Books like Where Yesterday Lives

I absolutely devoured this book in just a few hours. 

This Christian family drama crosses over into mystery/suspense. In a family with three sisters and one brother, no one seems to be able to get it all together. One sister is a writer, but she’s being blackmailed for what she’s writing about. The other sister is notorious for one-night stands, the third sister is mostly stable with a husband and two kids.

Their brother? He’s going through a divorce. Only problem is that when he went to visit his soon-to-be ex-wife, he found her dead. With a shared son and a dying mother-in-law, who should have custody over the child? It seemed simple until the brother was listed as a person of interest for his wife’s death. The sisters all put on their detective hats to help their brother out.

I laughed at the sibling rivalry in this book and… show more.

I love a good family drama where there’s a found family.

A young reporter is assigned to write the obituary of an alive woman, Mrs. Kip. Mrs. Kip lost her husband, never remarried, and never had children. But she lived what could appear to be a thousand lives as she held different roles and careers throughout her life.

In order for one job/role/calling to end, a part of her had to die. Now, faced with a young blonde who favors her, Mrs. Kip feels as though maybe this is the daughter she never had, the daughter who would listen to the stories, the daughter that might not be family by blood, but family by heart.

This story gave me a lot of “spread the Gospel” vibes, but also reminded me to not sleep on the seniors in our lives. They have a lot to offer, too. 

Reading Christy Miller Volumes 1, 2, 3, and 4 practically summarizes a good portion of my teenage life.

Well, that and me trying desperately to recreate the amazing scenes you don’t want to miss within these pages. Only told from the POV of fifteen-year-old Christy Miller, we meet a girl whose life has been upended by a sudden move to California, a wealthy but rude aunt, and a hot surfer on the beach.

Problem? He’s a die-hard Christian who plays guitar at church. She’s never accepted Christ and doesn’t know the first thing about beach living. In fact, she only has the world’s ugliest one-piece green bathing suit.

Christy Miller is the forever friend that I wish I could meet in real life!

This Christian fiction novel holds a special place in my heart because I didn’t really know who Melody Carlson wrote this book for.

Christy Miller was written for teens and young adults. Where Yesterday Lives was written for Young Adults. But what Christian family drama has characters that are 16, 37, and 72?! Okay, maybe grandma is 71, but the point of the matter is that it’s told from multiple POVs across three different generations.

As of writing this, I’m 28 and I loved it. Why? It’s about a family. A true-to-life family, with true-to-life problems. Girls get taken out of school and pulled away from their boyfriends in real life. Sometimes moms and dads get divorced. And sadly, sometimes grandma or grandpa may start forgetting things they should remember.

This story made me laugh, cry, and feel so grateful that even in our mess, God still loves us. If… show more.

Love him or hate him, it’s undeniable that LeDuff is a tremendously charismatic writer. A Pulitzer Prize winner, a breathtaking reporter, and a denizen of Detroit for decades, this is one of the most compellingly written books on Detroit ever.

This book has a Mustang eight-cylinder engine on it, and I hoovered this up over just a couple of hours. If you want a barn-burning page-turner of a tale, showcasing Detroit as its most broken and beautiful, this is the one for you.

All Fudged Up features one of the most charming real-life settings I’ve come across in cozy mysteries.

The series takes place on the delightful Mackinac Island, where there are horse-drawn carriages instead of cars and plenty of historic buildings like the McMurphy Hotel and Fudge Shop.

The main character, Allie McMurphy, spends her days whipping up batches of fudge, keeping the hotel running, and solving murders whenever her sweet puppy finds a body.

I like this book because it forces us to rethink what the Cold War really was. The book identifies key figures in anti-communist crusades in post-World War II Detroit: workers, white homeowners, city officials, Catholics, and manufacturing executives, and argues that the core elements of their “anticommunism” were not fears of Soviet incursion, but sociocultural tensions at home that derived from drastic changes in wartime and postwar Detroit, which observed a sudden influx of African Americans, Southern whites, and immigrants. 

Thus, the book argues that Cold War Detroit’s “anticommunism” was not a new development in the postwar era, but a continuation of what had previously been labeled anti-unionism, white-supremacism, anti-secular Catholicism, and anti-New deal sentiments, all of which can be characterized as expressions of ongoing “anti-modernist” tensions within American society. Such a reexamination of Cold War anti-communism is significant because it could open up new territory for rethinking what anticommunism… show more.

A haunted capital building, spooky cemeteries, the infamous Legend of Seven Gables Road, true crime, and more are all featured in this excellent book on ghosts and haunted places around our state capital and surrounding cities and towns. Carpenter has a very entertaining style of writing that makes this book hard to put down.   

Social media expert Maddy Montgomery, left standing at the altar, is #StartingOver in small-town Michigan after inheriting her great-aunt’s bakery and a 200-pound English Mastiff named Baby. Her plan to sell the bakery and go back to her sophisticated life is spoiled by a restriction in the will requiring her to spend a year in New Bison. Maddy doesn’t bake, and her Louboutins aren’t made for walking giant dogs, but the locals are friendly, and Lake Michigan is beautiful. Maddy feels ready to take on the challenge—until New Bison’s mayor is fatally stabbed, and her fingerprints are on the knife. When there’s another murder, she even begins to suspect the one person she has trusted. Maddy’s snarky dialog and clever use of hashtags, along with the irresistible Baby, make this a stand-out.

I love that this story is set around cherry harvest. The description and storytelling were done in broad strokes of imagery. This story stayed with me because of the grief and longing one of the main character struggles with. Seeing through the perspective of the little girl was entertaining. All the characters had extraordinary personalities. I loved this book because it was a universal truth. Life is a hill with boulders of various sizes, set on fire, headed straight for you. Staying put is only going to get you knocked the F@#! Out.