89 Books Like The Innocents

This book is everything I love—an atmospheric setting, a fiercely independent heroine, and a slow-burning partnership filled with tension and intrigue. Charlotte Sloane’s sharp wit and refusal to conform had me hooked from the start.

I devoured this book in a single weekend, completely absorbed in the richly drawn world of Regency London and the dark secrets lurking beneath its surface. I love mysteries that blend history, strong characters, and intricate plotting, and this one delivered all of that and more.

Our next stop is Essex for a classic English village mystery. I knew from the moment I read the opening scene—the grisly discovery of a young man entombed in the crypt of the usually murder-free parish church—that I was going to love the story. And I did.   

I was delighted to see how the tranquility of the pastoral scenes—the thatched-roof cottages, the earthy smell of horses in the stable, the square, Norman-style church tower overlooking the village green—carried through the story and beautifully counterpointed the skullduggery at the heart of the mystery.

The quaint village atmosphere heightens the tension in this well-constructed first installment of what promises to be an exciting new mystery series.  

I tell anyone who will listen that I am not a fan of anything paranormal, but this series has me hooked. I think Summoning the Winds is the first book I ever read about witches (Hamlet doesn't count), and I loved it. In a nutshell, the series takes the notion of witch trials and turns it on its head with tales of real witches in colonial Connecticut of the 1660s (where, in my time machine, I would view the events in this story from a safe distance).  

Yarrow Pickering, the main character and an eighteen-year-old orphan, is spunky and smart. She’s also a witch. She uses her abilities for good and, like her mother, is skilled at creating herbal remedies for illnesses and injuries suffered by the people in the village of Milthorpe. When she attempts to help a young girl who has become ill, the girl’s father becomes… show more.

I picked up this book because I loved the cover (who says we don’t choose books by their covers?) and shortly thereafter found myself completely immersed in a 17th-century English Restoration mystery. I would visit that era in my time machine provided it’s fully stocked with soap and hand sanitizer (this time period being the one during which the Great Plague took place). 

Main character Lucy Campion is a chambermaid in the home of a London magistrate. Her days are filled with the drudgery of servant duties—that is, until a murder claims the life of a servant in the household and someone Lucy holds dear is accused of the crime. Knowing that person can’t possibly be the killer, Lucy sets out to find out whodunit. I don’t want to give away any spoilers, so I’ll stop there. 

I learned more about 1660s England reading this book than I ever did… show more.

I love books that mix fact and fiction, mystery and adventure, and include real-life settings and history. Kate Messner’s great Ranger in Time series, starting with Rescue on the Oregon Trail does all of this incredibly well. These books do a terrific job of making history both personal and present to today’s readers. Interested readers can delve deeper by locating landmarks mentioned in the book on a map, in person, or via the internet. Add on top of the fact that the main character is a time-traveling golden retriever, and young readers can’t lose anything but time otherwise spent in front of screens. Her later Ranger in Time book on 9/11 is especially terrific, making a very difficult subject very approachable to interested readers.   

Back to romance! This is a time travel story about a woman who is keeping something vital from her family.

She’s the middle child and suffers from that insecurity of not quite having found her place. She is seriously depressed. But the moon, an eclipse, timing, the house she’s in… all play a part in this excellent tale that brings the medieval times front and center.

The author really delivers a knock-out punch to the gut and hope really is lost until this hero comes to his senses. But when he does… well, suffice it to say, you won’t be disappointed. 

It may be obvious by now that I’m drawn to stories about complex characters, stories that aren’t afraid to be both humorous and gut wrenching.

Fourteen-year-old Nephele is another protagonist whose voice is immediately endearing, refreshing, and compelling. She’s an outsider, a brilliant math and science nerd who struggles to adjust socially to high school.

She invents a time travel app in order to relive her freshman year and do it right—but instead she becomes stuck in a time loop for ten years, encountering characters and surprises that help her to overcome her loneliness and find herself.

I love it that this book celebrates a smart, quirky character as she learns to look more deeply into her life and navigate her world. 

I am fairly convinced that Grace Burrowes is a time traveler, for I have never seen a modern author get period-specific language so right. Unlike all the other books on my list, the Lady Violet series does not include any murders.

Instead, Lady Violet’s penchant for solving “puzzles” made for a nice break from the more macabre. I got lost in the twisty details and adored the Agatha Christie-style reveal at the end of the book.

Bradbury remains my favorite author of all time, and this collection of short stories contains some of his best work, including my favorite time travel tale, “A Sound of Thunder.”

Imagine an avid hunter given the opportunity to stalk the king of prehistoric beasts, the monstrous T-Rex. Then imagine that things don’t go exactly as planned. The world will never be the same.

This book is a literary novel set in part on the Moon. That’s not a sentence you’ll read often, which is a big part of why I love this novel—it’s not what I expected, even though there’s a big hint in the title.

Like many readers, my introduction to Emily St. John Mandel was her post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. In that story, the most interesting characters aren’t concerned with simple survival…if they are going to fight to live, they want a culture worth fighting for. When I picked this book up, I deliberately chose not to read the story summary and was completely caught off guard by how the novel unfolded. Typically, stories questioning time and our perception of reality do so by sending the protagonist on a dangerous quest looking for answers.

Like all my favorite novels, the scope is intimate and vast in this one. The story… show more.