable, and then, like real life, didn’t go as planned.

Most of all, I love how the author constructed a novel about a tough subject that didn’t drag me down into hopelessness and also didn’t turn out all sunshine and kittens. As a bonus, I learned some pretty cool things about parrots.

I first read Lolita when I was 14 and have read it every few decades since, learning something new each time.

I love the first-person immediacy of it and the way it is a crime novel in reverse: the narrator is already imprisoned but not for the crime he describes. It is a love story turned on its head: what the narrator says is love is in fact abuse.

It is a road trip across the vastness of the US, like one I took when I was a student.

This is a meta-fictional novel about the fragile state of memory and interpretation.

Stories can save us, and in the case of 13-year-old Briony Tallis, stories can ruin us. A single accusation is enough to destroy her sister, a young man’s life, and their future together. It shows us that the art of writing can be both sacred and profane.

It is a novel inhabited by ghosts, one that taught me the importance of absence in storytelling, of the silences and liminal spaces when writing about epic events. The style obfuscates the plot, then later renders it in vivid detail.

What lives between the lines is critical. It asks if forgiveness and acts of retribution can counter the death that eventually comes for all of us.

The title of this book really intrigued me. That, and the fact that the author had died very shortly after completing the novel, requesting her friend to see it through its journey, meant I felt compelled to read it.

The other hook for me was that the story is set in Guernsey, an island I have visited and where I was aware there had been a great deal of deprivation in WWII. I wasn’t disappointed. I loved the wit, the cast of wonderful characters, and the story that developed from a chance correspondence.

In 2017, Jason Reynolds introduced the world to Long Way Down, a young adult novel that follows a fifteen-year-old’s sixty-second elevator passage from the seventh to the ground floor. Written in narrative verse, the revenge-seeking teenager meets up with ghosts who press him to decide if he truly wants to use a gun as a means to avenge the murder of his older brother.

It appears the author is using a literary platform to incite the public to WAKE UP! to the cost of gun violence. Yet, how ironic that the very theme of Long Way Down caused the book to be censored, even though it has been bestowed with countless accolades.

Shouldn’t the array of positive reviews and numerous awards override a censorship board? 

This book has one of the most interesting characters I’ve ever come across in fiction. Evie Decker is an introverted and slightly eccentric teen living in small-town America whose ordinary life takes a completely different turn when she hears a young musician, Drumsticks Casey, being interviewed on the radio. Anne Tyler can be depended on to create fascinatingly quirky characters – I’ve long been a big fan of her writing – but I think she outdid herself with Evie. The story is unexpected and moving and funny and sad – really, it provides all the feels. The evolving relationship between Evie and Casey, with its ups and downs and twists, is perfectly told, and the dialogue sparkles with authenticity. 

I loved the novel’s unforgettable narrator, Perry L. Crandall, who has an IQ of 76.

A masterpiece of narrative voice, Lottery is easily the most engulfing book I’ve read in ten years. (I had a beloved sister with developmental disabilities and expected to be reduced to mush by page 5, but instead I was filled with joy.) The story follows Perry and his loathsome, money-grubbing sibs after Perry wins a boatload of dough in the state lottery.

This book is not what you think it will be, in about a million ways, and the ending is a heart-filling surprise. It made me want to be a better person. Everyone I’ve recommended this to adored it. (P.S. I’m not related to the author but I wish I were.)

I’m drawn to books that buck expectations, whether that’s through the format, content, or approach. So I adore how this book absolutely tears them all down and creates something more original instead. Chunks of this book are written like social media posts, which create quick, digestible sections that let the absurdity, humor, and social musings really hit.

I also admire how Lockwood is able to switch so smoothly between hilarity, heartbreak, anxiety, and sadness; I was cackling one minute and then ugly crying just a few pages later. I’ve never read a book quite like this before. Lockwood’s writing style inspires me to take more risks in my own stories.

I love a good look at class realities from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

So I was eager to dive into a book about Trust’s central character, Ida Partenza, the daughter of an early twentieth-century anarchist, but also the secretary and ghostwriter for wealthy financier Andrew Bevel.

Part of what is so captivating (and mind-boggling) about Trust is its metafictional structure: Is it a novel? Wait, is it a memoir? Wait, is it Bevel’s story, or Ida’s, or Bevel’s wife’s?

To say more, I’m afraid, would ruin too many wonderful surprises, but I will say that some of the loveliest, most memorable writing in this book appears in the voice of Bevel’s wife, Mildred.