Here are 98 books that Standing at the Scratch Line fans have personally recommended if you like
Standing at the Scratch Line.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
In elementary school, I was told I had an overactive imagination, an insatiable curiosity, and an adventurous spirit. Fortunate to live across the street from the school, the school’s tiny, nondescript library became a sacred place, a sanctuary, a peaceful and magical space where I could escape into worlds far beyond the limits of a small southern town in the 1950s. I incorporate all of these characteristics, plus my love of travel, into my books. My goal is to write thrilling multicultural fiction novels that depict the blended relationships and experiences of African Americans and people within the communities that make up the global African diaspora.
When I lounge on the beach at an exclusive Caribbean resort, I typically lift my Pina Colada in a toast to my ancestors before taking my first sip. Vanessa Riley’s book increased my respect for the exploited and enslaved black women who lived in the Caribbean during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
My heart broke with the emotional and psychological trauma and physical dangers that Doll endured to save herself and her children. The intrigue and suspense kept me riveted, constantly wondering how Doll would overcome her challenges. Riley tells a beautiful story of the least likely underdog, Dorothy "Doll" Kirwan Thomas, who survived despite the injustices and became one of the Caribbean's wealthiest and most influential entrepreneurs.
"Riveting and transformative, evocative and immersive...by turns vibrant and bold and wise, discovering Dorothy's story is a singular pleasure."--The New York Times
A remarkable, sweeping historical novel based on the incredible true life story of Dorothy Kirwan Thomas, a free Black woman who rose from slavery to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners in the colonial West Indies.
Born into slavery on the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, Doll bought her freedom-and that of her sister and her mother-from her Irish planter father and built a legacy of wealth and power as an entrepreneur, merchant, hotelier, and…
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I am a very inquisitive person with a background in psychology and sociology. Human behavior and ancient civilizations fascinate me, as do the heart, mind, and soul. Why do we love? Why do we hurt? Why do we do the things we do? Having researched numerous vampire legends across history and cultures, I was surprised to find this folklore virtually everywhere! And now, I bring this love of research, psychology, and soul-level motivation to my plots, characters, and world building–hair color, eyes, and background are fine, but what makes this being tick!? Where’s the light, the dark, and the shadow? I hope you enjoy my book list!
This book encompasses the good, the bad, and the ugly—it is both powerfully real and beautifully raw!
We think with our minds, we feel with our hearts, but we exist within our souls. And this book pried every one of those open for me. It was so gritty and hard-hitting, so raw and uncut, so reminiscent of what it is like to look deep inside oneself, face both strengths and weaknesses, conquer fears and inner demons, acknowledge everything without pretense, then continue fighting to reach one’s potential.
Yes, this novel taps into all of this and more in an extremely well-written, brilliant tale about a kick-ass vampire huntress!
There is one woman who is all that stands between us and the eternal night. Here is an account of her legend....
All Damali Richards ever wanted to do was create music and bring it to the people. Now she is a Spoken Word artist and the top act for Warriors of Light Records. But come nightfall, she hunts vampires and demons—predators that people tend to dismiss as myth or fantasy. But Damali and her Guardian team cannot afford such delusions, especially now, when a group of rogue vampires have been killing the artists of Warriors of Light and their…
I am an award-winning, national best-selling author who loves reading as much as I love writing. Combine that with a good, smooth bourbon and it’s a win-win. Like my literary journey, my love for bourbon has been filled with surprises and challenges. Romance writing found me. I didn’t go looking for it. The journey introduced me to great writers and amazing stories and taught me to write better. Distilleries could extol the health benefits of bourbon, but I discovered it can be subtle, soul-searing, and pairs beautifully with a good meal and an even better book. Like my writing, bourbon leaves you feeling like you’ve had a great meal and threw in dessert!
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.
Cara Lee Henson knows no soldier can be trusted to stay in one place—and that includes handsome Sergeant Chase Jefferson of the Tenth Cavalry. Dallying with the dashing man in blue could cost the pretty, independent Kansas schoolteacher her job and her reputation. So Cara is determined to repel Chase’s advances—even though her aloof facade barely masks her smoldering desire.
A Blazing Passion . . .
Never before has Chase longed for a woman the way he ached for lovely Cara Lee. The strong-willed ebony beauty, however, will not surrender easily. But with tender…
The Guardian of the Palace is the first novel in a modern fantasy series set in a New York City where magic is real—but hidden, suppressed, and dangerous when exposed.
When an ancient magic begins to leak into the world, a small group of unlikely allies is forced to act…
I am an award-winning, national best-selling author who loves reading as much as I love writing. Combine that with a good, smooth bourbon and it’s a win-win. Like my literary journey, my love for bourbon has been filled with surprises and challenges. Romance writing found me. I didn’t go looking for it. The journey introduced me to great writers and amazing stories and taught me to write better. Distilleries could extol the health benefits of bourbon, but I discovered it can be subtle, soul-searing, and pairs beautifully with a good meal and an even better book. Like my writing, bourbon leaves you feeling like you’ve had a great meal and threw in dessert!
I love Walter Moseley and have read everything he’s written.
I discovered his books when former President Bill Clinton mentioned him during a State of the Union address and curiosity took me down to my local library to see what all the fuss was about. It was love at first line with his book Devil in a Red Dress.
Those that followed were equally impressive but there was something about The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey that took the storytelling to a whole other level. Part drama, part science fiction, it was a mesmerizing tale and again, showed the importance of storytelling that pulls a reader in and refuses to let them go.
I’d recommend this book if you’re looking for great writing, an air of mystery, and dynamic drama. It has that and so much more!
Soon to be an Apple Plus series starring Samuel L. Jackson, a masterful, moving novel about age, memory, and family from one of the true literary icons of our time.
Marooned in an apartment that overflows with mementos from the past, 91-year-old Ptolemy Grey is all but forgotten by his family and the world. But when an unexpected opportunity arrives, everything changes for Ptolemy in ways as shocking and unanticipated as they are poignant and profound.
I never thought I’d become a historian of the US military. Like most Americans raised in the era of the All-Volunteer Force, I grew up with no close personal connections to the US military. Yet its symbols, metaphors, and power flooded my life, from movies to games to politics. Every encounter with a memoir, an operational history, a biography, or a government study offered a new understanding of how the US military came to play such a vital role in US society, and how US society in turn shaped practices and people in the military. These five histories did more than any others to shape my understanding of the military’s relationship to American society in the twentieth century.
Torchbearers is a pathbreaking history of the fight for American democracy during World War I, told from the perspective of African American servicemen who joined, fought, and returned from battle. Already engaged in conflict over civil rights in the US, African Americans took seriously the call to “make the world safe for democracy.” Through writing, activism, and organizing, they linked their domestic fight to the foreign fight against democracy’s enemies. Perhaps no other group in the US, Williams shows, was poised to engage the very biggest questions that animated the war – questions of citizenship, rights, freedom, and empire – as were African Americans. And their wartime service, he shows, was the crucible for the long freedom movement that followed.
On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson thrust the United States into World War I by declaring, ""The world must be made safe for democracy."" For the 380,000 African American soldiers who fought and labored in the global conflict, these words carried life or death meaning. Relating stories bridging the war and postwar years, spanning the streets of Chicago and the streets of Harlem, from the battlefields of the American South to the battlefields of the Western Front, Chad L. Williams reveals the central role of African American soldiers in World War I and how they, along with race activists and…
I have written widely on themes related to race, slavery, 19th-century politics, the Civil War, and its aftermath. The Reconstruction era has sometimes been called America’s “Second Founding.” It is imperative for us to understand what its architects hoped to accomplish and to show that their enlightened vision encompassed the better nation that we are still striving to shape today. The great faultline of race still roils our country. Our forerunners of the Reconstruction era struggled to bridge that chasm a century and a half ago. What they fought for still matters.
This is a brilliant, harrowing book that should be must-reading for anyone who might still be swayed by the worn-out moonlight-and-magnolias mythology of the “Old South.”
Drawing heavily on a wealth of remarkable first-person testimony, Williams chronicles the systematic brutalization of usually helpless Black women by white men. In particular, she makes all too clear that rape and other forms of sexual abuse were not just incidental but central to the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan in its campaign to assert power over freed people.
Although women couldn’t vote, the abuse of wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers was a way to intimidate the Black men who could. Williams also shows how that abuse continued long after Reconstruction to become part of the repressive fabric of the Jim Crow era that followed.
I found some of the accounts in Williams’s book difficult to read, but I don’t think the full…
Shares wrenching accounts of the everyday violence experienced by emancipated African Americans
Well after slavery was abolished, its legacy of violence left deep wounds on African Americans' bodies, minds, and lives. For many victims and witnesses of the assaults, rapes, murders, nightrides, lynchings, and other bloody acts that followed, the suffering this violence engendered was at once too painful to put into words yet too horrible to suppress.
In this evocative and deeply moving history Kidada Williams examines African Americans' testimonies about racial violence. By using both oral and print culture to testify about violence, victims and witnesses hoped they…
Aury and Scott travel to the Finger Lakes in New York’s wine country to get to the bottom of the mysterious happenings at the Songscape Winery. Disturbed furniture and curious noises are one thing, but when a customer winds up dead, it’s time to dig into the details and see…
When I wrote The Shopkeeper, I wanted to write a different type of western. I love buddy stories. I also love fish-out-of-water stories. The Steve Dancy Tales combines both. More accurately, the first couple of novels maintain the fish-of-of-water storyline, but eventually, our shopkeeper gets the hang of the Wild West. Steve and his two friends, however, remain united throughout all seven books. They fight common foes, move through the western states, marry, have children, grow older, but remain fast friends. In fact, I consider Steve Dancy, Joseph McAllen, and Jeff Sharp friends of mine. I have sure spent a lot of time with them.
The Sacketts series is a classic western saga and this first book tells the story of two brothers bound by more than blood. A good buddy yarn works best when the protagonists are very different. The reader must also want all of these different characters to succeed. Orrin and Tyrel are an unusual and unbreakable team.
I grew up in the 1950s and loved getting the bejeezus scared out of me by monster movies my brother and I watched at a local theater or on TV. With a budding interest in writing, I began noting down monsters and scenes that caught my attention. In fact, it was from the TV series The Outer Limits, an episode entitled Zanti Misfits, that I later got the idea for the creatures in my book. I am currently reading books on the strange pelagic creatures that live at extreme ocean depths for a monster story with a nautical theme. I hope you find the books on my list as enjoyable and informative as I did.
This was recommended to me by a friend who knew I was writing a sci-fi story that takes place in South Louisiana, where my story is set. Gautreaux’s story is enjoyable, but it is the vivid descriptions of the logging camp and its surroundings that held my attention: the thick, almost suffocating damp air, the smells of decay, and the dark mocha of mud puddles that never seem to dry up.
Though my own story isn’t set specifically in a swamp, this gave me the punch I needed to describe the Louisiana town where my story is set.
Byron Aldridge, heir to a timber empire, returns from the First World War a changed man and finds refuge as a company policeman in a backwoods Louisiana sawmill. Soon his younger brother Randolph tracks him down, assuming charge of the mill in the hope of rescuing his former idol. But as the brothers try to understand each other and their wives contend with their own hopes and fears, it is Randolph who starts a feud with the Sicilians who control the whisky and girls, and the future grows fearsome for them all.
I was not intentionally set out to write books for children, but I was inspired to do so after struggling to face the challenges brought on by my illness—multiple brain tumors and surgeries. Creating messages through stories for children facing such hardship as a life-threatening illness, at times even brought me the reason I needed to keep fighting for my health and for my life.
I was very pleased to read that book. It comforts us to know that the people we lost are living through us, through our actions I share the author's view that the world we live in is not our home. Like the author, I think we're just passing through this world, which means we will all see each other again when the time comes.
Till We Meet Again is a story about death & grieving for children. This book provides comfort to families when they experience the loss of a loved one. The book is meant to help a grieving child remember and share their special memories with those around them, to help them grow to see how they can honor and cherish their loved ones through their own actions. Much love and hope has been poured into this book to help young children deal with loss and provide hope that someday we will all meet again.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
As children, my brother and I were constant playmates. He was an early riser and often woke me up so our day of play could begin as soon as possible. I have sight, and my brother is blind. Play for us was an all-senses experience. We felt the rumble of our bikes on the street, listened to the screech of the metal swing set, and guessed spices by their smell. We also devoured stories. We listened to audiobooks, he read to me in Braille, and I read to him. All of these experiences, and more, prepared me to be an author of numerous children’s books with sensory details to make stories come alive.
Pat the Bunny is designed for the youngest children learning to read, yet I remember this book on our shelf throughout my whole childhood.
Each page is interactive as children are invited to pat the soft bunny, smell the flowers, touch Dad’s scratchy face, and more. Besides learning to read, children learn to notice sensory details in the world around them.
The timeless children's classic full of interactive fun—a perfect gift for new babies and first birthdays.
For generations, Pat the Bunny has been creating special first-time moments between parents and their children. One of the best-selling children’s books of all time, this classic touch-and-feel book offers babies a playful and engaging experience, all the while creating cherished memories that will last a lifetime.
