Books like Open Throat — picked by fans

I was immediately drawn into this story’s premise: former best friends who haven’t seen each other in forty years reuniting in Los Angeles for one night of conversation, a night that will leave each woman changed forever.

Lacey and Edith met and bonded as young girls on the East Coast, but it is Hollywood that tore them apart. I am always interested in stories of female friendship, when ties are strongest, and when they are severed. And, of course, the introduction of a movie star love interest is bound to test even the tightest bond.

This story is especially poignant because it is told by two older women, looking back, who understand the consequences of their decisions and know what they would do over again and what they regret most. 

Shockingly, it wasn’t until taking an Asian-American History class in college that I learned about the US internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. My husband is Japanese-American, and so I now also have family who experienced this shameful time in our history firsthand.

Evergreen is the second book in Naomi Hirahara’s Japantown Mystery series, the first being Clark and Division. It takes place during post-WWII and centers around Aki (a nurse’s aide) and her family's struggles after being released from Manzanar in 1946. This backdrop and its inherent social injustices are adeptly interwoven with a murder mystery happening in Little Tokyo.

In itself, this is a compelling combination of mystery and historical fiction. But it's also a morally significant book, and I'm so glad that Naomi Hirahara was the one to write it. 

Thirsty for more buff orc lesbians? Legends & Lattes serves up a mug of warm, cozy queer fulfillment. Viv was an adventurer, but she no longer wants to be. Despite her battle scars and intimidating looks, she longs to open her own quiet coffee shop.

The journey to small-business success has challenges, but her determination to live on her own terms brews up a staff of misfits that become a queer-found family. This quiet, low-stakes novel is as sweet as an almond croissant and will leave you hungry for more.

This novel takes an absurd premise (everyone magically receives a string whose length reflects how long they will live) and spins it into a profound thought experiment. I loved it for its complete indifference to the scientific credibility that I tried to build into my novel, which is in part about knowing (if you want) exactly how long you have to live.

I found it liberating to learn that, as a writer, I could have it both ways: be extremely thoughtful and nuanced about the consequences of your premise while being completely arbitrary and absurdist about the premise itself. I don’t have that kind of nerve, so I fell back on mere science for my premise, but I love Erlich’s gall. 

I knew little about North Woods when I started reading it, except that it chronicled the lives of different inhabitants of a farmhouse in western New England—a region I love—and featured an intriguing image of what I assumed was a bobcat on the cover.

North Woods brings its setting vividly to life; while there are fascinating characters—including a colonial-era English soldier who abandons the war to cultivate an apple orchard on the farmhouse property—the flora and fauna of the farm and its surrounding woodlands play equally important roles.

I’m grateful to my daughter, the same sensitive reader who cried when she finished Homegoing, for posting a photo of her copy of North Woods along with her lunch one day and piquing my curiosity.

The protagonist in this book is ConaLee, a 12-year-old girl mature beyond her years whose father, a Union soldier, is severely injured in the Civil War and doesn’t remember who he is (he never makes it back home). Her mother is raped by a roaming Confederate war veteran and traumatized to the point of muteness.

The Confederate soldier drops the mother and ConaLee off at a lunatic asylum in West Virginia, where a mysterious night watchman joins what becomes a compelling tale. I enjoyed this book because it introduces a spirited preteen protagonist who is trying to keep her family together and shows how devastating the Civil War was to so many families.  

This is one of the very few novels that managed to conquer me in every aspect—the plot, the characters, the settings, and the writing. All credits go to the author, of course. But—as I now see her as a living person rather than a fictional character—I think I owe a special tribute to Big Ammachi, the female protagonist of this family saga.

She grabs the scene on page one, and although there comes a moment when she leaves (the story spans some eighty years), her profound sense of humanity keeps lingering throughout the book. More than that—she continues to linger now, even two months after I finished reading. And I suspect she will stay with me forever.

I found so much to love in this story of found family and hidden magic—an enchanted isle, a guardian wizard and his rabbit familiar, and a young woman with a concealed past, all devoted to one another.

The bonds between the wizard, his adopted daughter, and their rabbit familiar were simply lovely, and the sacrifices they made in their quest to save what magic remains in their world were compelling. Despite trials the characters endure, the story still captured a cozy feel which would make it a fantastic winter read.

Though The Magician’s Daughter stands alone, I’d love a sequel—I didn’t want to leave these enchanting characters behind!

I love when stories tease out backstory in little bits, and this book does that wonderfully.

Right from the opening chapters, seeds of intrigue are sprinkled everywhere, and I had so many questions that I needed answers to. It’s the kind of opening where it seems that life is going well for the character, yet there is something amiss.

And then the metaphorical rug was pulled out from under me, and I had to stay up well past my bedtime because I just needed to know more.

I loved this tale about the extraordinary Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, Mary Shelley.

Thoroughly researched, this novel delves deep into the complex relationship of a daughter who never knew her infamous, trailblazing, rule-breaking, feminist mother and how that same daughter breaks the mold in her own way by inventing the science fiction genre in writing Frankenstein.

The legacy of each of these women still endures!