Books like To Die Game

I love this book because of the strange and wonderful 10-year-old female protagonist, a white girl who is “rescued” from Kiowa captivity on the Texas frontier in 1870, a time of Indian raids and pervasive anarchy.

This girl was assimilated into her Indian family and considers her “rescue” a kidnapping; she remembers almost nothing of her family of origin. She is icy-veined, fearless, and creatively violent. The scene where she improvises ammunition from hundreds of dimes (yes, coins) blew my mind.

From this book, I learned about how whites (especially children) who were captured by Indians quickly abandoned their former lives and usually did not want to return if given the opportunity. The language is spare, tough, and beautiful. I did not want this book to end.

I used to teach this book in Civil War classes. Although billed as fiction, the book is a thinly veiled account of Albion Tourgée’s actual experiences with terrorism. Tourgée refers to the protagonist as “The Fool,” a dig at himself in the third person. An Ohioan, he relocated to North Carolina after the Civil War, became involved in Radical politics (advocating African American voting), and was elected a superior court judge. Tourgée battled the Ku Klux Klan. He faced death threats and provided accounts of lynchings of prominent Republican leaders—acts of political violence. The “Fool” started out as an idealist who tried to encourage equality under the law and then found himself, along with others, ground down by the violence around him, causing him to return to the North. The book allows readers to feel the problems of Reconstruction through the eyes of someone who lived through them.

I know the author personally and had a chance to read portions of the manuscript before it went to press. It is by far the best account of the occupation of the former Confederacy by the U.S. Army during Reconstruction. Meticulously researched, it gives readers a firm sense of where the military was and when, as well as how it was forced to confront insurgent white Southerners determined to obstruct advances in equal rights through whatever means possible, including violence. That intransigence caused increases in military supervision of governments, leading the author to state, “Military Reconstruction therefore exposed the necessary interdependence of democracy and coercion. (180)” There’s the irony—that expanded freedom required military control of governments. The author is a very good writer, having won the Flannery O’Connor Award for a short story collection Spit Baths.

This is a brilliant, harrowing book that should be must-reading for anyone who might still be swayed by the worn-out moonlight-and-magnolias mythology of the “Old South.”

Drawing heavily on a wealth of remarkable first-person testimony, Williams chronicles the systematic brutalization of usually helpless Black women by white men. In particular, she makes all too clear that rape and other forms of sexual abuse were not just incidental but central to the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan in its campaign to assert power over freed people.

Although women couldn’t vote, the abuse of wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers was a way to intimidate the Black men who could. Williams also shows how that abuse continued long after Reconstruction to become part of the repressive fabric of the Jim Crow era that followed.

I found some of the accounts in Williams’s book difficult to read, but I don’t think the full… show more.

I found this coming-of-age story a satisfying tale of evolving self-discovery in an unlikely situation and in a less-traveled setting. Thrilling twists and turns kept me enthralled from page one to the end. The setting was vivid and colorful, and I fell in love with the well-defined, colorful characters. I highly recommend it.

This book causes the reader to rethink all that they have been taught regarding the colonial history and founding of our United States.

Did Thomas Jefferson actually plagiarize the Declaration of Independence based on a similar document from 1775 that was sent on horseback from Charlotte, N.C., to the constitutional convention in Philadelphia a full year earlier? I see ample evidence that makes for a strong argument, and this book is both an entertaining and historically based-account of a 250-year-old mystery.

Ronnie is everything a teenage girl should be—independent, sharp, and fierce. Will, the local guy who has it all, is drawn to her unique spirit. He sees through her defiance as they bond over Ronnie’s desire to save a sea turtle’s nest from predators. Over the course of their summer romance, Ronnie learns that Will’s life is not what she expected. In return, Will helps Ronnie make some discoveries of her own. This book is close to my heart in that you see how Ronnie learns how to channel her spirit from being rebellious to guiding her life in a more positive direction. She is similar to Jess in that she rises to the challenges presented to her and we see what a difference her decisions make in getting her to where she belongs.

In a previous life, I taught a class in constitutional law to undergraduates at a local university, many of whom had never heard of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence from May 20, 1775. 

That date appears on both the North Carolina state flag and state seal, and commemorates the first political break with England by any governmental body among the original colonies. I enjoyed how the author did his homework and documented sources and conflicting arguments with respect to how this document has been and should be viewed.

When I started a book club in 2019, this was one of the first books we read! In West Mills is set in rural North Carolina and follows Azalea “Knot” who refuses to let her town dictate how she’s going to live. She has a mind of her own. She has spunk. But her life of wild choices is leading to some difficult consequences: ostracization from her family, living as an outcast in her own community. What I loved about this book was how lived-in it felt—all of the characters are flawed, and their dialogue and domestic scenes are so fully realized and believable. I highly recommend this book for fans of historical fiction and family dramas!

This book crawled under my skin and stayed there.

It starts off ordinary, familiar, even as the unease builds slowly. The fear isn’t loud or in-your-face; it’s quiet, creeping, and emotional. 

I found myself questioning what was real, what was imagined, and whether it even mattered once the darkness started closing in. What really got me was the sense of something just out of sight, something you can’t quite explain, but you know it’s coming.

Grief and fear twist together in a way that feels inescapable. You try to run, to reason, to fight, but in this story, none of that may be enough. It’s the kind of horror that doesn’t scream. It whispers, and somehow, that’s so much worse.