Here are 100 books that Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey fans have personally recommended if you like
Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I have always loved writing, receiving, and reading letters—slips of paper that hold one person’s thoughts in order to transfer them to another person. One of my prized possessions is a short stack of letters I wrote to my parents from summer camp when I was 10 years old. Each one relays some catastrophe—a fall from a horse, a motorcycle crash, a waterskiing incident—with the relish of a wartime correspondent. Epistolary novels, diaries, and journal entries will always fascinate me. I love their immediacy. I begin reading and am immediately captivated by words that are ostensibly written for someone else but which speak directly to me.
I love the verve and charm of this story, told through a series of letters between two young Regency women who are best friends. Though the magical elements add mystery and keep the plot moving, I especially enjoyed experiencing the narrative through their correspondence with each other.
The letters add nuance to the characters, making me imagine that I am involved in the events of their lives—even though it takes days for the post to carry the letters to their destination. A side note that makes me love the book even more is the story of how it came to be: a fan met an author, and they collaborated to create this project.
A great deal is happening in London this season. For starters, there's the witch who tried to poison Kate at Sir Hilary's induction into the Royal College of Wizards. (Since when does hot chocolate burn a hole straight through one's dress?!) Then there's Dorothea. Is it a spell that's made her the toast of the town--or could it possibly have something to do with the charm-bag under Oliver's bed? And speaking of Oliver, just how long can Cecelia and Kate make excuses for him? Ever since he was turned into a tree, he hasn't bothered to tell anyone where he…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I have always loved writing, receiving, and reading letters—slips of paper that hold one person’s thoughts in order to transfer them to another person. One of my prized possessions is a short stack of letters I wrote to my parents from summer camp when I was 10 years old. Each one relays some catastrophe—a fall from a horse, a motorcycle crash, a waterskiing incident—with the relish of a wartime correspondent. Epistolary novels, diaries, and journal entries will always fascinate me. I love their immediacy. I begin reading and am immediately captivated by words that are ostensibly written for someone else but which speak directly to me.
This book was a revelation: a tactile, hands-on dream. I loved the physicality of holding and reading actual cards and letters between two people, got caught up in the mystery of how and why they were corresponding and thoroughly enjoyed the pervasive feeling of being involved in what appeared to be a very private conversation.
I never get tired of reading and revisiting it. Its appeal never grows old.
Don't miss The Pharos Gate , the final volume in the Griffin & Sabine story. Published simultaneously with the 25th-anniversary edition of Griffin & Sabine , the book finally shares what happened to the lovers.
Griffin: It's good to get in touch with you at last. Could I have one of your fish postcards? I think you were right-the wine glass has more impact than the cup. -Sabine
But Griffin had never met a woman named Sabine. How did she know him? How did she know his artwork? Who is she? Thus begins the strange and intriguing correspondence of Griffin…
I have always loved writing, receiving, and reading letters—slips of paper that hold one person’s thoughts in order to transfer them to another person. One of my prized possessions is a short stack of letters I wrote to my parents from summer camp when I was 10 years old. Each one relays some catastrophe—a fall from a horse, a motorcycle crash, a waterskiing incident—with the relish of a wartime correspondent. Epistolary novels, diaries, and journal entries will always fascinate me. I love their immediacy. I begin reading and am immediately captivated by words that are ostensibly written for someone else but which speak directly to me.
The Great Gatsby is one of my all-time favorite books, so I was thrilled to get to spend more time with Nick Carraway (not my favorite “Gatsby” character, but still…) I love so much about this hilarious, inventive book. Would Fitzgerald approve? Possibly. Would Papa, likely not.
Regardless, I love the letters, memos, transcripts, and other ephemera that come together to make for an entirely novel reading experience.
America in 1953 seems hell-bent on squandering the flood tide of international goodwill earned in WWII. Senator Joe McCarthy is on a red-hunting rampage in Washington, and the fledgling CIA under Allen Dulles is starting to dabble in nation-building.
Into this moment of history wander Nick Carraway and Jake Barnes, refugees from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. They begin a correspondence that leads to a close friendship, and widens to include a bizarre cast of characters. From the classic fiction of the period come Larry Darrell (The Razor's Edge), Alden Pyle (The Quiet American), Lady…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I have always loved writing, receiving, and reading letters—slips of paper that hold one person’s thoughts in order to transfer them to another person. One of my prized possessions is a short stack of letters I wrote to my parents from summer camp when I was 10 years old. Each one relays some catastrophe—a fall from a horse, a motorcycle crash, a waterskiing incident—with the relish of a wartime correspondent. Epistolary novels, diaries, and journal entries will always fascinate me. I love their immediacy. I begin reading and am immediately captivated by words that are ostensibly written for someone else but which speak directly to me.
One of the things I love most about this book is the fact that it’s the author’s debut novel—when she was in her 70s. The letters that form the story are engaging, witty, and sweet. All of them have a deep underlying awareness of the passing of time. (“It must have occurred to you that what you thought would happen when you were young never did.”)
The writing is beautifully poetic, with phrases that tickle the reader’s inner ear and remind me anew of why I love falling into a good book.
I have loved the history of the West since I was a child, as my family has lived here for over a century. I devoured historical fiction about pioneer girls in grammar school (including the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder), and as I got into college, I expanded my reading universe to include books about women’s roles in the West, and the meaning of this region in overall American history. This concept is what drew me to study the cultural influence of dude ranching, where women have always been able to shine -- and where I placed the protagonist of my first novel.
When we think of the West, we so often think about people moving and traveling, but rarely do women come to mind, except as pioneers in covered wagons. But ever since Sacagawea walked with the Lewis and Clark expedition, women have not only traveled West, they often led the way, both physically and metaphorically. Scharff’s book is a fascinating look at how hard it was for women to actually move through the region, whether stumping for suffrage or civil rights. Scharff’s book is especially valuable because she includes so many women of color, and you can feel their pain and their exhilaration on the page.
From Sacagawea's travels with Lewis and Clark to rock groupie Pamela Des Barres's California trips, women have moved across the American West with profound consequences for the people and places they encounter. Virginia Scharff revisits a grand theme of United States history - our restless, relentless westward movement--but sets out in new directions, following women's trails from the early nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. In colorful, spirited stories, she weaves a lyrical reconsideration of the processes that created, gave meaning to, and ultimately shattered the West. "Twenty Thousand Roads" introduces a cast of women mapping the world on their…
Having grown up with an older generation—my great-grandparents, great-great aunts and uncles, and a godmother, all who were born between 1877 and 1900—I learned to appreciate how they lived and what they went through. As a child, I found a hand-written poem about a brothel queen who caused a gunfight between her paramour and a stranger. Then, in college, I met a wonderful old man who told me stories about the former red-light district right in my own neighborhood. Once I learned the often tragic, but also successful stories of these ladies, I decided to be their voice and remind America how important they were to our history.
First published in 1958, this is one of the first books to pay respect and present the truth about the struggles western women faced. Mr. Brown was very thorough in covering women’s roles in the west, from homesteaders and wives, to women kidnapped by Natives, to actresses and prostitutes. He also used primary sources, not the internet, to conduct his research.
All aspects of western feminine life, which include a good deal about the western male, are covered in this lively, informal but soundly factual account of the women who built the West. Among those whose stories are included are Elizabeth Custer; Lola Montez, Ann Eliza Young, Josephine Meeker, Carry Nation, Esther Morris, and Virginia Reed.
A fake date, romance, and a conniving co-worker you'd love to shut down. Fun summer reading!
Liza loves helping people and creating designer shoes that feel as good as they look. Financially overextended and recovering from a divorce, her last-ditch opportunity to pitch her firm for investment falls flat. Then…
I’m Marsali Taylor, a retired teacher of English, French and Drama. I’ve always been interested in women’s history—not queens and countesses, but what life was like for ordinary people like me. A chance to research women’s suffrage in the Scottish National Library got me started reading these women’s stories in their own words—and what stories they were, from the first women graduates to the war workers. Women’s Suffrage in Shetlandtook two years of fascinating research, and Ihope it’s the foundation for more work by other researchers, both here in Shetland and in other communities whose women fought for the vote.
These women did know their place – they’d measured it out, filled in the claim forms, assembled their tiny wood shack cabin or turf –roofed dugout, sewn their corn and dug their vegetable patch. The usual picture of pioneer women is as the mother of the family, but a staggering 12% of those Wild West pioneering homesteaders were single women or widows, and this is the story of over twenty of them. After introductory chapters, it’s told in their voices, through magazine articles, letters back home and memoirs written later. We learn about how they set out on their adventure, the reality of farming and how they coped, and their triumph as they won their claim. Fascinating.
Instead of talking about the rights of women, these frontier women grabbed the opportunity to become landowners by homesteading in the still wild west of the early 1900s. Here they tell their stories in their own words-through letters and articles of the time-of adventure, independence, foolhardiness, failure, and freedom.
I have loved the history of the West since I was a child, as my family has lived here for over a century. I devoured historical fiction about pioneer girls in grammar school (including the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder), and as I got into college, I expanded my reading universe to include books about women’s roles in the West, and the meaning of this region in overall American history. This concept is what drew me to study the cultural influence of dude ranching, where women have always been able to shine -- and where I placed the protagonist of my first novel.
This hefty tome is a comprehensive and valuable collection of articles about women who were bound by race and class, and who also defied the expectations of these categories. Native American, Latinx, Asian, and Black women fill this fascinating volume, with stories that span colonial New Mexico to modern-day Hollywood. If you need a reference work on women of color, this book is not only your starting point, but it also has an extensive bibliography for further reading.
A valuable introduction to the rapidly changing field of western history, Writing the Range explains clearly how race, class, and culture are constructed and connected. The first section examines issues raised by more than a decade of multicultural western women's histories; following are six chronological sections spanning four centuries. Each section offers a short introduction connecting its essays and placing them in analytic and historical perspective. Clearly written and accessible, Writing the Range makes a major contribution to ethnic history, women's history, and interpretations of the American West.
I have loved the history of the West since I was a child, as my family has lived here for over a century. I devoured historical fiction about pioneer girls in grammar school (including the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder), and as I got into college, I expanded my reading universe to include books about women’s roles in the West, and the meaning of this region in overall American history. This concept is what drew me to study the cultural influence of dude ranching, where women have always been able to shine -- and where I placed the protagonist of my first novel.
Although this book is about the influential women of Arizona exclusively, they stand in for the many women who have made contributions to the history and culture of the entire West. Cleere begins with indigenous women, and moves on to both historic and modern women in medicine, the arts, business, education, and the law. The short biographies of the nearly forty women profiled here are just enough to whet the appetite for more, and are written in an engaging and accessible style.
Award-winning author Jan Cleere brings her exceptional skills in research and writing to a new book about more than 35 heroic women of Arizona. From teachers and entrepreneurs to artists and healers, Cleere provides an informative text that highlights historical Hispanic, African American, Native American, and Anglo women who made their mark in the intriguing history of our state.
“Rowdy” Randy Cox, a woman staring down the barrel of retirement, is a curmudgeonly blue-collar butch lesbian who has been single for twenty years and is trying to date again.
At the end of a long, exhausting shift, Randy finds her supervisor, Bryant, pinned and near death at the warehouse…
As a nonbinary trans guy, I grew up obsessed with novels about women disguising themselves as men. I loved everything about the trope, and always felt disappointed when they had to go back to living as women. It is a trope I eagerly embraced when I wrote Shrouded Loyalties, and though I didn’t yet know the term “transgender,” I was already exploring my own gender identity through my reading and writing of this theme. The books I’ve chosen to highlight here are ones that became some of my very favorites, and also feature action-packed wartime settings like the one used in Shrouded Loyalties.
This is slightly outside the boundaries of a wartime novel, as it takes place in the Old West, but it’s a fantastic book for this list, and shouldn’t be overlooked if you love this trope. Jess Harney makes a name for herself as a notorious male sharpshooter and outlaw. Her first-person voice is one of the most interesting I’ve read, and I loved how she fit in as one of the guys while never sacrificing who she was. She barely even thinks about her gender as she so naturally considers herself male. Books like this really highlight the blurred lines between cross-dressing out of necessity or desire, and I’m excited to see more authors addressing this trope with the nuance of queerness which is often part of it.
Named a Best Book by Entertainment Weekly, O Magazine, Goodreads, Southern Living, Outside Magazine, Oprah.com, HelloGiggles, Parade, Fodor's Travel, Sioux City Journal, Read it Forward, Medium.com, and NPR's All Things Considered.
"A thunderclap of originality, here is a fresh voice and fresh take on one of the oldest stories we tell about ourselves as Americans and Westerners. It's riveting in all the right ways -- a damn good read that stayed with me long after closing the covers." - Timothy Egan, New York Times bestselling author of The Worst Hard Time
