Books like The Boys — picked by fans

I find this book to be an unsettling but impactful read, both thought-provoking and complex. We Need to Talk about Kevin follows the mother of a troubled teenager responsible for a school shooting.

It’s about nature versus nurture, the relationship between mother and child, and deeply seated guilt. It draws inspiration from real events, including the 1999 shooting at Columbine, which wasn’t the U.S.’s first mass shooting at a school, but it would become one of the most infamous.

Shriver’s novel raises unsettling questions about a mother’s guilt and self-justification and a community’s heartache and blame. I consider it to be a captivating and moving book.

I love love love an unreliable narrator! Especially when that narrator is a beautiful, elegant woman who turns out to have the ugliest soul imaginable. I think as a whole, our society tends to be extra afraid when they see conniving evil existing in a female’s mind, especially when she’s physically beautiful and well spoken.

At certain points in this book, I found myself weirdly rooting for Amy and chomping at the bit to see how far her “crazy” would take her. The twists and turns kept me racing through this book and left me wondering at the end, “What happens to them now?!”

This novel has so many reasons to recommend it. It incorporates radical experimentation and horrifying surgeries being done in a bizarre hospital. To make it even more mysterious, there is a hurricane threatening the island which complicates the investigation of US Marshall Teddy Daniels searching for a patient who has disappeared.

I loved the creepy island hospital and the use of weather as a character.

Usually, this isn’t my kind of thriller.

I struggle with passive heroines, and Claire drove me a little crazy at first—so removed, so unaware, so unwilling to look too closely. But I stuck with it, and I’m so glad I did.

I loved Lydia immediately (that first scene alone told me exactly what kind of energy she was bringing), and I enjoyed how the story shifts into something that belongs to the sisters, not the man at the center of it.

What really worked for me is the turn—when Claire stops drifting and starts choosing, and the two of them finally align. From there, it gets visceral and messy in the best way. I ended up loving it for that transformation: for the moment control is taken, not given.

Over the past 15 years, I’ve walked through layers and layers of trials – including chronic illness in myself and all four of my children, special needs in one of our kids, a degenerative ankle that has led to six ankle surgeries, depression, and several seasons of financial struggle. During times when I haven’t had much capacity to read in large chunks, I have found Beside Still Waters to be a comfort and encouragement. Charles Spurgeon writes with profound insight and eloquence, but in a down-to-earth way.

The thing that first drew me to medieval Sicily was its history of Muslim habitation.

I am deeply interested in questions of how Muslims, Christians, and Jews interacted with each other during a period of history in which religious identity was one of the most prominent public facts about a person and their community.

Alex Metcalfe is one of the leading scholars studying the Arabic texts that give us insight into the cultures of Muslims in Sicily and southern Italy and their legacies after the Norman conquest of an island that had been in Muslim hands for nearly two centuries. He has written several other works, but this is the one most accessible to a general audience, and the one that covers both Sicily and the southern parts of the mainland that were also strongly impacted by Muslim presence and culture.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough! This insightful book had its genesis in a trip the author took with her daughters through Italy where she saw parallels between viticulture and the meaningful, fruitful lives we can live here on earth. 

Bestselling author Beth Moore is perhaps the best-known Bible teacher in the United States, bar none, and a hugely gifted writer. She is also known for her deep spiritual wisdom and joyful spirit despite undergoing some very traumatic experiences in her own life, including childhood sexual abuse. Moore uses Jesus’ teaching in John 15 to introduce readers to biblical principles that help us flourish.

This is an absolutely beautiful book, inside and out! I recommend both the print and audio versions, but it’s a special gift to listen to Beth Moore read her own words.

24 Hours In Italy is the perfect poolside summer read, especially because it transports you to the picturesque Amalfi Coast while enjoying a second chances romance.

I’m recommending this book not only because the author, Romi Moondi, is a fellow Canadian and happens to be my author bestie, but because it’s a genuinely amazing and well-written book. (It got a starred review in Publishers Weekly, so you know I’m not just saying that because I’m biased!).

It’s technically a sequel but it reads as a standalone, and the heartfelt emotions, descriptive setting, and meaningful character arcs make it a perfect summer read.

Theoderic the Ostrogoth, arguably the greatest Gothic king, ruled over Italy for more than thirty years (493-526). Moorhead offers an insightful and detailed examination of how Theoderic succeeded in maintaining peace between Goths and Romans and extended his power and prestige, only for the Ostrogothic kingdom to collapse shortly after his death due to political and religious divisions and the Reconquest by the eastern emperor Justinian. Scholars still debate the extent of Theoderic’s own responsibility for the Ostrogothic decline, and as Moorhead observes the very policies which underlay Theoderic’s success also contributed to his kingdom’s vulnerability. I just wish that Moorhead had expanded his very brief comments on Theoderic’s remarkable legacy, which included appearing in the Nibelungenlied and as a symbol of German unification.

Oxford academic Dr. Roderick Bailey is an expert on the Special Operations Executive who made helpful comments to improve my first WW2 book. I love the little-known stories of Italian and British secret agents that populate this book, which is the official history of SOE’s undercover war against Mussolini's Italy. I enjoy tracing the strategic impact of relatively minor actions. Some efforts succeeded, many failed. There were the attempts to make common cause with the Sicilian Mafia. There was the agent paid and supplied by SOE who was really working for Italian Counter-Intelligence. And there was the SOE agent who parachuted into Lake Como, was immediately captured and expected execution, but survived to provide the secret radio link that enabled Italy to surrender and change sides.