Books like Third Class Relics — picked by fans

I love this book because it made me think about myself as a parent. The premise here is crazy simple—a gunman seems about to kill two girls but takes one, leaving the other. I felt horrible for Meredith, crushed by survivor’s guilt, but my real sympathies fell to her mom, Claire.

At that point in my life, my sons were adolescents, and I was viewing their healthy independence as something I was losing. I was totally taken by the heart-rich, wise exploration of what we do when someone we love goes somewhere we can’t follow.

I love this book because I don’t cry easily. Decades before the whole world knew Barbara Kingsolver as the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Demon Copperhead, I found a beat-up copy of this book at a thrift shop in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.

I bought it for a buck, and I’ve never spent a better dollar. I swooned to the simple story of Taylor, a teen fleeing home, and Turtle, the abandoned child who changes her life. The family they make is one of my favorite in all of literature.

I love this book because it nearly made me miss my flight. I bought it after hearing the author at a conference in Baton Rouge and started it at the airport. My mistake. I was sucked in by the story, told in sumptuous, gorgeous prose, about a boy looking for the father he never knew.

But I found its true radiance in the unexpected discoveries he makes about the man who sired him and, of course, himself. (I finished it on a connecting flight late that night out of Houston. Totally worth it).

I love this book because I think of it every time I go up on a ladder. That’s where Doug Merritt, the father of the family on the precipice here, goes when he needs to clear his mind.

I laughed out loud reading it, and more than once I found myself thinking about my own parenting, how the size and scope of that obligation is totally out of whack with your ability to influence kids at a certain point. Like I did with my sons, Merritt does his best to hold things together, and if he doesn’t entirely succeed, he sure as hell doesn’t fail. Maybe that’s enough.

A stunning assembly of archival photographs and newspaper clippings from Jackson County, Wisconsin, in the last decade and a half of the 19th century, and the definitive explanation of why nobody in old-time photographs is ever smiling—and, I choose to believe, the real reason the parts of The Wizard of Oz set in Kansas were filmed in black and white. Economic privation, unceasing bereavement, disease both physical and mental—in other words, Tuesday. Was there any joy in Jackson County? Somewhere, I’m sure. What’s documented here is a stark, powerful beauty. The most real book I’ve ever encountered, and one of two on face-out display on my bookshelves.

Because…I love language, and Timberlake spins out one gorgeous sentence after another.

Set in 1871, the story follows Georgie Burkhardt as she tracks her big sister, who’s run away with “pigeoners”, a seedy bunch who follow the migration of passenger pigeons (which once existed in the millions but were hunted to extinction). Georgie’s voice is tough, funny, and wildly original, just like the West itself.

There’s plenty of mystery and suspense, but for me, it’s about the language! Here’s the glorious ending: “I say let all the world be alive and overwhelmingly so. Let the sky be pressed to bursting with wings, beaks, pumping hearts and driving muscles. Let it be noisy. Let it be a mess. Then let me find my allotted space. Let me feel how I bump up against every other living thing on this earth.”

I’ve read all of this author’s work and the Rushed series is my favourite because although it’s a sinister paranormal fantasy, it is filled with humour. The world-building for each book is amazing – certainly daunting and nasty in parts, yet believable.

There are remarks in reviews that it’s confusing and weird, so maybe you have to be odd to understand and appreciate it. I did, so I must be.

I’m a sucker for gorgeous prose, Wisconsin landscape as a character, strong female protagonists, small-town community dynamics, and the complexities of found family—Carol Dunbar’s debut novel checks all of these boxes and then some.

I got so excited when I read this book. The prose crackles. The sensory details are vivid. It’s a literary slow-burn with just enough sizzle to keep you turning pages, and I savored every word. What would you do if you were a young wife and mother living off-grid in Northwoods, Wisconsin, and your partner suddenly became incapacitated? Dunbar left me feeling like I now know.

I was working part-time at an independent bookshop in 2008 when this book arrived in the latest shipment. In addition to the title—named for Driftless Region near where I grew up—the author’s personal comeback story was a novel in itself: Iowa Writers Workshop graduate Rhodes published three books in quick succession in the 1970s, then promptly fell off the face of the earth until, decades later, fledgling Milkweed Editions tracked him down and learned he’d been paralyzed in a motorcycle accident but was still very much alive (and writing) in a small farmhouse in rural Wisconsin. Hooked, I read the book—and was moved to my core.

Nobody captures the particular quirkiness, heart and faith of the people that make up tiny Wisconsin communities better than Rhodes.

I love me a tomboy. And that’s Caddie Woodlawn, who lives on the Wisconsin frontier with her family in the 1860s, where there are still Indians in the woods, and all the richness of nature to explore with her two brothers. Plus lots of mischief to get into. The threat of a proper, domestic young lady’s life looms, but with her father to support her, Caddie resists it.

I love this book because it brings me back to my own childhood, where my siblings and I played for endless days in the woods and creek around our home, making pretend food out of sticks and mud, catching frogs and salamanders, and building forts. The kind of childhood that few children now have in suburban America.