Books like The Naming — picked by fans

Three worlds in one book! There’s the not-so-important world of the Ancelstierre, roughly Edwardian or early-20th-Century-ish, and there’s the Old Kingdom, basically medieval, where Charter Magic wars with Free Magic (and how well Nix thinks through the workings of his forms of magic).

But the third world is the one that takes the cake! An underworld of the dead, with its different levels, gates, and sills. Sabriel discovers her own special inheritance and powers—OK, that’s standard fantasy fare, except that Sabriel’s powers are those of an abhorsen. It’s the Abhorsen’s role to make sure that the dead stay dead, and journey on down into the deeper levels of death. Of course, the dead who keep coming back are the ones who drive the narrative!

Echo North combined several familiar-to-me folk tales, and introduced me to the tale of Tam Lin. I loved the blending of known and original—especially the mirror room, where stories layered upon stories and acquaintances took on completely new qualities. The sewing together of a fracturing magical house also fascinated me. I was never sure about the intentions of certain people until the end, and despite guessing wrong, I was delighted by what really was happening.

The plot, intrigue, and world-building in this series opener are pitch-perfect, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it was Katsa and Po's relationship that hooked me.

I loved their individual strengths and the way they strengthen each other. I love that their relationship is unorthodox and the way it's built on equality and respect. And I love that when Bitterblue comes into their lives, it brings a new dimension to all three characters.

This is the first in a series.

Anna writes cozy romantic fantasies that feel like getting a hug from your best friend.

A Cinderella retelling (we love a retelling!) in which our main character, Selah, has to travel the world to find a husband to save her family’s legacy, this book will have you giggling and gasping all the way to the end. And don’t worry – there is a sequel, The Boundless, and it’s just as good.

I consider Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves one of the best books on how Confederate monuments came to dominate nineteenth-century public spaces – most notably in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia - and what they tell us about post-Civil War history.

It is a compelling narrative of how white Southern society purposefully chiseled racism and white superiority into their post-war commemorative landscape, and used these memorials to both re-define the public’s memory of the Civil War and to cement the white-black hierarchy established during slavery. 

Savage’s analysis of the Confederate monuments looks at all the political, historical, cultural, and artistic factors that enabled the creation of Richmond’s racialized landscape. This approach helped me understand the importance of context when examining nineteenth-century public art through a twenty-first-century lens. 

This is one of those novels I read as a writer, and I thought I should just pack it in because I’ll never be able to write anything so gloriously beautiful, heartbreaking, and perfect.

While Robert Jones, Jr. meticulously creates an atmosphere of the harsh realities of slavery–stretching from the shores of Africa to the cotton fields of Mississippi–he brings us up above all that ugliness, all that inhumanity by offering a transcendental love story between two of the slaves, Samuel and Isaiah.

Even though the harshness, so realized that it made my stomach turn while reading the story, is so visceral and painful, it is the love story that not only infuses itself throughout the plantation–from the slave quarters to the main house–that supersedes all and wends its way into your skin, your heart, your soul. This novel is an achievement beyond anything I expected.

“Slave women’s transition to freedom, while deeply desired, prayed for, and actively pursued, was a treacherous and ambiguous process.” With these words, Leslie Schwalm goes on to detail the activist role Black women played in securing emancipation and shaping a different future for themselves and their families, from slavery to freedom. 

Schwalm uses oral narratives to capture their experiences before, during, and after the Civil War, and examines how social, racial, and political realities influenced the lives of Black women. This book is a must read on how African American women continuously challenged the barriers to free labor, family autonomy, and legal rights, in their quest to “define and defend freedom”.

Before I read this book, I had no idea just how much slavery’s economic benefits to the North allowed so many individuals to look the other way. This was the first book that underlined for me why all Americans, Northerners, and Southerners, need to own and understand our history.

The chapter “Plunder for Pianos” on the ivory trade and piano keys forever changed my sense of how the Triangle Trade operated.

Despite the vast literature on the transatlantic slave trade, the role of sailors aboard slave ships has remained unexplored. This book fills that gap by examining every aspect of their working lives, from their reasons for signing on a slaving vessel to their experiences in the Caribbean and the American South after their human cargoes had been sold. It explores how they interacted with men and women of African origin at their ports of call, from the Africans they traded with, to the slaves and ex-slaves they mingled within the port cities of the Americas. Most importantly, it questions their interactions with the captive Africans they were transporting during the dread middle passage, arguing that their work encompassed the commoditisation of these people ready for sale.

If you can read only one book on Lincoln, this is the one I would choose. In my opinion—as well as that of many professional historians—it is the best book ever written to examine why Lincoln waited two years after becoming president to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In this brilliant and elegantly written book, a Pulitzer Prize historian argues, entirely convincingly, that the need to keep together his pro-union coalition required Lincon to proceed very cautiously.

To be sure, Foner writes that while Lincoln’s long-held anti-slavery convictions were not in doubt, he also initially shared the racist attitudes that black people were not ready for full freedom. However, Foner emphasizes that as Lincoln grew in office, his beliefs increasingly moved towards those of Frederick Douglass—whom Lincoln came to greatly admire—and other full-fledged abolitionists.