43 Books Like Valley of Shadows

Eowyn Ivey’s work hits every one of my interests: lush writing, Alaskan wilderness, family drama, untamed beasts, folklore and fairy tales, parenthood, childhood, and the struggle to survive…I mean, really, it couldn’t be more perfect.

Her debut novel references the Russian fairy tale “Snegurochka,” about a girl made of ice. It’s an absolutely gorgeous and transporting book that also happens to have been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—again, perfect, right? 

On a remote island in the Pacific Northwest, a Hello Kitty lunchbox washes up on a beach.

Tucked inside is the diary of a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl. Ruth, the auto-fictional protagonist of this novel, is a writer who finds the lunchbox and suspects it’s debris from Japan’s 2011 tsunami. Thus ensues a dual storyline in which each of these characters seeks out the other and, in the process, reckons with family, fate, and ancestral heritage.

I chose this National Book Award finalist from 2014 for its subtle use of the two main characters liminal realities to wrestle with the possibility of how two people living at a vast distance apart and even in different times might be connected to each other.

As a writer I was blown away by this passage which comes late in the novel. “[Ruth] thought back to the mystery of the missing words. Had she somehow… show more.

I can’t stop thinking about this book. The setting is Florida in the near future, where climate change has reached a point where the ocean is reclaiming the state. The book spans the entire life of the protagonist, Wanda. Wanda broke my heart. She suffered so much loss, none of which was her own fault. But, smart and curious, she found a way, led primarily by an older woman who took her under her wing. 

I felt for Wanda as she lost her family and friends, dealt with bullies, and lost her home. And I cheered her on when she found ways to survive. Wanda is the light: the message of the book, which could easily have been horribly depressing, was that love will find a way—life will find a way if you give it room to breathe.

This novel’s protagonist, Pepper Rafferty was raised by two Lesbian mothers, who found her as a newborn on the doorstep of their vet practice.

But at 36, Pepper is still trying to find her footing in the world and understand things about herself, like her habit of imagining she’s living in different worlds, based on different choices she might have made.
Without being shown exactly why, the reader soon grasps that this has something to do with the fact that her birth mother is Ula Frost - a very famous portrait painter about whom fantastic claims are being made.

These come primarily from the models in her portraits, these are her clients, who say that her painting them brought forth their mirror selves from other universes, often with disastrous consequences. Outrageous as this claim seems, many in the art world believe it, and Ula's paintings sell for millions of dollars.… show more.

This YA novel is unquestionably one of my all time favourite reads. It’s about an asexual Apache girl with her ghost-dog sidekick in a world full of magic including faeries and vampires. The prose, the plot, the characters, the narrative structure—it was all brilliant and brought to life the story of a girl who can raise the ghosts of dead animals, a skill from her Lipan Apache family. A story that could’ve remained delightfully cute and sweet takes a decidedly darker turn when Elatsoe’s cousin is the picture-perfect town of Willowbee. As Elatsoe begins to investigate, she uncovers some seriously gruesome secrets in an alternate version of small-town America shaped by magic and monsters.

When we think of slavery in American History, we mostly think of African Americans enslaved by white settlers. Paul Conrad tells a different story. Focusing on the Apache and through the often poignant stories of particular Apache women and men over the course of four centuries, he details their experience as shifting webs of alliance led to their enslavement by the Spanish and the Mexicans on the North American mainland and Cuba, and imprisoned and held in unfreedom by the United States through the 1880s, and yet still holding onto their identity as a distinct people with a distinct culture.

This book is a great read by Louis L'Amour, who’s arguably one of the greatest Western writers to ever live.

L'Amour executes the book brilliantly, placing a woman and her six-year-old son in grave danger from some angry, fired-up Apaches, who are on the warpath.

All that stands between them and their safety is one tough man and his dog.

Elmore Leonard wrote a ton of books, and almost all of them were darn good. He’s most famous for his more modern books, Get Shorty, etc. His stories are raw, edgy, and exciting. Toward the very end of his career, he did crank out some novels that were, I thought, junk. But for the most part, his writing is terrific, easy to read, page-turning books. What many don’t know is that when he was young, he was writing Westerns. And wow, what fabulous Westerns, too! If you’re lucky enough to get a copy of this collection, you’ll both love it, and feel kind of bad when you get to the end. One of the very best Western writers of them all.

The Arizona territory was an intersection for people from many different cultures, and they sometimes did horrible things to one another. This is the story of the brutal Camp Grant Massacre of 1871, one of the pivotal events in the war on the aboriginal tribes in the Arizona Territory. This is a difficult book to read as it lays bare the inherent racism of the so-called settlers of the territory, and uncompromisingly addresses their genocidal inclinations. Worse, it shows how the policies of the U.S. Government encouraged such acts of mass murder. Though one hundred of the participants, including a number of upstanding citizens from Pima County, were indicted for 108 counts of murders, and tried, not one was found guilty. A shameful, but important history.

Ilona Andrews is a husband-and-wife team that writes realistic, diverse characters and edgy, complex storylines. From the unique, somewhat sci-fi Innkeeper Chronicles to the gritty post-shift world of the Kate Daniels series and the powerful families of the Hidden Legacy series, the Andrews team excels at next level world building, flawed, relatable characters, and I love every one of their books, but Blood Heir is my favorite because it has a strong grown-up street kid with a found family vibes and is a tension-filled slow burn romance, with a strong, intelligent, compassionate, witty female protagonist.