Books like The Taming of the Drew — picked by fans

This graphic novel skews younger than the others on this list. It’s a heart-warming, slice-of-middle-school-life that revolves around the school’s musical theater production, from auditions and rehearsals, set-building and costumes, to opening night, the 3-show run, and even the cast party. It invokes the highs and lows of a production, including the inevitable malfunctioning props and inter-cast issues. I love this story’s emphasis on how fun it is to work on sets, costumes, lights, and sound, and how important stage crew is to the production.

Theatre Quotient: High. The bulk of the plot revolves around the show.

If you’ve never done theater, this book will have you running for the nearest audition. The non-fiction book contains heartwarming reflections from the cast, crew, and creative team for Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, including director Joel Grey. Readers get an inside look at show life, from cast bonding to pre-opening stress to performance mishaps. The vignettes convey what each cast and crew member contributes to making the magic happen. While heavy on the feel-good memories, it rings true and mesmerizes.

Theatre Quotient: High. It’s all theater, all the time!

I like the grittiness and real-life issues addressed in this story. The pressures and joys of being students at an elite performing arts high school are described through the eyes of five friends: two actors, one writer/director, and two dancers. Aspirations, disintegrating friendships, budding romances, vengeance, and addiction interweave as the students forge ahead to the career-making (or breaking) Senior Showcase. Tragedy enfolds the friends in a dark ending as the dangers of the outside world pierce their high school bubble. 

Theatre Quotient: Medium. Plot is split between dance and theater, and the show gets minimal pages.

A high school production of Romeo and Juliet isn’t the focus of this plot, but the book still makes my shortlist. The concept of a trans guy acknowledging his gender identity after having been cast as a girl playing the boy Romeo is profound. Dean questions his gender as rehearsals progress. By showtime, he decides to use the production’s program to publicly announce he is trans. Friend and parental issues arise, so there’s plenty of drama on and off the stage in this one.

Theater Quotient: Medium. Gender identity is the focus, but rehearsals and performances figure prominently.

I’ve often wondered about the lives of the migrant farmworkers who come to Vermont, most often from Mexico, Guatemala, and Jamaica, but whom I only ever see in the grocery store checkout line or waiting at the service desk for cash transfers.

While it’s easy to idealize the rolling hills dotted with Holsteins, perfect for postcards and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cartons, dairy is big business in Vermont, and, like everywhere in the US, many of our farmworkers are immigrants without legal protection. Language and cultural barriers, and their very real fears of deportation, keep these workers’ lives hidden. This book, which brings together nineteen stories of personal witness, told by immigrant workers and illustrated, graphic-novel-style, by local comics artists, goes a long way to change that. While there are some common themes—the dangers of crossing the desert, longing for home, working endless shifts in all weather—the stories are… show more.

This book was short-listed for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. It features ex-soldier Mercy Carr and retired military K-9 Elvis, who were both traumatized when Mercy’s fiancé—also Elvis’s handler—was killed on their last deployment.

Paula Munier is another author with a deep connection to the natural world. She is studying for a naturalist certificate in her home state of Vermont, and the books are full of great details.

This Picoult novel, written close to the time I began to shape my book, asks whether we can love across time. While the theme is much more grounded in practical and natural circumstances, the fact that the question is teased out in this novel helps shape the same question my character, Adelyn, finds herself embroiled in. Is Innis capable of breaking the barrier using the strength of a first love?

I dream of one day walking the entire Long Trail, biking the back roads, and paddling a canoe across Lake Champlain, but in the meantime, Leath Tonino has done all that and more. He brings a friendly curiosity, scrounged-up equipment, and a high tolerance, or even yearning, for discomfort and solitude as he explores “the wilderness of home.”

And because he’s also always reading books—the title comes from Aristotle, and his literary heroes are many—his perspective is a little more philosophical than you might expect from a collection of reports about often-challenging outdoor adventures. Mainly written for the magazines that helped fund his modest expeditions, these short pieces explore defunct logging camps, slippery waterfalls, ice-kayaking societies, cormorant colonies, and the little-seen railroad tracks of Vermont.

In the title selection, the native Vermonter traverses the state in seven different ways: biking, walking, swimming, skiing, hitchhiking, flying, and paddling. For Tonino, it’s… show more.

The masculine voice in this novel is absolutely masterful. It’s tender, nuanced, earnest, and intelligent. Stegner offers a sweeping, unflinching story about friendships, marriage, the human ego, and the passage of time with a set of characters who are flawed, fragile, and therefore, very believable.

I’ve read this book more than once, and discover something new and lovely each time. This book honors a reader’s intelligence and heart. Again, the complexity in the characters and how they relate to one another gets me every time.  

This lovely story is one of loss, tragedy, hope, family, and new beginnings that come in the most unexpected ways.

Seventy-five-year-old Sarah has a good life. She’s been married to Charles, a man she adores, for fifty years. She assumes they will live out the rest of their lives together in the tranquil setting of their Vermont country home. But when Charles unexpectedly passes away, Sarah’s beautiful life is shattered.

With her children grown and raising families of their own, she finds herself alone in her big house, no one to nurture, no place to put her love. Until a collection of displaced characters begin to find shelter in her home. Working through her grief, Sarah discovers interests she never took the time to explore, and in pouring into others, soon finds her own cup overflowing. 

This story provides perspective on what things are important, and what are not. So… show more.