100 Books Like To Dance with the White Dog

This book has been criticized for ignoring the brutal aspects of the Bolshevik revolution and giving us only old-world elegance and luxury. Hello? It’s historical FICTION! Instead of facts, the author gives us atmosphere, a charming main character who is being gradually revealed to us.

It made me ask: Did time change him, or was he always that way, and the events brought out his “true” self? It’s a story told in a polished style or, as one reviewer put it, with “a permanently arched eyebrow.” 

As the parent and sister of a person with disabilities, I look for authors who can handle this topic in a sensitive and loving way.

Ms. Brown does an amazing job as she weaves suspense into this depression era story. I fell in love with the characters, and this book encouraged me to keep looking for ways to include these special people into my own stories.

Pat Conroy was a master at conjuring characters and writing stories chock-full of emotion. Heck, even the way he describes his beloved state of South Carolina makes it seem like one of the characters in his novels. (Truth: I made my family go to South Carolina one summer after binge-reading Pat Conroy’s books.)

If forced to choose which of his novels is my favorite, I’d have to go with South Broad. With a lead character named Leopold Bloom, you just know it’s going to be good 😊 As Leopold’s life is defined by unimaginable tragedy, he is drawn to a group of outsiders in school. This unlikely band of friends experiences two decades of poignant, life-changing moments together.

Love, loss, and grief are prevalent in this novel, but there is also total hilarity as the bonds of friendship overcome disappointment and heartbreak.  

The plot: “Madelaine Hillyard is a world-famous heart surgeon at the top of her game. Her personal life is far less successful. A loving but overworked single mom, she is constantly at odds with her teenage daughter. At sixteen, Lina is confused, angry, and fast becoming a stranger to her mother—a rebel desperate to find the father who walked away before she was born.

Complicating matters for Madelaine are the vastly different DeMarco brothers: While priest Francis DeMarco is always ready to lend a helping hand, his brother, Angel, long ago took on the role of bad boy. Years earlier, Angel abandoned Madelaine—and fatherhood—to go in search of fame and fortune. His departure left Madelaine devastated, but now he reappears and seeks help from the very people he betrayed—as a patient in dire need.”

Though this is the story of the mother Madelaine, a surgeon, helping her ex-boyfriend as her… show more.

Southern writer Joshilyn Jackson is one of my all-time favorites, with her unerring sense of place. In her last few books, she has turned to mystery plots. The results are mysteries of high literary quality. In The Almost Sisters, unflinching questions about race and privilege reside next to questions of guilt and innocence. I was close to the end before I picked up on a twist she’d embedded. 

When it comes to “selling the voice” in the first-person narrative, so much depends on the language and the style by which the chosen character tells the story. How convinced is the reader of this voice that promises us everything?

Let us only pay attention to Jabari Asim and his slave narrative Yonder, to know how to do it well. From the first chapter we are thrown into William’s world, the harsh truth of living on a plantation in the American South.

Once he starts narrating in his believable and lyrical voice, we feel the danger, and the hopelessness: ”I had known death could come at any time. You could keel over in the fields. You could be crushed under a wagon wheel, kicked by a horse, or have your skull split open because a slice of ham…had gone missing.” The first-person magic takes over and we have no choice… show more.

This book came out in 1956 and almost instantly became a classic. It essentially ripped apart the claims put forth by southern historians that slavery was a benign institution and that slaves were better off in the Deep South than if they had remained in “savage” Africa. The book also made it clear that slavery, and not states’ rights, brought on the Civil War. But the main reason I chose this book is that I had the good fortune of taking Stampp’s lecture course when I was a freshman back in 1952. Were his lectures dazzling? No, they weren’t. But they covered what now appears in The 1619 Project. And the message was always clear: Don’t ever underestimate the negative impact of slavery. 

This is a “bring to a deserted island” kind of book.

I’m in perpetual awe at the way Carson McCullers wrote with an unflinching eye on people—their strengths and weaknesses and every nuance in between—and always, with love. I have laughed and cried and pondered the largest questions, all in a single McCullers story. And there’s simply no one who writes like she did.

I read this book during the summer of 2021 when a lot of pandemic restrictions were still in place, and I wasn’t going anywhere. Reading Bacchanal made me feel like I was on a road trip, traveling across the dusty American southwest in the 1930s.

Veronica G. Henry’s debut features a traveling carnival making its way across middle America during the Great Depression. But the carnival isn’t all fun and games—behind the scenes, a hungry demon runs the show, and Liza might be in danger of becoming the creature’s next meal.

Bacchanal features a cast of interesting humans and demons, and the book really shines when it showcases real-life personages such as Stephanie St. Clair, a Black crime boss in 1920s Harlem. I love how danger lurks around every corner in this novel, with the traveling carnival offering up a mix of scares and delights.   

“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met Stowe. The quote may be apocryphal, but it points to a truth about the 1852 novel that shaped American opinions about the cruelty and injustice of slavery. The writing is a bit melodramatic for modern sensibilities, but it’s hard to beat the scene in which the escaped slave Eliza tries to carry her young son across an icy river for freedom on the other side.