Here are 100 books that The Trouble with Heroes fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have authored four verse novels myself and crafting imagery is my favorite part of writing in the form; most recently, one that revolves around earth imagery, Lilac and the Switchback. I also teach many verse novel classes and have studied the form a great deal, particularly on how to create a successful image system for your novel in verse. When reading verse novels, I am always keeping an eye out as to how the imagery and symbolism help to reveal character growth and change.
This book has so many stand-alone beautiful poems while maintaining the voice of a realistic middle school character.
The loss of a beloved landscape to wildfire is such a real-world issue, and Chris Baron manages to tackle this in a way that isn’t frightening but somehow hopeful by the end.
I also absolutely love the bearded dragon named Watermelon!
As a community recovers from a devastating wildfire, two friends find their way back to each other and their homes, by award-winning author Chris Baron.
Perfect for fans of Alan Gratz and Lauren Tarshis.
Finn and his friend, nicknamed Rabbit, live in a rural area that's been hit hard by wildfires. Families were displaced and school was interrupted. Moreover, their beloved forest is suffering -- animals and plants haven't been able to come back, and the two friends wonder if there's anything they can do to help. Rabbit's uncle, a science teacher, is part of a study that may help…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
I have authored four verse novels myself and crafting imagery is my favorite part of writing in the form; most recently, one that revolves around earth imagery, Lilac and the Switchback. I also teach many verse novel classes and have studied the form a great deal, particularly on how to create a successful image system for your novel in verse. When reading verse novels, I am always keeping an eye out as to how the imagery and symbolism help to reveal character growth and change.
Amber McBride is a master of the verse novel form. It was fun to read a middle-grade verse novel by her!
In this one, the main character, Onyx, dreams of flying during the time of the moon landing. He is also struggling with a loved one’s dementia, and Onyx dreams of actually building wings as a form of escape and fantasy.
McBride cleverly frames the book with the phases of the moon.
Praised as "a story of perserverance and love" in a starred review by Kirkus, here is a story about keeping dreams alive.
Onyx lives with his mother, who is showing signs of early-onset dementia. He doesn't want to bring attention to his home -- if Child Protective Services finds out, they'll put him into foster care.
As he's trying to keep his life together, the Civil Rights Movement is accelerating. Is there anywhere that's safe for a young Black boy? Maybe, if only Onyx can fulfill his dream of becoming an astronaut and exploring space, where none of these challenges…
I have authored four verse novels myself and crafting imagery is my favorite part of writing in the form; most recently, one that revolves around earth imagery, Lilac and the Switchback. I also teach many verse novel classes and have studied the form a great deal, particularly on how to create a successful image system for your novel in verse. When reading verse novels, I am always keeping an eye out as to how the imagery and symbolism help to reveal character growth and change.
This book takes place in NYC, where the main character longs to be a pilot.
In a beautiful, keystone poem about the blues in the sky (hence the name of the book), Sage sees all of what is beautiful and sorrowful in the world. During the course of the story, she processes the grief surrounding losing her best friend in a way that feels believable.
# 1 New York Times bestselling and Newbery Honor author Renée Watson explores friendship, loss, and life with grief in this poignant novel in verse and vignettes.
Sage's thirteenth birthday was supposed to be about movies and treats, staying up late with her best friend and watching the sunrise together. Instead, it was the day her best friend died. Without the person she had to hold her secrets and dream with, Sage is lost. In a counseling group with other girls who have lost someone close to them, she learns that not all losses are the same, and healing isn't…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
I have authored four verse novels myself and crafting imagery is my favorite part of writing in the form; most recently, one that revolves around earth imagery, Lilac and the Switchback. I also teach many verse novel classes and have studied the form a great deal, particularly on how to create a successful image system for your novel in verse. When reading verse novels, I am always keeping an eye out as to how the imagery and symbolism help to reveal character growth and change.
I love how this LGBTQ+ verse novel combines magical realism, hurricanes, and family conflict to create a compelling read!
Murray’s deep connection to the ocean is something that shifts and changes through the course of the story as the storm forces her to literally move and for family dynamics to shift.
The water imagery helps reflect Murray’s character growth during the story.
* A Stonewall Award Honor Book * ALA Notable Book * Bank Street Best Book of the Year *
Perfect for fans of Rebecca Stead, Natalie Lloyd, and Jasmine Warga, this beautiful novel in verse explores one girl's struggle to regain her magic after a hurricane forces her to move away from her beloved ocean that, she believes, has given her special powers.
Bighearted and observant twelve-year-old Murray O'Shea loves the ocean. Every chance she gets, she's in it. It could be because the ocean never makes her apologize for being exactly who she is—something her family refuses to do—but…
I’m agnostic to book genre. If I see it, I will try it. I read all over the place. I just finished a book on online dating and race, the buzzy fiction of the moment, and a self-help book. There are two genre’s that are my absolute favorites, though, women’s fiction, and police procedurals. I’ve read Elizabeth George, Julia Spencer Fleming, Michael Connelly, and Tana French since they started publishing. While I enjoy the whodunit nature of the books, my favorite parts are those quiet moments of pure, unfettered relations between people who care for each other in an otherwise chaotic world. It’s what I write and what I read.
This book is the third installment in the The Rev. Clare Fergusson & Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries.
This series features a small town, upstate New York police chief (Van Alstyne) and an Episcopal priest (Fergusson). When the series starts Van Alstyne is happily married, and Fergusson is new to her church.
By this book, it’s clear that the cop and the priest are attracted to each other. There’s this single scene when they’re driving in his pickup as they gather clues to solve the murder. They look at each other and it’s one hundred percent clear that not only do they have an attraction that can’t be denied.
Also they’re going to have to break their vows, his to marriage, and hers to the priesthood.
On April, 1 1930, Jonathon Ketchem's wife, Jane, walked from her house to the police department to ask for help in finding her husband. The men, worn out from a night of chasing bootleggers, did what they could. But no one ever saw Jonathon Ketchem again.. Now decades later, someone else is missing in Millers Kill. This time it's the clinic's physician that bears the Ketchem name. Suspicion falls on a volatile single mother with a grudge against the doctor, but Reverend Clare Fergusson isn't convinced. As Clare and Russ investigate, they discover that the doctor's disappearance is linked to…
I’ve always loved books about outsiders and stories that make you palpably feel what others do. In real life and fiction, the characters that interest me most are often outsiders. Because characters on the outside of social groups and norms are often isolated and lonely, there is something so powerful about works that can bring you inside their experience and relate what their inner life is like. Interiority is the great strength of literature, and stories that convey the inner architecture of outsiders have always attracted me. I love books that make me feel deeply connected and that linger in my subconscious long after I’ve read them.
I love this book because it puts me inside the heartbreaking experience of a singular character named Francis Phelan—a homeless man from Albany, New York—as he wrestles with his past and journeys home after a long, self-imposed absence. By the time Ironweed begins, Francis has been homeless for many years and is haunted by his past.
I love how the main character is a mystery, yet the author uses interiority to place the reader inside his experience. Ghosts of the past become palpable to Francis, and he struggles to make his way back home while struggling to survive the hardscrabble existence of the homeless. This book unravels the mystery of its main character and employs striking, beautiful, and direct prose. This book haunted me.
Winner of The Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the third in Kennedy's Albany cycle, Francis Phelan, ex-ballplayer, part-time gravedigger, and full-time bum with the gift of gab, has hit bottom. Years earlier he'd left Albany after he dropped his infant son accidentally, and the boy died. Now, in 1938, Francis is back in town, roaming the old familiar streets with his hobo pal, Helen, trying to make peace with the ghosts of the past and present.
I began writing speculative fiction because I was fascinated by its potential as a laboratory to imagine the world that could be. It’s a narrative form that allows us to play with revolutionary changes in society without any real people getting hurt. And it compels the author to do the hard work of imagining how others experience life in the real world as well as the imaginary one. The best SF novels balance their speculations with a grounding in the observed world, entertaining us with propulsive wonder while filling our minds with new ideas and fresh perspectives that linger long after we put the book down.
One of the best and most underappreciated works of contemporary speculative fiction by one of its finest living stylists, this book dares to riff on The Diary of Anne Frank and manages to pull it off with a first-person narration by a 12-year-old girl in New York City recounting her everyday life as the nation is coming apart in civil conflict and unrest.
The rapidly maturing innocence of the point of view dials up the intensity of the story—making it feel more real—while at the same time giving it a uniquely accessible charisma powered by emotional connection more than the cyberpunk eyeball kicks that charged Womack’s other amazing novels.
With his vivid, stylized prose, cyberpunk intensity, and seemingly limitless imagination, Jack Womack has been compared to both William Gibson and Kurt Vonnegut. Random Acts of Senseless Violence, Womack's fifth novel, is a thrilling, hysterical, and eerily disturbing piece of work.
Lola Hart is an ordinary twelve-year-old girl. She comes from a comfortable family, attends an exclusive private school, loves her friends Lori and Katherine, teases her sister Boob. But in the increasingly troubled city where she lives (a near-future Manhattan) she is a dying breed. Riots, fire, TB outbreaks, roaming gangs, and civil unrest threaten her way of life,…
I left my hometown of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, at age 18 to attend university in Manhattan, where I started my career in journalism and the media. Since then, I’ve lived in Berlin, Germany; Hong Kong; and now Copenhagen, Denmark, generally moving to advance my career and explore new worlds. Whenever you move to a new place and establish yourself in a new culture, there’s always a learning curve. Helping other women (and men!) adapt to their new environment is why I started the “How to Live in Denmark” podcast, which has now been running for more than 10 years.
This rare novel by the TV writer Gail Parent is a broad, almost slapstick comedy about a proudly Jewish girl in the 1970s who moves from Long Island in Manhattan in her bid to find Mr. Right.
“As a graduation present, I was offered either a nose job or a fur coat. I took the fur coat with a high collar.” Mr. Right proves elusive as Sheila makes her way through the swinging singles scene of the time, and she ends up finding a different kind of success as a teacher.
I’ve probably read this book a dozen times and still find it very funny – although, trigger warning, it’s written in the form of an extended suicide note. (She changes her mind.)
A series of amusing events occurs when a thirty-year-old Jewish woman tries to fulfill her parents' wishes and find a husband, in a new edition of the best-selling novel from the 1970s. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
"My friends are my estate." This quote from Emily Dickinson (which I like so much, I’ve put in my novel!) gives a proper dignity to the concept of friendship. Friends can be overlooked in fiction, often just there to show that the main character isn’t a complete loner. Friendships are portrayed as less interesting and important than romances. Yet in real life, romantic relationships come and go, whilst friends are there for you, no matter what. Or at least, the best ones are. I’m a passionate believer in stories which reflect the importance, and complexity, of what, for many of us, are our longest-lasting relationships.
Scruffy, grumpy Billie is my favourite female character in all of literature, and she stars in this, one of my top five all-time books.
It’s novella-length, a series of overlapping short stories, with characters who are absolutely real, living, breathing people. The story is primarily about a love affair, but there is a fabulous friendship in it between Billie and her childhood friend, Penny.
When Billie goes back home for Penny’s wedding, they briefly ditch the reception by rowing out onto the lake as they did when children, Penny in her long white dress. It’s a scene that never fails to make me want to phone my oldest friend and tell her how much I value her.
'Warm, wise, witty, and just plain fun' Maggie Shipstead
At a perfectly ordinary cocktail party, Francis is introduced to Billy and - although it slips right by him at the time - he falls in love with her at once.
Billy is a serious, often glum person. An economic historian, she is indifferent to a great many things (clothes, food, home decor), frowns easily and is frequently irritated.
Francis is older. He likes routine and a well-run household; he likes to pay for dinner, open car doors and call Billy at night to make sure she is safe.
I’d written modern true crime before—a book that helped solve a 40-year-old cold case—and wanted to try my hand at historical true crime. I live in Manhattan, home to the greatest crime stories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so I was able to see the actual locations where the grisliest murders, the biggest bank heists, and the crookedest con games took place. What really drew me in, though, were the many colorful, unforgettable characters, both good and bad, cops and robbers, who walked the bustling streets of Old New York during the fascinating era known as the Gilded Age.
If you read one biography/memoir of a Gilded Age criminal, make it this one. It tells the story (often in his own words) of the celebrated pickpocket George Appo, an odd little half-Chinese, half-Irish, one-eyed fellow who could make $800 in a few days when most working men made less than that in a year. Appo would rivet New Yorkers when he testified about his second career as a “green goods” con man, working to swindle gullible out-of-towners who came to buy purported counterfeit money at a discount, only to discover that there was nothing but sawdust inside the packages they carried away. Appo refused to name names, though, as he was a self-described “good fellow.”
In George Appo's world, child pickpockets swarmed the crowded streets, addicts drifted in furtive opium dens, and expert swindlers worked the lucrative green-goods game. On a good night Appo made as much as a skilled laborer made in a year. Bad nights left him with more than a dozen scars and over a decade in prisons from the Tombs and Sing Sing to the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he reunited with another inmate, his father. The child of Irish and Chinese immigrants, Appo grew up in the notorious Five Points and Chinatown neighborhoods. He rose as…
