100 Books Like Throwback

I fell in love with Jennifer Donelly’s writing when I discovered her historical romance trilogy The Tea Rose, and then devoured her YA novel A Northern Light. So when I found out she had published a YA book with history, young love, and a ghost mystery, I was all in!

In this story, the past and the present are once again woven together, adding fascinating and horrific details of the French Revolution as the main character navigates her new and strange life in Paris. The Catacombs beneath the city play a role in the plot, and it was this setting that made me determined to visit this creepy location myself one day—which I did!

The labyrinth of man-made tunnels wind their way into an underground maze that is filled with the relocated human bones of over 6 million bodies, which line the walls in macabre designs. Exploring the “Land of… show more.

I adored this novella from 2021 and the made-for-TV movie based on it.

Seventeen-year-old Mark is trapped in a Groundhog-day-like time loop with no real desire to break out of a situation that releases him from looming responsibilities. Then he meets evanescent and brilliant fellow time-looper Margaret, and the two set out to discover the wonders of the eternal day in which they’re stuck.

The story is charming, funny, and sweet. It was released during the pandemic at a time when a lot of us felt stuck in our own time loops, and its attention to detail and moving discovery of Margaret’s dark secret prompted me to appreciate the tiny perfect moments of my own seemingly endless and repetitive days. 

It may be obvious by now that I’m drawn to stories about complex characters, stories that aren’t afraid to be both humorous and gut wrenching.

Fourteen-year-old Nephele is another protagonist whose voice is immediately endearing, refreshing, and compelling. She’s an outsider, a brilliant math and science nerd who struggles to adjust socially to high school.

She invents a time travel app in order to relive her freshman year and do it right—but instead she becomes stuck in a time loop for ten years, encountering characters and surprises that help her to overcome her loneliness and find herself.

I love it that this book celebrates a smart, quirky character as she learns to look more deeply into her life and navigate her world. 

I’m cheating a little here, since protagonist Ailey Benjamin Lane is not quite a teenager—he’s only eleven.

But I love how this book celebrates dance—Ailey is a tap dancer with big dreams whose grandfather had similar, though thwarted, talents and dreams. And I love the window into Black history in 1930s Harlem when, feeling discouraged, Ailey puts on what turn out to be a pair of magical shoes and is transported to the past, where he meets his twelve-year-old grandfather.

Ailey is faced with the classic time traveler dilemma of wanting to help his grandfather overcome his fears while avoiding changing the past so much that it will affect Ailey’s own future.

I learned from this book—and since I was writing about gymnastics, time travel, and the fraught history of adoption politics, I found this book a wonderful model for evoking a passion, a culture, and a history.

I was genuinely surprised and challenged by this inventive book by Cathy Park Hong that follows a mysterious translator into a dystopic new world.

Written in a pygin that combines over ten different languages, this poetry collection is deeply weird but oddly moving, despite its formal inventiveness, and connects politics to poetry in a novel and haunting way. 

While this novel is a suspenseful psychological thriller in its own right, the story also tackles racial tensions and contemporary family dynamics. I admire the way Steph Cha explores grief, revenge, violence, racism, and justice over the course of Your House Will Pay’s fast-paced plot. This is absolutely a must-read.

Growing up as a first-generation Korean American my heart ached with love to read this book. It truly celebrates Korean culture and its ties to family. Kim portrays our young protagonist Yoomi, a black and white cat experiencing something everyone has gone through—a bad day while highlighting some of the warmth and joyful things about Korean culture, my favorite topic being food. The end cap of the book features a recipe for kimbap. I love that she does this because growing up my mother would pack me kimbap for lunch and kids would immediately peg it as sushi. Little me would have felt so seen and loved by this book and I’m so happy it exists today.

The year is 2003, and I’m finishing up my first year at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. And a colleague of mine tells me a recent Korean-American graduate will be publishing her first novel. He tells me that Caroline’s book is a romantic comedy in novel form. And I pause for a moment – ten years ago I could not name a single Korean American writer, and now we have our own Jennifer Weiner? How cool is that? And how cool is In Full Bloom? You probably have never heard of this novel, and now that you have, you will thank me when you race through these hilarious pages. Ginger Lee is our heroine, and yes, that type of punny humor is de rigueur in this book. I don’t know who I love more, Ginger or her mother. Probably her mother. 

An intergenerational story about a young girl, Junie Kim, who finds the strength to face up to the bullying and racism in school thanks to the stories shared by her grandparents is heartbreaking and inspiring. 

Though this story is set in North America, the flashbacks to Korea during the war between the North and South are chilling and authentic.  

It was fascinating to read about the Korean War and the struggles of the masses as they tried to escape to the West in search of a better life for themselves and their families. It also gave me a sense of relief that I was living in a country (and a time) where life wasn’t a challenge every day. 

I feel Chang-Rae Lee broke out of the mold of Asian American books that always dealt with immigration or stories set in Old Asia. A young man, Henry Park, is hired to infiltrate the campaign of a Korean American running for mayor in New York City. Yes, this delves into the issues of assimilation and alienation, but the novel is about so much more. It’s lyrical and poignant and universal in its explorations of familial and marital love.