Here are 100 books that Pride fans have personally recommended if you like
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I'm a Polish, London-based writer of Slavic-folklore-inspired fantasy novels for adults (The Second Bell, out from Angry Robot Books) and children (The Wind Child, published by Uclan). I write stories of families, grief, motherhood, and communities, steeped in the Ancient Slavic lore and set against the beauty and danger of the natural (and supernatural) world.
A powerful story of mothers, daughters, adoptive families, and loyalty the book draws inspiration from Greek mythology. The main character is a teenage girl with a magical affinity for plants. As she unexpectedly comes into an inheritance, for the first time her abilities seem to hold more promise than a threat. A highly readable story.
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'Kalynn Bayron does more than re-write a fairy-tale ... She breaks it apart and rebuilds it into a wholly original and captivating story where girls finally decide for themselves who lives happily ever after' - Brigid Kemmerer
'Brings much-needed inclusivity and contemporary flavor to the teen fantasy genre' - Kirkus Reviews
'A delicious mix of intoxicating fantasy and coming of age, steeped in Greek mythology and peppered with references to the Jordan Peele films Get Out and Us' - Observer New Review
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Ever since she can remember, Briseis has had power over plants. Flowers bloom in her footsteps…
Secrets, lies, and second chances are served up beneath the stars in this moving novel by the bestselling author of This Is Not How It Ends. Think White Lotus meets Virgin River set at a picturesque mountain inn.
Seven days in summer. Eight lives forever changed. The stage is…
As a reader and an author, I prefer young adult novels because they tend to focus more on character growth and development than other genres, but I’m particularly drawn to both historical and fantasy period pieces in books and film. The medieval ages especially, with their castles and feudalistic way of life, have always fascinated me. This fascination was largely filled by reading and watching fairy tales and novel adaptations while growing up. Nowadays, I gravitate toward retellings like a moth to the flame, as I get to relive stories that have a special place in my heart in a fresh new way.
This atmospheric novel, a retelling of The Island of Doctor Moreau, is a perfect blend of gothic romance and haunting mystery. It’s beautifully written, well-paced, and filled with unexpected twists. I love the feminist theme presented through the main character, Juliet, who is independent despite the hardships she endures, is not dissuaded from pursuing her passion for science even though it wasn’t proper for a woman to do so at the time. There is also an underlying theme throughout the book that expertly juxtaposes sanity and madness, eliciting the question of where the line should be drawn.
For fans of Libba Bray, this first book in a gothic suspense trilogy is inspired by H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau and has been hailed by New York Times bestseller Carrie Ryan as having "beautiful writing, breakneck pacing, a pulse-pounding mystery, and an irresistible romance."
Following accusations that her scientist father gruesomely experimented on animals, sixteen-year-old Juliet watched as her family and her genteel life in London crumbled around her—and only recently has she managed to piece her world back together. But when Juliet learns her father is still alive and working on a remote tropical island,…
In my previous role as a teacher, I often encountered teens who never, ever read outside of school – and hated having to read in school. Finding YA retellings of the classics became an indispensable tool for me in terms of not only linking the past with the present for the young adults in my classes, but also in terms of helping them see themselves in fiction, finding representation there, and discovering their own importance. It opened up whole worlds for all of us, and offered a pathway to a love of reading that I hope they will never forget!
Romeo & Juliet retellings are, in my opinion, the absolute hardest ones to bring anything new to, but Le’s own voices portrayal of Vietnamese culture smashed all my preconceptions and turned what’s often a dry, predictable format into something so insightful and compelling it genuinely took my breath away. With real, authentic teenage protags facing real, contemporary issues, we get an insight into the turmoil of the lives of ‘ordinary’ teens far removed from the ‘glossy’ veneers we’re often presented in YA fiction. A Pho Love Story speaks a unique, powerful truth – and brings a breath of fresh air not only to the original but also to the genre as a whole. (Caution: parts of this book will make you extremely hungry!)
All's fair in love, war and noodles! This delicious debut is perfect for fans of teen romcoms such as When Dimple Met Rishi and Jenny Han's To All the Boys I've Loved Before.
What if Romeo and Juliet was set in a Vietnamese restaurant?
Linh and Bao like each other. A lot. The only problem? Their families own rival pho restaurants and hate each other's guts, so they have to keep their relationship a secret.
But they can only steal kisses in dark alleys and the art room at school for so long. Can their love transcend an age-old feud…
She’s hiding from pain. He’s lost everything but his dog. When fresh air and second chances bring them together, can they rediscover true love?
If you enjoy kind-hearted heroes, small towns, and more humor than heat, you’ll adore this contemporary Alaskan romance! A Darling Handyman is the feel-good first book…
In my previous role as a teacher, I often encountered teens who never, ever read outside of school – and hated having to read in school. Finding YA retellings of the classics became an indispensable tool for me in terms of not only linking the past with the present for the young adults in my classes, but also in terms of helping them see themselves in fiction, finding representation there, and discovering their own importance. It opened up whole worlds for all of us, and offered a pathway to a love of reading that I hope they will never forget!
I wanted to include an unashamedly fun read for balance, and Of Curses and Kisses is absolute bucketloads of fun. A contemporary Beauty and the Beast retelling, it’s charmingly clever, funny, and vibrant, with its cast of diverse characters and its boarding school setting. If you’re ever looking for a hug in book form, look no further!
For Princess Jaya Rao, nothing is more important than family. That's why when she finds out she'll be attending the same elite boarding school as Grey Emerson, a member of the rival royal family behind a humiliating scandal involving her little sister, she schemes to get revenge on the young nobleman in order to even the score between their families. The plan? Make him fall in love with her and then break his heart the way his family has broken hers.
Grey Emerson doesn't connect with people easily. Due to a curse placed on his family by the Raos that…
Much laughter is born out of sadness. Humor can be a way to cope or even reinvent our realities in ways that bring relief—and release. There's a misconception that “serious literature” should be humorless; crack a smile and you’re a fraud. However, the worlds and characters that emerge from this way of thinking do not ring true to me. Who among us hasn’t joked to help deal with sorrow? Or to satirize the outrageous? Or simply because life--however brutal—is also sometimes funny? The more a writer allows laughter to intermingle with tears, the more I believe in the story, and the more I enjoy it. That is why I wrote a “funny-sad” novel, The Australian.
Oreo (originally published in 1974, then out of print, and finally repopularized by Harriette Mullen and republished in 2000), a satirical novel by Fran Ross, a journalist and, briefly, a comedy writer for Richard Pryor, is widely considered to be “before its time.” This aching and hilarious, experimentally structured story is about a girl, Oreo, with a Jewish father and a Black mother, who ventures to New York City to find her father only to discover there are hundreds of Sam Schwartzes in the phonebook, and then goes on a quest to find him.
Oreo is raised by her maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. Her black mother tours with a theatrical troupe, and her Jewish deadbeat dad disappeared when she was an infant, leaving behind a mysterious note that triggers her quest to find him. What ensues is a playful, modernized parody of the classical odyssey of Theseus with a feminist twist, immersed in seventies pop culture, and mixing standard English, black vernacular, and Yiddish with wisecracking aplomb. Oreo, our young hero, navigates the labyrinth of sound studios and brothels and subway tunnels in Manhattan, seeking to claim her birthright while unwittingly experiencing and triggering…
Maybe it was too much reality TV growing up, especially being raised on figures like Tiffany "New York" Pollard or A Different World's Whitley Gilbert, but bad girl protagonists are insta-buys for me. I love them, and I have a particular fondness for when they're black girls. We're already seen as so angry, but bad girl books show you not only why a girl could get to be so angry but also that you ain't seen nothing yet. I need more people to see how much joy there is in rage, and I chose to explain it with YA horror because it's a genre so driven by catharsis and mood that it's a perfect fit.
Maddy is not, and never will be, a bad girl. She's just a scared girl that did some very, very bad things.
That doesn't mean I wasn't cheering her on. Maddy is the kind of heroine that I fantasized about jumping into the pages to fight for. I cussed out many a side-character in my head, just wishing they would try to talk to me like that so I could give them what they deserve.
But Maddy gets her lick back without my help - and it's a remorseless gorefest. The ending of this book is part slasher, part action film that I needed. After getting frustrated with all her hardships, I needed Maddy’s revenge to take over the book, just like her rage took over her.
* AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * INDIE BESTSELLER * JUNIOR LIBRARY GUILD SELECTION * KIDS' INDIE NEXT LIST PICK * NPR BEST PICK * KIRKUS BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR *
New York Times bestselling author Tiffany D. Jackson ramps up the horror and tackles America's history and legacy of racism in this suspenseful YA novel following a biracial teenager as her Georgia high school hosts its first integrated prom.
When Springville residents-at least the ones still alive-are questioned about what happened on prom night, they all have the same explanation . . . Maddy did it.
I’ve lived and worked intensely in the medical field for over two decades in many countries in Africa. I’ve seen global health programs from the academic, research, developmental, and humanitarian viewpoints of both Africans and Europeans. It’s a complicated mix of politics, good intentions, and, sometimes, egos. There’s much to be learned from both fiction and nonfiction about the complexity of it all.
Nadia Owusu is the quintessential third culture kid, holder of a US passport, but born in Dar-es-Salaam to a Ghanaian father and an Armenian-American mother. Her UN-employed father moved his two daughters around through Kumasi (Ghana), Kampala (Uganda), Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), Rome (Italy), and the UK. Her mother left the family when Nadia was three years old and didn’t look back, save for a rare, short visit and some trinket gifts. Aftershocks is Ms. Owusu’s tribute to a loving father, but her upbringing was a shaky foundation that reverberated throughout her life, and provided the earthquake metaphor around which she structures her memoir. She weaves bits of political history and culture from the countries she lived in into her own story, comprised of the foreshocks, main shock, and aftershocks. It’s held together by beautiful prose descriptions, both of place and emotions.
In the tradition of The Glass Castle, this “gorgeous” (The New York Times, Editors’ Choice) and deeply felt memoir from Whiting Award winner Nadia Owusu tells the “incredible story” (Malala Yousafzai) about the push and pull of belonging, the seismic emotional toll of family secrets, and the heart it takes to pull through.
“In Aftershocks, Nadia Owusu tells the incredible story of her young life. How does a girl—abandoned by her mother at age two and orphaned at thirteen when her beloved father dies—find her place in the world? This memoir is the story of Nadia creating her own solid…
I can’t guess how many great poems I have committed to memory. In waiting rooms, or in the checkout line, I recite them to myself. In this way, poetry helps me not only understand the world we live in, but live in it without going crazy. And while I love all poetry, I’ve always found that poetry in traditional forms—with meter and rhyme—is easier to remember. That’s one reason why I’ve always been drawn to formal verse. In my own poetry, I strive to uphold that tradition, while inventing new forms that spring organically from the subject at hand. I trust these books will demonstrate I’m not alone.
This book, justly honored with the Pulitzer Prize, surprised me with its formal range and intensity of experience.
Trethewey is celebrated as a chronicler of our collective history, but I was far more taken with the poems of personal history—and, more specifically, personal loss. The poems that examine the absence left by her mother’s untimely death are, to me, the defining poems of the book. These often exemplify her gift for presenting the most telling detail or selecting the word that will resonate on the broadest level.
Let me hone in on one poem, “Myth,” a recasting of the Orpheus story. What astonished me about this poem was the formal structure. It consists of two sections of nine lines, each arranged in terza rima stanzas. The second section rewrites the first half—in reverse! The effect is to convey the experience of descending into the darkness of the underworld and then…
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and former U.S. Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey's elegiac Native Guard is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. The title of the collection refers to the Mississippi Native Guards, a black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze across the water to the fort on Ship Island where Confederate captives once were guarded by black soldiers serving the Union cause.? The racial legacy of the South touched Trethewey's…
I am a professor who teaches and works in the field of African American History. Because I am both white and Jewish, I’ve been repeatedly asked to give talks about relationships between African Americans and white Jewish Americans, and about what “went wrong” to shatter the “grand alliance” of the civil rights movement embodied by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. I had no answer, but I suspected that none of the stories that we had been told, whether good or bad, were fully true. So I went back to the sources and uncovered a complex and multilayered history. Black and Jewish collaboration was never a given, and underlying tensions and conflicts reflected the broader realities of race and class in the U.S. In the book I explored how these historical and political forces operated, and continue to resonate today.
Too often, “Black-Jewish relations” has been used as a shorthand for “African American non-Jewish/white Jewish relations. Gibel Azoulay, herself both Black and Jewish, not only shatters the myths of this dichotomy, but plunges into deeper questions of what constitutes identity and lived experience in the first place.
What shapes one’s “Jewish” or “Black” identity? What is “biracial” or “multiracial” and can it be disentangled from its American political and historical context?
Ultimately, she concludes, these ways of “being in the world” serve to both challenge and undermine the essentialist and confining classifications surrounding us.
How do adult children of interracial parents-where one parent is Jewish and one is Black-think about personal identity? This question is at the heart of Katya Gibel Azoulay's Black, Jewish, and Interracial. Motivated by her own experience as the child of a Jewish mother and Jamaican father, Gibel Azoulay blends historical, theoretical, and personal perspectives to explore the possibilities and meanings that arise when Black and Jewish identities merge. As she asks what it means to be Black, Jewish, and interracial, Gibel Azoulay challenges deeply ingrained assumptions about identity and moves toward a consideration of complementary racial identities. Beginning with…
I’m a lecturer at the University of Liverpool who researches 19th century American literature. A year studying in central Pennsylvania sparked my interest in early US writing and led me to a PhD in the subject. I’m fascinated in how American literature of this period both upholds and challenges the founding myths of the nation - liberty, egalitarianism, progress – and how new genres, such as science fiction and the gothic, develop over the century.
Another example of early African American fiction, The Garies and their Friends is the second novel published by a Black American. Following the lives of an interracial couple moving from Savannah to Philadelphia, their middle-class Black friends, and the racism they face, The Garies is one of the first texts to examine free Black life in depth. Writing an anti-racist novel, Webb criticizes the legal structures and extra-legal white supremacist violence that prohibit Black safety and success in the ‘free’ North.
In this novel set in antebellum America, the Garies -- a white southerner, his mulatto slave-turned-wife, and their two children-have moved to Philadelphia from Georgia. Originally published in London in 1857, and never before available in paperback, The Gages and Their Friends was the second novel published by an African American and the first to chronicle the experience of free blacks in the pre-Civil War northeast. The novel anticipates themes that were to become important in later African American fiction, including miscegenation and "passing", and tells the story of the Garies and their friends, the Ellises, a "highly respectable and…
