Here are 100 books that The Matchlock Gun fans have personally recommended if you like
The Matchlock Gun.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I have a passion for reading and telling tales. But I am a Christian first and foremost, and when I am not studying the Bible, I love to write when my mind is at rest and not too busy with life’s responsibilities. I love fantasy as it has a rich capacity for symbolism, and Jesus taught with parables. Symbolism in storytelling is such a potent way to convey truths and stimulate thought as thoughts work like seeds. It only takes one seed to germinate and sprout. It takes a humble heart to listen and consider something new we haven’t thought of before. And epic tales have a strong impact for touching hearts, for it had truly reached mine.
Though Tolkien’s Middle-earth was a centerpiece of fantasy for me, Lewis’ Narnia offset and balanced the more serious grave nature of Middle-earth with its more light-hearted adventures told through the eyes of children, where it feels like a fairy tale as everything in its world is simply extraordinary.
The Chronicles of Narnia’s symbolism strikes me as being straightforward in its Christian allegory, which I find quite relatable. The aspect of being as children following the will of “our Heavenly Father” (in their case, walking in Aslan’s guidance) in what is truly a beautiful and imperfect world resonates so well with me, as it is a beautiful picture.
Its fairy tale style fantasy as a magical world just brings out the beauty of fantasy when its storytelling is kept simple. A simple beauty from levity, I love in contrast to the sorrowful beauty of Middle-earth that affects me on a…
A beautiful paperback edition of The Magician's Nephew, book one in the classic fantasy series, The Chronicles of Narnia. This edition is complete with cover and interior art by the original illustrator, Pauline Baynes.
On a daring quest to save a life, two friends are hurled into another world, where an evil sorceress seeks to enslave them. But then the lion Aslan's song weaves itself into the fabric of a new land, a land that will be known as Narnia. And in Narnia, all things are possible.
The Magician's Nephew is the first book in C. S. Lewis's…
An engaging picture book for children that celebrates what it means to be American!
What does it mean to be American? Does it mean you like apple pie or fireworks? Not exactly. This patriotic picture book is perfect for Memorial Day, Independence Day, Election Day, or any day you want…
I was homeschooled, and when I was young (back in the last millennium), we didn’t have a TV, so my parents read to us kids hours every day. This really helped pass the time because we lived in the middle of a cornfield, and there was nothing else to do but . . . watch corn grow! Later in my teens, I started writing myself. This has continued until today. Writing is a good way to explore the world of ideas. All of the books on this list have influenced my writing.
This is a story about a whole sibling group that causes a lot of trouble. But in a way, they are the only ray of light in an otherwise dull town.
I get the idea that the townsfolk enjoy the drama more than they let on. What I really liked about this book is the writing style. It is very engaging and conversational. I was always waiting for the next punchline/payoff. Very funny.
I listened to the audiobook. It is read by Elaine Stritch. She has the best voice. I could listen to her talk all day long.
This year’s pageant is definitely like no other, but maybe that’s exactly what makes it so special.
Laughs abound in this bestselling Christmas classic by Barbara Robinson! The Best Christmas Pageant Ever follows the outrageous shenanigans of the Herdman siblings, or “the worst kids in the history of the world.”
The siblings take over the annual Christmas pageant in a hilarious yet heartwarming tale involving the Three Wise Men, a ham, scared shepherds, and six rowdy kids. You and your family will laugh along with this funny story, perfect for independent reading or read-aloud sharing.
I was homeschooled, and when I was young (back in the last millennium), we didn’t have a TV, so my parents read to us kids hours every day. This really helped pass the time because we lived in the middle of a cornfield, and there was nothing else to do but . . . watch corn grow! Later in my teens, I started writing myself. This has continued until today. Writing is a good way to explore the world of ideas. All of the books on this list have influenced my writing.
I can (and have) read Calvin and Hobbes all day. Perfect on many levels. This is a good book in the series. But they are all good.
The strip is all about exploring with friends. I like how the strip avoids revealing what is real and what is imaginary. The story, art, and dialog work together and show just enough to constantly excite my imagination.
Also, each time a storyline recurs, it always tops the last time it was there. The interaction of the characters is second to none. The art is unexpected in its detail and emotion. Watterson took his work seriously.
Calvin and Hobbes are at it again, and this time, our irrepressible friends are taking a walk on the wild side.
Homicidal Psycho Jungle Cat chronicles another segment of the multifarious adventures of this wild child and his faithful, but skeptical, friend. If the best cartoons compel readers to identify themselves within the funny frames, then all who enjoy Calvin and Hobbes are creative, imaginative, and ... bad, bad, bad!
Calvin, the irascible little boy with the stuffed tiger who comes to life are a pair bound for trouble. Boring school lessons become occasions for death-defying alien air battles, speeding…
Mamiachi & Me is a lyrical and empowering picture book about what it means to be a mariachi in an all‑female band.
Today, Rosa will take the stage next to her mami and play along with her popular mariachi band. But Rosa begins to worry. What if the audience doesn’t…
I was homeschooled, and when I was young (back in the last millennium), we didn’t have a TV, so my parents read to us kids hours every day. This really helped pass the time because we lived in the middle of a cornfield, and there was nothing else to do but . . . watch corn grow! Later in my teens, I started writing myself. This has continued until today. Writing is a good way to explore the world of ideas. All of the books on this list have influenced my writing.
I liked how Ramona is a feisty 9-year-old dealing with real-world kid problems. Everything in Beverly Cleary's novels is real life.
I listened to the audiobook on this one, too. It's read by Stockard Channing. Another golden voice that pops with character.
This book is also home to the best opening line of any book in English literature: "Ramona Quimby was 9 years old. She had brown hair, brown eyes, and no cavities."
Newbery Medal–winning author Beverly Cleary's final book in the Ramona series has all of the warmth, realism, and humor of its predecessors.
Ramona Quimby can't wait to start fourth grade. With a new baby sister to brag about, new calluses to show off, and a new best friend to get to know, everything's going to be great!
Or is it? When Ramona's spelling is atrocious, her teacher, Mrs. Meacham, is firm about her needing to improve. Then a scary incident at a friend's house leaves Ramona feeling at fault. Who knew growing up could be filled with such complicated situations?
I’m not as old as some of the characters in the books I’ve mentioned, but I’m getting there. With age, one learns to hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. The importance of friendship and community can hardly be overstated. I love reading books that represent older characters, especially women, as complex, life-embracing individuals without resorting to condescension. I strove to write such a book with Toby’s Last Resort. I’m not always writing about older characters, but in all my work, I want to dive below the surface, discover meaning in the ordinary, and treat my characters with respect.
Lillian is an 84-years old woman walking around New York City on New Year’s Eve.
She loves the city, made her way there as a young woman in advertising in the 30s, became well-known as a poet of light verse. She alternately reminisces about her life and encounters people you would not expect.
She remembers her life in pieces, the way one does, so the reader puts together the mystery.
I found her to be a delightful and refreshing character. The book is a beautiful lacing of the past with the promise of unexpected things to come.
A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.
“In my reckless and undiscouraged youth,” Lillian Boxfish writes, “I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street…”
She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy’s to become the highest paid…
I grew up a Yankee fan during the Mickey Mantle era, traveling to the Bronx in my uncle’s canary-yellow Chrysler Imperial. Those early experiences set me on a trajectory to want to play baseball every chance I got, starting with Little League and ending up on my high school’s varsity squad. Fortunately, my high school was in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where my family had moved in 1962, the same year that the Yankees began playing their pre-season games in the city, which meant when I wasn’t playing baseball at school, I was hanging around Ft. Lauderdale Stadium watching the Yankees. Yes, the Pinstripe Nation was in my blood.
If you want a close-up look at the players who made up the early Yankee teams, this is the book for you. In Amore’s book you’ll learn about some key Yankees’ players: Wee Willie Keeler, Frank Chance (of Tinkers-to-Evers-to-Chance fame), Hal Chase, Roger Peckinpaugh, Frank “Home Run” Baker, and, of course, George Herman “Babe” Ruth, among many others who populated the early New York Yankee teams.
2018 marks 115 years since the inception of the New York Yankees--and what a 115-year period it's been! But how did the team that has since won a league-leading 27 world championships get started? In A Franchise on the Rise, veteran sportswriter Dom Amore takes readers back in time to the first twenty years of the team's existence, from 1903 to 1923, focusing on all the major players and events, including their first ten years as the Highlanders, their move to Yankee Stadium, and their subsequent first World Series in 1923. In doing so, Amore successfully finds the characters' own…
Serendipity is a magical story told by a grandmother to a granddaughter, introducing us to the traditional way of living of the Scottish Travellers and their Cant language.
A fantasy tale for children of 8 years old and older inspired by three real places in Scotland. Serendipity takes us to…
Born in 1969 as the seventh of eight children to two Harlem-raised parents, I benefited from both the inner-city life of Queens, New York and childhood summers spent on a farm in rural upstate New York. Academic, professional, and physical accomplishments have punctuated my life. An adventurer by nature, I became the first African American to hike to the top of every mountain in the northeast US over 4,000' (115 of them) by September of 2000. At that time, less than 400 people had accomplished this feat; whereas thousands have scaled Mount Everest. My home city’s iconic landmarks create a psychological veil that blinds people to the vast open spaces that dominate New York State.
As books by academics are apt to be, this wonderfully rich account of the history of New York’s Finger Lakes region is replete with references, quotes, and poetic stories. Tall begins with the manner in which the Iroquois Confederacy was divided and driven out during the Revolutionary War, and progresses through the influences of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a heavily guarded military base, and struggles with blight in Geneva, New York. “Place” is explored through the lenses of the natural environment, language, religion, psychology, racism, and more. Indeed, Tall’s approach to understanding the community she adopted can be replicated on lands all over the world.
Why does a particular landscape move us? What is it that attaches us to a particular place? Tall's From Where We Stand is an eloquent exploration of the connections we have with places-and the loss to us if there are no such connections. A typically rootless child of several American suburbs, Tall set out to make a true home for herself in the landscape that circumstance had brought her-the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York.
In a mosaic of personal anecdotes, historical sketches, and lyrical meditations, she interweaves her own story with the story of this place and its…
I moved to New York City right after college, hungry to escape from the homogeneity of a small New England town. I wanted nothing more than to be surrounded by people of all races and nations, languages, and walks of life, and to have easy access to some of the greatest cultural institutions of the world. New York can be hard and unforgiving, but there is no place like it. I love living here.
As much about ideas and the nature of friendship as it is about the city, this slim volume captures, better than any other I know, the visceral feel of living in New York. Fiercely independent, Gornick wanders the city’s streets in the “habit of loneliness,” ever watching, listening, and thinking. A child of working-class Jewish immigrants, she grew up in the Bronx in the 1940s and 1950s, and writes in a funny, smart, rueful, and tell-it-like-it-is voice that is unmistakably New York.
A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments
A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness,…
Growing up in Brooklyn I heard stories about local mafia figures. Now, as the author of several books that deal with crime, I am passionate about good storytelling. I believe that a novel delving into the world of crime and criminals should be fast-paced and believable. Readers have told me that they give up on a book because, in their words: 1. “It isn’t believable” and 2. “It didn’t draw me in.” God forbid that any of the books I’ve written should fall into either of those categories! The books that I recommend are tops in the genre of The Best Mob Books That Tell It Like It Is.
This is a novel about Italian immigrants struggling to survive in New York City’s Little Italy during the early years of the twentieth century amid the growth of the Black Hand, the precursor to the American mafia. The book is unique in that most of the characters are the author’s actual ancestors and people with whom they had come into contact during that era. Similarly, the grisly central events described in the story all occurred.
It is beautifully written and filled with fascinating historical details. The characters and the descriptions of places and events come alive on the page. Fabiano includes an extensive Glossary of Italian Terms used in the book, as well as a multi-generational family tree. Elizabeth Street makes for very good reading!
Based on true events, Elizabeth Street is a multigenerational saga that opens in an Italian village in the 1900's, and crosses the ocean to New York's Lower East Side. At the heart of the novel is Giovanna, whose family is targeted by the notorious Black Hand-the precursor to the Mafia. Elizabeth Street brings to light a period in history when Italian immigrant neighborhoods lived in fear of Black Hand extortion and violence-a reality that defies the romanticized depiction of the Mafia. Here, the author reveals the merciless terror of the Black Hand-and the impact their crimes had on her family.…
Since losing his mom, thirteen-year-old Jack Wilson has spent most of his time seeing just how much trouble he can get away with so that he feels like a winner at something. But he takes his mischief too far and is faced with the possibility of unbearable consequences. He…
My print-journalist father covered the crime beat. He often took me with him to the police station and I got hooked on crime. My background is eclectic, a professional trumpet player with a BA in Mathematics and a Masters in Fine Arts. While teaching at Berklee College of Music in Boston, I discovered my dark side and began writing crime thrillers. Most are inspired by actual events or news reports about stalkers, domestic homicides, or serial killers. In 2001, I moved to New Orleans. My crime thriller series features NOPD Homicide Detective Frank Renzi. I'm fortunate to be able to consult three former NOPD homicide detectives who advise me on police procedures and investigations.
Picture Jack Reacher on an NYC subway car at 2 AM with a suicide bomber. Will she blow up the car and everyone in it? I love how Lee Child keeps us in suspense, not just for a page or two, for twenty-seven pages! Reacher finds out the woman had a dangerous secret, but everyone he talks to lies to him. Each chapter ends with a cliffhanger and more questions.
But many people want Reacher to stop asking questions: a former Delta Force operative running for the US Senate, two Al Qaeda agents, NYC cops, and FBI agents. They want Reacher to get lost and forget the suicide bomber. Fat chance! The complex plot will intrigue you. The climactic ending will terrify you even more than the suicide bomber.
Enhances his status as a mythic avenger. . .You'll be left with a thumping heart and a racing pulse but, be warned, Chapter 63 will give you nightmares." (Evening Standard)
Suicide bombers are easy to spot. They give out all kinds of tell-tale signs.There are twelve things to look for.No one who has worked in law enforcement will ever forget them.
New York City.The subway, two o'clock in the morning. Jack Reacher studies his fellow passengers.Four are OK.The fifth isn't. The train brakes for Grand Central Station.
Will Reacher intervene, and save lives? Or is he wrong?Will his intervention cost…
