100 Books Like The Last Wish of Sasha Cade

Jaye Robin Brown writes complex characters with a deft hand and everyone in this book felt deeply real to me. I didn’t just read about Jess and Vivi’s relationship. I joined Jess on her tumultuous emotional journey. As a mental health counselor, I often encourage people to seek out coping mechanisms to manage adversity, but it’s important to realize that sometimes the thing that made a person whole is inaccessible after trauma or loss, and that healing means forging new paths. This story captures that idea beautifully. Heart-wrenching, but ultimately a story of hope and renewal.

This rare story had me laughing out loud, sobbing, and sighing at the beauty of it from beginning to end. It’s not about a ghost in the paranormal sense, but the story revolves around a family haunted by the death of a son.

Pup (James) Flannigan, the youngest of eight siblings, is used to being the silent observer at his raucous family gatherings. When his oldest brother dies suddenly, grief and denial rattle the family to its core.

I fell in love with Pup immediately! He’s a funny, sensitive guy who’s powerless against his family’s tide of sadness until an art teacher encourages him to pick up a camera. Pup’s slow transformation from helplessly observing to using the camera lens to bring the damaged, grieving people he loves into clear focus is a beautiful thing to watch.

This book is so ambitious! The author tackles emotional abuse, trauma, grief, survivor’s guilt, self-harm, complicated family relationships, and more without anything feeling glossed over. Main character Daya is prickly and hostile and can be difficult to root for at times, but her portrayal feels spot-on given all she has endured in her life. I’ve always been fascinated by roller derby and it’s brilliant the way the author built her plot around the sport so it is truly integral to Daya’s character’s growth and healing.

Most books about grief deal specifically with the death of a loved one, but grief isn’t just about death—it’s about major loss. For some of us that might mean the loss of a friendship or relationship or job. In this book, the main character is facing the loss of a lifelong dream.

Despite what TV shows and self-help books tell us, success is not a simple matter of dedication and hard work. Sometimes we don’t achieve our dreams, and stories like this remind us that "failure" is okay, that we have options, that we can choose to pursue the thing we love in a different way, or choose to love something else, or maybe we'll have to take a break to heal and reflect before we choose anything at all. The universe might steal away a dream, but we remain in charge of our happiness.

Hata, a Korean, adopted by a Japanese couple, serves the Japanese Army as a medic in World War II. His job is to care for enslaved Koreans who serve as “comfort women” to Japanese soldiers. His experiences are the material of nightmares. Years later he leads a deceptively quiet life in a small town in New Jersey with his Korean adoptive daughter. It is deceptively quiet because his unresolved war experiences, presented in flashbacks, haunt him. I admired the abrupt manner in which Chang-Rae Lee interrupted Hata’s uneventful life with horrific memories.

The author’s method felt like the triggering of those who have suffered trauma and continue to relive events as PTSD. This approach of interweaving past with present inspired my depiction of a young German woman living a quiet life on a primitive Icelandic farm, milking the cows and raking the hay, while being repeatedly interrupted by memories of… show more.

This is a peculiar and marvelous book about birth families, adopted families, and “found” families, and how each of these can be equally screwed up.

Starting in Ireland in the 1940s, the story is peppered with sharp, clever dialog and vivid, fully-human characters. I love how the narrator struggles with his own heart for decades, unable to decide what he wants, who he loves, what’s right, what’s wrong, etc.—in other words, all the stuff I haven’t figured out yet myself. 

Coincidence also plays a huge role in this book, basically making an ass of everyone, which I find oddly comforting since it reminds me that part of being human is having very little control over my own life. Painfully funny and brilliant from cover to cover. 

Imagine this. You were adopted as a child. You’re now an adult with a medical condition. So, you take a DNA test to find blood relatives who could shed some light and family history on your disease. But you get the shock of your life when an FBI agent shows up and tells you they received your test results too and you are related to a serial killer! Ivy’s life spins out of control as she travels to meet her relatives and find a killer. Ivy is told that her mother was murdered by The Full Moon Killer and now she is getting too close…could she be the next victim? A chilling novel with lots of twists that left me thinking if I were in Ivy’s shoes, just this once, I’d rather DNA kept secrets.

When reading, I often mark passages and sentences I find especially evocative, powerful, insightful, or well-written. This novel is riddled with such marks. Freud does an exceptional job of creating a strong sense of time and place with elegant descriptions.

She explores the bonds between mothers and daughters, formed and broken, through three generations of women who all have a penchant for loving deeply flawed men. It’s a largely melancholy story and it stirred in me a wide range of painful emotions—heartache, disappointment, anger, frustration. Yet, the story contains moments of true beauty, as well, and ultimately concludes with a sense of brightness and redemption. 

I love this book because, beyond the fabulous, richly layered story, it takes what should be unlikeable characters and makes you root for them. April Epner is flawed—brittle, sarcastic and closed off at times—but I love her.

As a reader, I can understand why she is the way she is, and that’s the key to making her sympathetic and likable. The payoff is so satisfying when April makes a deep emotional connection and opens up. Bernice Graverman, April’s newfound biological mom, is tacky, loud and over the top, and yet, I was rooting for her. She has a tough shell, but there’s a touching hidden vulnerability.

One more thing I loved about this book…I lived in Quincy, MA (outside of Boston), where this story is set, for five years—it perfectly captures what life was like there in the nineties.

This recommendation returns to one of my most passionate interests—that of adopted children and the families they are placed in. Beatty is a poet and this is reflected in her memoir—it is not the usual chronological narrative as most memoirs are. She breaks the myth of the “special” or “chosen baby” to tell her truth of the lives of adopted children. Beatty exposes, through vignettes and her poetry, her meetings with her birth mother, her adopted family, her attempts to know who she is and where she came from. She breaks open the belief that you can “create” a perfect family using children from other birth mothers, when all her life, she feels, is a lie and she has no grounding in the world. This memoir is her quest to find out who she is.