Books like Self-Portrait with Nothing — picked by fans

As a writer obsessed with folklore and magical realist fiction, I adore this book!

Based loosely on the Russian fairy tale of the same name, The Snow Child is set in 1920s Alaska and balances the ethereal arrival of a magical child with the harsh reality faced by homesteaders in an unforgiving landscape. My favorite elements in this book are also primary themes I aspire to in my own writing: characters who face hardship with grit, perseverance, and a deep connection to their wild home. 

The author was born and raised in Alaska, and you can tell by the detail and specificity in her writing. In this novel, the natural world truly is the main character, to breathtaking effect.

On a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on a beach.

Tucked inside is the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl. Ruth, the auto-fictional protagonist of this novel, is a writer who finds the lunchbox and suspects it’s debris from Japan’s 2011 tsunami. Thus ensues a dual storyline in which each of these characters seeks out the other and, in the process, reckons with family, fate, and ancestral heritage.

I chose this National Book Award finalist from 2014 for its subtle use of the two main characters liminal realities to wrestle with the possibility of how two people living at a vast distance apart and even in different times might be connected to each other.

As a writer I was blown away by this passage which comes late in the novel. “[Ruth] thought back to the mystery of the missing words. Had she somehow… show more.

I can’t stop thinking about this book. The setting is Florida in the near future, where climate change has reached a point where the ocean is reclaiming the state. The book spans the entire life of the protagonist, Wanda. Wanda broke my heart. She suffered so much loss, none of which was her own fault. But, smart and curious, she found a way, led primarily by an older woman who took her under her wing. 

I felt for Wanda as she lost her family and friends, dealt with bullies, and lost her home. And I cheered her on when she found ways to survive. Wanda is the light: the message of the book, which could easily have been horribly depressing, was that love will find a way—life will find a way if you give it room to breathe.

At first glance, Valley of Shadows is a straight-genre horror novel, with a gruesome whodunnit at its center.

We’re given a noble but flawed Mexican American hero, Solitario, searching for a band of ritualistic murderers, who, by the novel’s midpoint, have already slaughtered a dozen men, women, and children.

This leaves Solitario, like the reader, desperate to keep them from killing again, but clueless about who they are and how they select their victims. This mystery remains unsolved until a shocking perpetrator and motive emerge on the novel’s final pages.

An essential thread in Ruiz’s riveting story is its otherworldly cast of characters, including a parade of personable ghosts, two living bruja (Mexican witches), and both the mythology and practical applications of Aztec and Apache mystical traditions.

Readers will recognize these flourishes as directly traceable to the fantastical, politically charged magic realism style developed by masters of this genre, namely… show more.

When I first heard Gretchen Sisson speak about her long-term study involving birth mothers, I felt gratified. Through her impeccable research, she quantified the feelings and experiences Ann Fessler had written about her book, The Girls That Went Away.

Because of my reunion and relationship with my own birth mother, I understand the importance of giving these women a voice and validating it through a scientific study. The conversation with those touched by adoption is important work. For it offers to those outside the adoption constellation a serious and accurate glimpse inside.

Spare and poetic, this beautiful debut novel explores teenage pregnancy, adoption, and secrets. Addie Lockwood knows Roland Rhodes during high school. They live in a small Southern town and develop a friendship over an appreciation of blues music. But later, in their thirties, when they reconnect in California, Addie falls in love with Roland. When she later realizes she’s pregnant, she makes a critical and heartbreaking decision: she doesn’t tell Roland about the baby, whom she names Byrd, and she gives the child up for adoption. But Addie never stops thinking about Byrd, wondering, hoping one day he will fly back her way. This novel is gorgeously written and what an ending.

Aside from the fun coincidence that I share my surname with the lake in this book, I fell in love on page one because one of the narrators is actually the lake! Chapters alternate between Renn Lake and 12-year-old Annalise, whose family owns lakeside cabins. Annalise has always felt a special connection to this water. When a toxic algae bloom threatens Renn Lake, she and her friends fight to save it. I grew up on a lake in Washington State that became clogged with Eurasian Milfoil, a highly invasive plant affecting water quality, fish, and other things. Remembering what it felt like to see my local lake transform, and how powerless I felt to help it, I rooted for Annalise and her friends and felt hope for this new generation of activists.

Adoptee Jackie Kay’s poetry collection presents the voices of three speakers who are distinguished typographically: the daughter, the adoptive mother, and the birth mother.

Read in conjunction with Kay’s memoir on adoption, Read Dust Road, this poetry collection offers a fascinating insight into the adoption triangle through multiple versions of the same events. 

First of all, Heather’s writing is so clear and so emotional, it’s hard not to get sucked into this world immediately. Second, the characters are so well-rounded.

You can feel their ache radiating off the page. The micro poetry Hannah leaves all over the city breaks my heart every time I read them, but what absolutely sends me is how the girls learned to process grief and all the other Big Emotions by making soup. This book easily has crossover appeal for both teens and adults.

As soon as I began reading Emma’s Gift, I was hooked.

Though the author’s relationship to Emma – mother-to-child – is different from my relationship to my twin sister, having a family member with a disability made the connection. The challenges of the situation and the difficult decisions that Kuperschmit had to make resonated with my own.

The honesty and bearing of emotions were necessary for both of us to tell our story. I could hardly put the book down, awed by Kuperschmit’s beautiful and eloquent descriptions of what she was going through.

We shared an understanding that there is a real person underneath the disability and I was thankful throughout for Kuperschmit’s skill in showing her readers that, even with an “atypical” child, there is the ability to love and be loved.