Here are 100 books that The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly fans have personally recommended if you like
The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly.
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I’m a YA writer who likes to tackle difficult subject matter. My books cover things like euthanasia, drug abuse, coming out, and accessing sex as someone with a disability. If my books are found by even just one person who needs to see themselves in a story, then I feel like my job is done.
This book deals with two different experiences of being a cancer survivor which is not something I've seen in a book before.I liked the way the book explored the idea of visible and invisible disabilities and how people view them differently. It's not a subject I've seen covered often in YA books and it's something so many people deal with every day. Jase was a jerk through a lot of the book, but I felt like this behavior was realistic given his past and his desire not to be seen through the cancer lens. His growth through the book was the most significant and it was gratifying to see the way his friendship with Mari changed his perspective on the world and his place in it.
Jase Ellison doesnt remember having acute lymphocytic leukemia when he was three years old. His cancer diagnosis only enters his mind twice a year. Once at his yearly checkup at the oncology clinic and one when he attends Camp Chemo in the summer. No one in his real life knows about his past, especially his friends at Atlanta West Prep. Mari Manos has never been able to hide her cancer survivorship. She wakes every morning, grabs her pink forearm clip crutches, and starts her day. Mari loves Camp Chemowhere shes developed a healthy crush on fellow camper Jase. At Camp,…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’m a YA writer who likes to tackle difficult subject matter. My books cover things like euthanasia, drug abuse, coming out, and accessing sex as someone with a disability. If my books are found by even just one person who needs to see themselves in a story, then I feel like my job is done.
All the characters in this book felt totally real and the situations they find themselves in and live through are honest. And I’m not just talking about the main characters here – all the supporting characters have their own personalities and don’t resort to stereotypes as shorthand. The romance developed organically and felt like something healthy that both Josh and Skylar needed in order to really accept who they are.
If Skylar Evans were a typical Creek View girl, her future would involve a double-wide trailer, a baby, and the graveyard shift at Taco Bell. But after graduation, the only thing separating straightedge Skylar from art school is three months of summer… until Skylar's mother loses her job, and Skylar realizes her dreams may be slipping out of reach. Josh had a different escape route: the Marines. But after losing his leg in Afghanistan, he returned home, a shell of the cocksure boy he used to be. What brings Skylar and Josh together is working at the Paradise―a quirky motel…
I’m a YA writer who likes to tackle difficult subject matter. My books cover things like euthanasia, drug abuse, coming out, and accessing sex as someone with a disability. If my books are found by even just one person who needs to see themselves in a story, then I feel like my job is done.
I really enjoyed this book. Both main characters had real problems to deal with and the ways they coped and reacted felt authentic, even when they frustrated me. Jonas and Brennan are sweet kids and I was rooting for them to work out ways to overcome their issues and realize they were better together than they were on their own.I also liked that their parents were part of the picture and were just as clumsy in the way they dealt with their kids' problems as their kids. It was clear they really loved them and wanted the best for them, but they were no better prepared to deal with these issues.
To get back up sometimes you have to fall down, hard . . .
What's the point of pretending nothing has changed when everything has? It's the last summer before college, and Jonas Avery knows he should be excited. Instead, he hides out at home, avoiding his friends, his family, and everything that resembles his old life. Because nothing will be normal again―because of The Accident, when everything started falling apart.
Brennan Davis knows she needs to stand up and face her anxiety―the deep, dark, debilitating dread that rules her everyday life. Because what stops her from going out into…
AcClaim is a dark, high-society romance about Beatrix Winslow-Hale, a successful romance author who believes desire can be negotiated and controlled—until enigmatic billionaire Dorian Wolker crosses the line between consensual surrender and violation. Publicly humiliated and emotionally shattered, Beatrix turns to Manon de Rochemaure, her fiercely loyal best friend and…
I’m a YA writer who likes to tackle difficult subject matter. My books cover things like euthanasia, drug abuse, coming out, and accessing sex as someone with a disability. If my books are found by even just one person who needs to see themselves in a story, then I feel like my job is done.
Perry has created two great characters in Aidan and Kate. Both are damaged in their own ways – Kate has diabetes and Aidan lost an arm in Afghanistan - and certain their problems are the only things that define them. Watching them grow and change and accept that they are so much more than their problems makes this a satisfying read.
Kate's dream boyfriend has just broken up with her and she's still reeling from her diagnosis of type 1 diabetes.
Aidan planned on being a lifer in the army and went to Afghanistan straight out of high school. Now he's a disabled young veteran struggling to embrace his new life.
When Kate and Aidan find each other neither one wants to get attached. But could they be right for each other after all?
As a history buff I am also fascinated by folklore and magic, and how it has influenced society during various time periods. I love discovering writers who seamlessly manage to present a parallel magical universe grounded in actual history or who manage to incorporate fantastical or magical elements into a historical novel. Over the last few years I’ve been increasingly drawn to exploring the philosophical, magical, and spiritual underpinnings of society as part of my historical research. Although my own published works to date have been straight historical fiction, my current work in progress is definitely veering into the speculative, alternative history realm.
Set in Victorian England, this novel is a sinister, gothic tale based on the ability of a young woman to read the souls of man-made objects and the disappearance of a young man drawn to the occult. I loved how this book was grounded in the real Victorian London and yet managed to incorporate gorgeously gothic supernatural elements as well as a love triangle involving well-drawn and believable characters. For me, the writing was what really drew me in and I have to admire anyone who can weave historical and fantastical elements as beautifully as this author.
In this hauntingly original debut novel about a young woman whose peculiar abilities help her infiltrate a mysterious secret society, Adam McOmber uses fantastical twists and dark turns to create a fast-paced, unforgettable story.
Young Jane Silverlake lives with her father in a crumbling family estate on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Jane has a secret—an unexplainable gift that allows her to see the souls of man-made objects—and this talent isolates her from the outside world. Her greatest joy is wandering the wild heath with her neighbors, Madeline and Nathan. But as the friends come of age, their idyll is…
Fantasy of all kinds is my jam, but I particularly like stories that weave monsters or myths into real life. When an author manages to reinvent a familiar monster trope, like Vivian Shaw with Van Helsing, and spin it into a new, stylized story, that’s the best display of cleverness. I’ve read an embarrassing amount of these kinds of books from Terry Pratchett to Frank Herbert. I think the notion of monsters/creatures/gods is our way of examining the different layers of the human psyche and a well-written monster trope story delivers that self-examination with a spoon full of fantastical sugar.
Greta Helsing’s family dropped the ‘Van’ half a century ago. And they don’t hunt vampires so much as heal them. That’s right, Greta is a supernatural doctor. Vivian Shaw has created a world where the good guys are genuinely good, unselfish people. I love me an antihero, but it’s a refreshing change of pace when the good guys really just want to help other people without ulterior motives. Despite the fact that most of the characters aren’t human, it restores my faith in humanity. I also appreciate the historical references and subtle geekery in these books. For example, Greta is a specialist in mummy reconstruction, and the detail Shaw goes into, just tickles me.
The first book in a delightfully witty fantasy series in which Dr. Greta Helsing, doctor to the undead, must defend London from both supernatural ailments and a bloodthirsty cult
Greta Helsing inherited her family's highly specialized and highly peculiar medical practice. In her consulting rooms, Dr. Helsing treats the undead for a host of ills: vocal strain in banshees, arthritis in barrow-wights, and entropy in mummies. Although she barely makes ends meet, this is just the quiet, supernatural-adjacent life Greta's been groomed for since childhood.
Until a sect of murderous monks emerges, killing human and undead Londoners alike. As terror…
"A profound and often affecting story of resilience." —Kirkus Reviews
The Silent Women, an extraordinary novel inspired by the real women of Oak Ridge, Tennessee—the Manhattan Project’s “Secret City," where thousands kept the deadliest secret of World War II—is a sweeping, absorbing, and deeply human story about chosen…
At one time, it was commonplace for male mystery writers to devote a substantial amount of plot to romance; for example, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White or Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon. In recent years, this tradition has eroded to the point where romantic mysteries are primarily written by women. I think romance spices up mysteries. In Death is Potential, Kate Swift is more invested in solving the murder mystery because she is protecting her lover.
I like this series because it is well written and the author – J.K. Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith – always features clever plot twists.
The Cormoran Strike series features an on again, off again romance between private investigator Cormoran Strike and his partner, Robin Ellacott. In the latest installment, The Running Grave, Cormoran and Robin are hired by a wealthy man whose son has joined a cult.
Robin joins the cult and moves into its rural Norfolk headquarters. The chapters devoted to her cult experience are well-written and creepy. Too bad there’s not more sex.
'The work of a master storyteller' Daily Telegraph
'One of crime's most engaging duos' Guardian ________
Private Detective Cormoran Strike is contacted by a worried father whose son, Will, has gone to join a religious cult in the depths of the Norfolk countryside.
The Universal Humanitarian Church is, on the surface, a peaceable organisation that campaigns for a better world. Yet Strike discovers that beneath the surface there are deeply sinister undertones, and unexplained deaths.
In order to try to rescue Will, Strike's business partner Robin Ellacott decides to infiltrate the cult and she travels to Norfolk to live incognito…
I’m a writer from Aotearoa New Zealand and I’ve always been drawn to stories of struggle, especially where a character fights against outside control. I started writing for the high school students I was teaching and got hooked on the YA genre. I love it partly because it crosses all genres – I can write about a 14-year-old girl trying to live in a repressive religious cult but I can also write about a 15-year-old boy who’s a champion kart driver. Karting at top level takes enormous skill as I discovered, but it also has room for dirty tricks.
I was privileged to be asked to mentor Lilia as she wrote of her life in and escape from the Gloriavale religious cult, a community of about 500 people living a secluded and strictly controlled life in a remote part of the South Island of New Zealand. Her life was like my fictional book,but on steroids. Four years after leaving the pain of knowing she’d never again see those she loved was still so acute that she wept as she wrote of it. Life inside Gloriavale fascinated and horrified me. But while Lilia gained the freedom to forge her own life she lost the closeness and love of wider family and friends. A heart-wrenching but ultimately triumphant story.
In this personal account, Lilia Tarawa exposes the shocking secrets of the cult, with its rigid rules and oppressive control of women. She describes her fear when her family questioned Gloriavale's beliefs and practices.
When her parents fled with their children, Lilia was forced to make a desperate choice: to stay or to leave. No matter what she chose, she would lose people she loved.
In the outside world, Lilia struggled. Would she be damned to hell for leaving? How would she learn to navigate this strange place called 'the world'? And would she ever find out the truth about…
I don’t think I’m alone in considering cults and those who join cults fascinating, but I’ve also always found it frustrating when non-fiction accounts or documentaries focus on the logistics of how the communes operate rather than finding out the why. Why do people join a cult, why do they stay, why do they follow increasingly erratic and dangerous instruction? For me, researching cults for my new novel The Sleepless – about a commune whose disciples believe that sleep is a social construct – was about finding out about the characters, the individuals, who are drawn into organisations which often ask you to relinquish that self-same sense of individuality.
This novel reimagines the events of the Jonestown massacre with lushly beautiful prose and a magical realist twist that offers the possibility of escape and redemption from the most horrific circumstances.
It’s a wonderfully immersive story that sucks you in with sensory detail and a hope-against-hope that the main characters won’t “drink the Kool-Aid”. One of those books where you need to sit still and catch your breath after turning the last page…
Acclaimed novelist, playwright, and poet Fred D’Aguiar has been short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize in poetry for Bill of Rights, his narrative poem about the Jonestown massacre, and won the Whitbread First Novel Award for The Longest Memory. In this beautifully imagined work of literary fiction, he returns to the territory of Jim Jones’s utopian commune, interweaving magical realism and shocking history into a resonant story of love, faith, oppression, and sacrifice in which a mother and daughter attempt to break free with the help of an extraordinary gorilla.
Joyce and her young daughter, Trina, are members of a…
Broken Boots, Redeemed Soul: A Veteran’s War with Sin and Salvation
by
Brian Lofton,
Broken Boots, Redeemed Soul: A Veteran’s War with Sin and Salvation, is a raw and faith-centered memoir about life after military service—and the internal battles many never see. Brian Lofton shares his journey through addiction, shame, identity loss, and spiritual distance, revealing how the hardest struggles often begin after…
I’ve been a fan of horror stories since I was a child. It was never about the shock or the gore, but the sense of dread and unease such stories could build, and how they challenged society’s norms in a variety of ways. The driving force in a lot of horror is often the threat—or even the result—of some sort of loss, and that’s what I tend to explore in my own work. Whether it’s the loss of life, of love or loved ones, the loss of sanity, of reality, horror allows us to discover and/or face our fears while providing a means by which to manage them.
I came to this one after watching and loving the television version and found the book even more fulfilling (although very different). It focuses on what happens when millions of people suddenly disappear from the world’s population and it looks not only at how people deal with this massive loss but also how they deal with the mystery of it, the not knowing why. People don’t only lose loved ones in this book but also their own sense of how the world should work, leaving them with a lot to deal with. I loved the characters, the tight focus on one community (and mostly one family within that community), and I loved how Perrotta made such a wild possibility seem entirely plausible.
With heart, intelligence and a rare ability to illuminate the struggles inherent in ordinary lives, Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers—now adapted into an HBO series—is a startling, thought-provoking novel about love, connection and loss.
What if—whoosh, right now, with no explanation—a number of us simply vanished? Would some of us collapse? Would others of us go on, one foot in front of the other, as we did before the world turned upside down?
That's what the bewildered citizens of Mapleton, who lost many of their neighbors, friends and lovers in the event known as the Sudden Departure, have to figure out.…
