22 Books Like Valentine in Montreal

In reading this novel again as an adult I was looking for an understanding of what this book provided me as an eleven year old girl. The answers were still there; safety & security, feeling seen, kinship, and perhaps the understanding of duty vs desire. Jane is fiercely independent, which is a trait I have long admired and was as a child determined to emulate. She is determined to find her way, following her personal beliefs and struggling to rise above the status of abused orphan she started from. Beyond all of these deep themes, the story is engaging and moves along quickly.

I love nothing more than being so immersed in a setting you can smell the ocean air, see the fog along the long stretches of beach and hear the hooves of the horse as he trots along the sandy beaches. This book taught you about a profession or industry that doesn't exist any longer due to automation and this look back at old world practices in modern day was fascinating.

This is a haunting and sad book that gripped me right from the beginning.

The father-daughter relationship is frustrating, sympathetic, and heartwarming. This book made me feel so many things that are hard to put into words. There is a naivete in the pre-teen protagonist that is sweet yet so deeply broken by her circumstances, which was something I really related to, and the decisions that she makes are inevitable, real, and tragic. 

Walls’ recounts her unconventional childhood marked by poverty, instability, and the eccentric choices of her parents.

The memoir offers an unflinching but often tender portrait of a deeply flawed family and the complicated bonds of love and loyalty. Walls’s voice is both clear-eyed and compassionate as she revisits her past.

Wanting to make sense of my own dysfunctional family, I reread this book several times.

Frank McCourt's classic book, the memoir of his childhood, is proof in the pudding that the origin of humor is the suffering of the low-status character. And that’s only one reason why I love it.

He had me at “Above all -- we were wet.” His descriptions of the impossible and undignified conditions of his childhood, where children had absolutely no control over anything and adults were at the mercy of life itself, brought me so close to him that I think I started believing we were actually related and scribbled him into the family tree as a long-lost uncle.

McCourt captures the hapless quality of gullible, unsupervised children let loose on an unforgiving world with a buoyancy that comes through every sentence and rises above the brutal conditions of his childhood. 

And the truth he finds in the details, from the brutality of religious authority figures to the abject… show more.

I was immediately hooked by this brilliant novel because of its unusual omniscient narrator, the Grim Reaper. Death, stressed out by the surfeit of “clients” he must deal with during World War II, reveals himself to be a sensitive narrator who sees everything. He especially keeps his eye on a young German girl, her loving foster parents, and the Jewish man they hide and protect.

I fell in love with these characters as they struggled with moral decisions, wartime hardship, danger, and tragedy. Despite the realistic portrayal of German life during WWII, I found this book to be an uplifting read. 

Delia Owens’s Crawdads was a smashing success as both a novel (her first) and a motion picture. ’Buked, beaten, and scorned by her feckless father, abandoned by her mother and older siblings, an illiterate girl of ten lives alone on the marshy coast of North Carolina. Befriended by a boy who teaches her to read with the compelling prose of A Sand County Almanac, Kya comes to see her world through the eyes of its author, Aldo Leopold. Kya and Tate grow up and fall in love, but he goes off to college—and she is again abandoned. She becomes a renowned naturalist, artist, and author, but falls sexual prey to a scoundrel, who winds up dead. It’s a murder mystery, but also a story of triumph and a beautiful portrayal of an environment often as reviled by polite society as its once feral celebrant.

I’d read the reviews, so I was prepared for a great book. I wasn’t prepared to be thrown out of my comfort zone—but in the best possible way.

Mandel made me sit with what it really means to lose everything and still create something beautiful. It’s not about saving the world; it’s about creating a new dream and making it your home. I loved how it celebrates art, memory, and the strange persistence of humanity even when everything else is gone.

This book reminded me that hope is often raw, painful, and ultimately necessary.

I loved the Glaswegian (quasi-Irish!) voice of Shuggie Bain, but what I will always remember it for is its gut-wrenching depiction of the consequences of poverty and alcoholism for the titular child character. 

There were times when I was reading this novel that I literally flinched from it. It’s one of the most poignant times that I can remember having such a visceral reaction to a book. 

What I found truly remarkable was the book’s sense of simultaneous inevitability and hope. At once, I felt that there was only one possible end for Agnes and Shuggie, and yet I also somehow believed that both characters would escape their miserable situation.

This idea, that hope sustains even against the most improbable odds, accesses something fundamentally human. A book that can do that is one I would recommend any day.

I got this novel for my wife, but once I read her the beginning, she had to wait until I finished it before she could read it. It’s one of those books. It won a lot of awards when it was published and it became a Broadway play, and I can see why. Christopher Boone is on the spectrum, a teenager who doesn’t understand lies, emotions, and dislikes being touched. He does understand numbers, including prime numbers into the thousands, and knows all the countries and their capitals. He lives with his father, and when a neighbor’s dog is murdered, he sets out to investigate who did it. It’s not a simple story, but it’s told in a simple way that is easy to read, and a true page-turner. I like to find books that make you want to forgo television and this is one of them. I told my… show more.