Books like Two Sisters' Secret — picked by fans

Set during World War I and inspired by letters of the author’s grandparents, this delightful novel is filled with a fetching cast of characters and borne along by the author’s entertaining sense of humor. The narration reminds us that many folks were suspicious of people with German ancestry during the war, even though they were American citizens and even using the common term “gesundheit,” and that children of German immigrants were drafted to fight against their parents’ former countrymen.

Young Iowa men were trained into soldiering, where there were still rivalries—some about girls back home, some about German sympathies—and sent across to fight the Kaiser’s troops in France. Some didn’t return home, some came back with broken bodies. There is a compelling scene with wounded veterans in a local hospital, at least one scarred on the inside and fighting his own private battle.

This winsome story also carries themes of… show more.

My Grandma Leora's family "went bust" in NE Nebraska during the 1890s drought. The McCance family stuck it out in central Nebraska during the same time. Grace McCance remembered so many dear details, like making horses from tumbleweeds, Indians learning German as a second language, the battle over wearing a bonnet, a pet rooster that liked to visit while feasting on grasshoppers. Grace was the second daughter in a family of seven girls and two boys. She hoped one day to make the most beautiful quilts and to marry a cowboy, which she did. They camped out the first night, then had their wedding portrait taken the next day.

Decades ago, I did a lot of quilting, so was familiar with the remarkable Flower Basket Petit Pointe quilt, which was designated as one of the top 100 quilts of the 20th Century by Quilters Newsletter Magazine in 1999. Grace McCance… show more.

For their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1917, a couple gathered their family for a celebration. During the day, they share their Iowa pioneering stories. What wonderful details about living arrangements, hardships in travel, hard-to-believe hordes of grasshoppers, blizzards, even a probable encounter with Jesse James. Written as a novel but based on historical events, his dear slim book also includes several photographs.

It has been interesting to read the reviews for this book. I ordered it when I learned it was about family history, but another wanted it because of horse whisperers in the title, yet another was drawn because of the artwork of one of the Allen brothers.

This is a corner of history that was new to me—a family moving from Missouri to the wilds of Montana to oversee a timber operation, but the sons learning training horses from Blackfoot Indians, which turned into jobs. They also trained horses for the army during WWI. They were hunters and mountainmen. Leather items they made still survive among descendants. Lee and Edd Allen's interests were so different.

Lee stayed with their parents when they moved to California, still cherishing the outdoors. Edd was an artist, illustrator, printmaker, and lived in Paris for a time. One etching is in the Smithsonian, and others… show more.

I’m a huge Franz Kafka fan. He was weird and troubled and wrote about feeling alienated from the world as well as any writer who ever lived. He was also funny and undeniably unique. He was so bizarre his last name became a phrase (“Kafkaesque”) that indicates something is oppressive or nightmarish. How cool is that? I chose The Castle because it’s his last, lesser-known novel, but also one of his most amusing and poignant, a novel he failed to finish before he died. Which is, of course, very fitting.

Nothing epitomizes the striking success of the Berlin Airlift more than the true story of the so-called “candy bomber.”

This was a USAF pilot who on his own initiative started dropping candy tied to handcrafted mini-parachutes out of his transport plane to give the children of Berlin a little sweetness in their otherwise bleak lives. His gesture more than any transformed the “terror bombers”—responsible for so much of Berlin’s destruction—into friends in the eyes of the Berliners.

This book is an autobiographical account by the candy bomber himself, Lt. Gail Halvorsen. It is written with candid clarity and heartwarming charm. A gem!

I found this book when surfing the Baen public library on their site. It was free to read, and I liked some of the short stories I had read from Eric Flint. 

Holy crap, nothing prepared me for the rollercoaster ride that this novel was. I loved the no-nonsense character that he gave to the main character. Add to that the fantastic alt-history spin he put to the story, and I was hooked.

I can completely understand why so many other authors added their own stories to the universe that Eric Flint created.

Terry Laster, who translated this work from the German original, does a masterful job of expressing the situation in 14th-century Heidelberg when a female secretly heals patients and for her success, is accused of performing works of the devil. In their ignorance, the town council appoints her husband, a lawyer, to discover her identity. How this story resolves is a testament to the power of good works and encourages me when I face opposition from ignorant people. 

Historian Mark Roseman interviewed Marianne Ellenbogen née Strauss in a suburban house near Liverpool. After she passed away, her son shared with him the diaries and letters he found in the attic. In the summer of 1943 Marianne escaped deportation and hid in various places across Germany, supported by a little-known network of unorthodox socialists. Her life under Nazism was horrible—yet strangely liberating. She flourished away from her strict parents but was still traumatized at leaving them behind. The fate of someone who repeatedly changed her German, Jewish, political, and indeed personal identity will move you emotionally as well as stimulate you intellectually. All along, Marianne struggled to maintain control over her own story—which makes A Past in Hiding a brilliant title for an outstanding book.   

The story of Sophie Scholl and the student resistance group, the White Rose, never fails to being me to tears.

Sophie, her brother Hans, and friends in Munich printed and distributed thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets, which describe a post-war need for international cooperation. She believed that it was wrong for anyone to side with their own nation if they knew that nation was doing wrong.

She and her friends paid the price for their resistance but remained defiant to the end. Sophie wrote one word on the back of the indictment against her: ‘Freedom’.

Never has her story been more inspiringly told than by McDonough.