Here are 100 books that The Kitchen House fans have personally recommended if you like
The Kitchen House.
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I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and raised in Virginia, so I am very familiar with America’s southern lands and culture. The South—also known as the Deep South—is a unique part of America’s tapestry of identities, and I love books set in this locale. Southern literature tends to focus on themes such as racial politics, one’s personal identity, and rebellion. When I wrote my book, I knew the story would have to take place in the southern states.
Here’s another book-to-movie entrant on the list. This book follows the exploits of a Confederate soldier who makes his way home to the mountains of North Carolina. It’s like the Odyssey—he has a series of memorable encounters and run-ins along his journey, and things are not as they seem when he eventually returns home. I love the novel's tension and the artfully crafted characters.
In 1997, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain made publishing history when it sailed to the top of The New York Times best-seller list for sixty-one weeks, won numerous literary awards, including the National Book Award, and went on to sell over three million copies. Now, the beloved American epic returns, reissued by Grove Press to coincide with the publication of Frazier’s eagerly-anticipated second novel, Thirteen Moons. Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, a Confederate soldier named Inman decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge mountains to Ada, the woman he loves.…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am passionate about little-told stories of women’s lives. Too often, women have been either minimized or silenced, and in so doing, we have ignored the experience of half of humanity. I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in the South, where girls and women were not listened to. For this reason, among others, it was hard for me to speak up for myself, hard for me to write. I found the stories of strong, courageous women—bad-ass women—whether fictional or real, to be life-affirming and inspirational in my own journey as a writer. These stories have helped me to say, “It’s my turn. I’m talking now.”
I love this book’s two freedom fighters: the historical Sarah Grimké and the fictional enslaved woman Handful.
It’s the early 1800s in Charleston, SC. Privileged white girl Sarah bucks cultural expectations for women, while Handful fights the cruel slavery system. Sarah repudiates her upbringing in order to support abolition, and Handful stakes everything in pursuit of freedom, “to leave or die trying.”
I loved learning about the Grimké sisters, giants in the abolition movement, and the West African story-quilt tradition, whereby women tell their lives through the art of needlework. This book was transformative for me; Sarah’s and Handful’s transgressive courage has helped me through difficult times of my own. If they could face their obstacles, then by golly, I can face mine.
From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees and the forthcoming novel The Book of Longings, a novel about two unforgettable American women.
Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world.
Hetty "Handful" Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke's daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something…
Diane C. McPhail is the award-winning author of The Abolitionist’s Daughter, her debut novel based on family history and little-known impediments to Southern Abolitionism and anti-slavery. Her yet-to-be-titled second novel, a historical 1900 Chicago & New Orleans psychological mystery, is due for release in the spring of 2022. As an experienced therapist, Diane has a passionate interest in the complex, sometimes conflicting, qualities of character and culture, and how those intricacies complicate the plot. Diane holds an M.F.A., M.A., and Doctor of Ministry.
This riveting American Gothic novel, set in 1865, follows a widowed Civil War Army nurse home to New Hampshire after her bloody stint of tending the wounded and sick, only to find that her beloved, but unstable, sister is dead in a fall from the roof of the asylum. The cause is ruled a suicide, but she is not convinced and determines to find the truth at all costs. The period is synchronic with that of The Abolitionist’s Daughter and the depth of research fascinated me. Blakemore’s writing and extensive attention to sensual detail is exceptional. Since I have my own yet-to-be-titled historical mystery due for release in the Spring of 2022, I loved delving into this twisting page-turner with a woman of determination in an equivalent period of history.
Until she discovers the truth of her sister's death, no one will rest in peace.
New Hampshire, 1865. Marion Abbott is summoned to Brawders House asylum to collect the body of her sister, Alice. She'd been found dead after falling four stories from a steep-pitched roof. Officially: an accident. Confidentially: suicide. But Marion believes a third option: murder.
Returning to her family home to stay with her brother and his second wife, the recently widowed Marion is expected to quiet her feelings of guilt and grief-to let go of the dead and embrace the living. But that's not easy in…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am passionate about little-told stories of women’s lives. Too often, women have been either minimized or silenced, and in so doing, we have ignored the experience of half of humanity. I grew up in the 1950s and ’60s in the South, where girls and women were not listened to. For this reason, among others, it was hard for me to speak up for myself, hard for me to write. I found the stories of strong, courageous women—bad-ass women—whether fictional or real, to be life-affirming and inspirational in my own journey as a writer. These stories have helped me to say, “It’s my turn. I’m talking now.”
I love this book because of the strange and wonderful 10-year-old female protagonist, a white girl who is “rescued” from Kiowa captivity on the Texas frontier in 1870, a time of Indian raids and pervasive anarchy.
This girl was assimilated into her Indian family and considers her “rescue” a kidnapping; she remembers almost nothing of her family of origin. She is icy-veined, fearless, and creatively violent. The scene where she improvises ammunition from hundreds of dimes (yes, coins) blew my mind.
From this book, I learned about how whites (especially children) who were captured by Indians quickly abandoned their former lives and usually did not want to return if given the opportunity. The language is spare, tough, and beautiful. I did not want this book to end.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this exquisitely rendered, morally complex, multilayered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. In the wake of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings from newspapers to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his…
Lori Benton is an award-winning, multi-published author of historical novels set during 18th century North America. Her literary passion is bringing little-known historical events to life through the eyes of those who lived it, either set along the Appalachian frontier, where European and Native American cultures collided, or amidst the conflict-laden setting of the southern plantation. Her novel, Mountain Laurel, begins an epic family saga that immerses readers in 1790s North Carolina plantation life and the moral dilemmas created by the evils of slavery.
Though it was wealthy white planters who built plantations, the enslaved people who worked them imbued these landscapes with their own meanings. With over 200 photographs and drawings of Antebellum plantations, Vlach leads readers on a tour of plantation outbuildings, providing examples of how slaves used these spaces despite—and in defiance of—their masters’ intentions. Testimonies of former slaves (drawn from the Federal Writers’ Project collection) give the reader a sense of what it was like to live and work in these settings.
Behind the ""Big Houses"" of the antebellum South existed a different world, socially and architecturally, where slaves lived and worked. John Michael Vlach explores the structures and spaces that formed the slaves' environment. Through photographs and the words of former slaves, he portrays the plantation landscape from the slaves' own point of view. The plantation landscape was chiefly the creation of slaveholders, but Vlach argues convincingly that slaves imbued this landscape with their own meanings. Their subtle acts of appropriation constituted one of the more effective strategies of slave resistance and one that provided a locus for the formation of…
I have loved these five books for many years. I used them often in college history classes and students always loved them, too. We learn much about women’s lives and hearts (and, of course, about men’s) from each book. They bring into vivid detail women’s hard work---domestic labor and paid work---but the books also vividly illuminate the joys, pleasures, and griefs in women’s lives--sickness and healing, children, sexuality, love, and loss. We see deeply into the lives of slaves, into the lives of the working poor, as well as of the middling classes during decades of enormous change. These books cover true events and real people, based on letters and diaries and traceable events.
Slaves brought deep knowledge of healing cures and medicines from Africa and that knowledge remained and circulated, helping “to heal the body and preserve the soul” as they endured slavery. Slaves held a “relational view” of sickness and health, focusing on the broader slave community and its health rather than the wellness or illness of the individual. This book in no way romanticizes slave healing as aiding an idealized communal harmony. Fett never lets us forget that slaves always faced conflict and struggle, especially since slaveholders intervened constantly in matters of health. Here, though, we gain a deep and powerful—and painful—understanding of certain kinds of relations on plantations, particularly male and female slaves’ work of curing and healing, and the uses of “conjuring,” “working roots,” divination, and “the clandestine practices of antebellum hoodoo.” Interpreting medical beliefs and practices, Fett illuminates broader social struggles over power.
Exploring the charged topic of black health under slavery, Sharla Fett reveals how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery, and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South. Fett shows how enslaved men and women drew on African and Caribbean precedents to develop a view of health and healing that was distinctly at odds with slaveholders' property concerns. While white slaveowners narrowly defined slave health in terms of ""soundness"" for labor, slaves embraced a relational view of health that was intimately tied to religion and community. African American healing practices thus not only restored the body but also…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
Raised in a Mexican-Italian family, I grew up traveling across the Arizona-Sonora borderlands to visit my extended family. As a kid, I took for granted movement across boundaries and cultural and racial mixture, but eventually, I came to see it framed my experience and outlook. In researching the Chinese in northern Mexico, I learned that Mexican women and Chinese-Mexican children followed their expelled men, whether by force or choice, and I became enthralled. I had to find out how these families fared after crossing not just borders but oceans. My passion for reading about how the long presence of Asians in the Americas complicates our understanding of history has only deepened.
This book unfolds in a compelling, nonlinear manner, and crosses genres. A combination of biography and family memoir and journalistic and scholarly research, it traces overlapping stories as the author sets out to discover why her great-grandmother traveled from India to America as a “coolie” at the start of the twentieth century and how this migration shaped future generations. Beautifully written, the book raises thorny issues around gender, race, and nationality, offering insight into the wider journeys of Indian contract laborers to the Caribbean and beyond.
In 1903 a Brahmin woman sailed from India to Guyana as a 'coolie', the name the British gave to the million indentured labourers they recruited for sugar plantations worldwide after slavery ended. The woman, who claimed no husband, was pregnant and travelling alone. A century later, her great-granddaughter embarks on a journey into the past, hoping to solve a mystery: what made her leave her country? And had she also left behind a man? Gaiutra Bahadur, an American journalist, pursues traces of her great-grandmother over three continents. She also excavates the repressed history of some quarter of a million female…
I’m a big-time fantasy reader, and I’ve always loved non-human characters in fiction, whether it was The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast. It never sat right with me that the Beast becomes human when I got to understand his vulnerability in monster form; I hated that Ariel wanted boring human legs. I was a romance novel hater for a long time, too, because I thought they were repetitive (and mostly straight). Finding queer indie romance that embraced these monsters and explored what makes them monstrous caused a huge shift in the way I interpret all relationships in literature, and it definitely influenced my choice to write monster romance.
I couldn’t leave out one of my favorite monsters of all time: dragons. Also, I just love secondary-world fantasy, especially the kind that has important themes like the effects of imperialism and that are set in a shifting palace full of magical rooms.
This book beautifully executes one of my favorite relationship dynamics in fiction: the dragon love interest starts out ice cold and very gradually warms up to the main character as they get closer, and they both overcome their past traumas as their romance grows deeper. That’s the good stuff!
I love reading and writing and I have always loved science fiction and myths and legends. I read my first fantasy when I was around 23, Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane. I know some people hate that series, but to me, the world he created was so real, so full of interesting things. At that time, I had not read Lord of the Rings so I didn’t realise how closely the world building was to Tolkien. I need to bond with my characters and feel their journey, cry at the end if it is sad, and think about them well after I have finished the story.
I’ve been reading Glenda Larke for years and I beta-read for her a lot. This book is special to me because it was great to give feedback on the draft but also to wonder at her genius and writing process. The great cast of characters adhere to the heart, and I was behind each and everyone. The book also was up for a few awards and when Larke won, I was there to accept an award for her.
'one of the very best Australian writers of fantasy fiction' NEXUS An absorbing new series about the most precious commodity of all - water - from the much-loved author of ISLES OF GLORY terelle, on the run from indentured servitude in a snuggery, finds refuge with a strange old man who paints pictures on water. She is horrified to discover that his floating artworks can fix the future for those portrayed in them. the Cloudmaster and his stormlords keep the land alive with their power over water and rain, but the current Cloudmaster is dying and there is no one…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
As a kid, I loved books of all shapes and sizes, especially those written by Irish authors. They made me feel like there was a chance of my own dream coming true – that I would walk into my local bookshop and see a book with my name on the cover. In the last twenty years, we've seen an explosion of new Irish authors making their mark on the world of children’s literature. Don’t get me wrong, I adore leprechauns, and many of the classic Irish books that have been loved by previous generations. But there’s a crop of brand new Irish authors making some incredible work, and it’s time to give them some love!
Simply put: this book is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.
PJ is a world-renowned artist who turned his hand to writing with this period piece, set aboard the famous ship bound for the new world. I had the enormous privilege of visiting PJ’s studio in Dublin several years ago and fell in love with his artwork on the spot.
In a world of flashy, computer-rendered illustrations, PJ’s style is timelessly beautiful.
The simplicity of the story, paired with the epic scope of his artwork makes this book a constant pleasure to revisit over and over again.
“This feast of a book . . . will captivate readers from its opening double-page spread. . . . Sweeping and grand, this personal take on a familiar story is an engaging success.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Leaving the docks of London on the Mayflower as an indentured servant to Pilgrim John Carver, John Howland little knew that he was embarking on the adventure of a lifetime. By his great good fortune, John survived falling overboard on the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean, and he earned his keep ashore by helping to scout a safe harbor and landing site…
