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.

I read this book while working on my own because Horwitz is a master of weaving a story with many characters about a complicated piece of the past. He provides ample detail about the lengths to which reenactors will go for their performances—and some of the methods are outright gross.

But I love that even when Horwitz is grappling with ways that modern interpretations can obscure the actual past, he never resorts to mockery when talking about his subjects. He might disagree with their perspective about the Civil War, but he listens and reports what they tell him. I recommend this for anyone trying to understand how the Civil War still plays such a prominent role in our world nearly two centuries later. 

I only recently discovered the work of Anna J. Cooper, but I find myself reading and thinking about and with her a lot. She’s not an obvious philosophical love for me in that she never writes about LGBTQIA life and does write about men and women from a relatively conservative, Christian, cis, and straight point of view. However, Cooper gives voice to and insight into the struggles of Black women, and her work helps me, as someone who is both racialized as white and an immigrant to the US, perceive and feel important dimensions of the reality in which I now live.

Thus, in her writings about the things she knows about, I find a friend and a colleague as I’m trying to think about intersectional issues that go beyond the life I know first-personally.

Alan Nolan became one of the first to challenge the Lee myth that had been created in the decades after the general’s death in 1870. He starts with the premise that Lee was a good man whose actions have been distorted beyond all recognition. He then subjects the historical record to a withering cross-examination. Nolan asks: Why did Lee commit treason? Did he really oppose slavery? Did his stubborn persistence harm his beloved state of Virginia? What did he do to unite the nation after the war? Nolan even challenges to the traditional belief that Lee was magnanimous to his enemies, writing, “The historical record shows that Lee constructed a demonic image of the Federals.” This book takes no quarter and may infuriate Lee’s supporters.

I love this short story collection by Jill McCorkle, because Jill is a master of complex yet subtle emotions—it left me laughing out loud on one page and crying on the next. The characters in each story are flawed and multi-dimensional and so gloriously human that I rooted for them, despite any shortcomings.

In Your Husband Is Cheating on Us, I sympathized with the unnamed narrator/speaker because her humanity shines through, even though she’s the other woman coming clean to her affair partner’s wife (and I was even hoping for her morally murky proposal to succeed). I love the short story form, and this is one of my favorites, but they’re all stellar in this collection. It’s a Funeral! RSVP feels like chatting with a best friend who’s made some questionable decisions, but you love her anyway—especially when the narrator divulges her dark secret. It’s funny and tender and heartbreaking.