If You Like Barbara Kingsolver

updated 4/09

Before You Know Kindness  by Christopher Bohjalian
Bohjalian's eighth novel is a beautifully observed, delicately balanced portrait of a family that begins with two EMTs leaning over animal rights' activist Spencer McCullough and winds back through the ordinary days leading up to the extraordinary accident, and then forward again as Spencer and his family come to terms with what has happened. As ambitious as other Bohjalian novels, Before You Know Kindness spirals out to encompass the larger issues of Spencer's political loyalties and the heartless, passionate world of political spin.

The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
A huge, brash thunderstorm of a novel, stinging with honesty and resounding with drama. Spanning forty years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born. Filled with the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina low country as well as the dusty glitter of New York City, The Prince of Tides is Pat Conroy at his very best.

The Antelope Wife by Louise Erdrich
This novel centers on the Roys and the Shawanos, two closely related Ojibwa families living in modern-day Gakahbekong, or Minneapolis. Urban Indians of mixed blood, they are "scattered like beads off a necklace and put back together in new patterns, new strings," and Erdrich follows them through two failed marriages, a "kamikaze" wedding and several tragic deaths. But the plot also loops and circles back, drawing in a 100-year-old murder, a burned Ojibwa village, a lost baby, several dead twins and another baby nursed on father's milk. The familiar Erdrich themes are all here – love, family, history and the complex ways these forces both bind and separate the generations, stitching them into patterns as complex as beadwork.

Crooked Little Heart by Anne Lamott
At 13, Rosie plays a gangly, pigeon-toed second fiddle to her sexy friend Simone. The two are junior tennis champs who often cart home trophies. But driven by the gnawing fear that she's a loser, Rosie starts to cheat. Meantime, boy-crazy Simone dabbles in off-court disaster. Up in the bleachers a weird loner named Luther obsessively follows Rosie's games, while at home her mother wrestles her own demons.

Patty Jane’s House of Curl by Lorna Landvik
Patty Jane Dobbin should have known better than to marry a man as gorgeous as Thor Rolvaag, but she was too smitten to think twice. Yet nine months into their marriage, with a baby on the way, Thor is gone. It's a good thing Patty Jane has her irrepressible sister, Harriet, to rely on. For it's been said that a fine haircut can cure any number of ills, and before long the Minnesota sisters have opened a neighborhood beauty parlor complete with live harp music and an endless supply of delicious Norwegian baked goods. It's a wonderful, warmhearted place where you can count on good friends, lots of laughter, tears and comfort when you need it – and the unmistakable scent of somebody getting a permanent wave....

The Honk and Holler Opening Soon by Billie Letts
The neon sign had at first seemed appropriate, but 12 years later, the once-busy highway cafe outside Sequoyah, Oklahoma, is little-traveled, and "opening soon" is a tired joke. Today the sign is as battered and beaten as the cafe and its owner, Caney Paxton, a Vietnam War veteran who hasn't ventured outside since its opening. The characters who drift in and out of the Honk don't change much: Molly O, a four-times-married earth mother; Life Halstead, a widower who eats three meals a day in the cafe so he can be near Molly O; and Hooks Red Eagle, Soldier Starr and Quinton Roach, Cherokee veterans of World War II. With Christmas only days away, their lives are to be forever changed with the arrival of Vena Takes Horse, a Crow woman on a quest, and Bui Khanh, a Vietnamese refugee looking for home. A story that crackles and sizzles like burgers on a red-hot grill, The Honk and Holler Opening Soon captures a small town's prejudice and tolerance, violence and big-heartedness.

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
Fourteen-year-old Lily Owens, neglected by her father and isolated on their Georgia peach farm, spends hours imagining a blissful infancy when she was loved and nurtured by her mother, Deborah, whom she barely remembers. These consoling fantasies are her heart's answer to the family story that, as a child under unclear circumstances, Lily accidentally shot and killed her mother. All Lily has left of Deborah is a strange image of a Black Madonna, with the words "Tiburon, South Carolina" scrawled on the back. The search for a mother and the need to mother oneself are crucial elements in this well-written coming-of-age story set in the early 1960s against a background of racial violence and unrest.

Bad Girl Creek by Joanna Mapson
There’s not a woman alive who wouldn’t want to spend time with the ladies down at Bad Girl Creek. This is a place where the wounded are welcome, but only if they bring their pets, and the price of admission is a willingness to work the flower farm that supports them. Phoebe, Ness, Nance and Beryl, four women of wit and grit, transcend their individual pain to revel in the promise their combined lives make possible.

The Ballad of Frankie Silver by Sharyn McCrumb
In 1832, an 18-year-old girl was charged with murdering her young husband. In 1833, Frankie Silver became the first woman in the state of North Carolina to be hanged for murder. But was she guilty? More than one hundred years later, Tennessee Sheriff Spencer Arrowood is determined to reveal the truth behind unanswered questions. Obsessed by the story of Frankie Silver, Arrowood is investigating a case that has many parallels to the long ago murder. Lafayette Fate Harkryder, convicted of murdering a young couple hiking the Appalachian Trail, is scheduled to be executed, and Sheriff Arrowood has been summoned to be his witness. But is an innocent man about to die? The time is near and the executioner may yet carry out his solemn duty before Arrowood finds answers from the past that can save Fate Harkryder from Frankie Silver's tragic end.

Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott
A woman recalls her 15th summer with the wry and bittersweet wisdom of hindsight. The beautiful child of older parents, raised on the eastern end of Long Island, Theresa is her town's most sought-after babysitter – cheerful, poised, an effortless storyteller, a wonder with children and animals. Among her charges this fateful summer is Daisy, her younger cousin, who has come to spend a few quiet weeks in this bucolic place. While Theresa copes with the challenge presented by the neighborhood's waiflike children, the tumultuous households of her employers, the attentions of an aging painter, and Daisy's fragile body and spirit, her precocious, tongue-in-check sense of order is tested as she makes the perilous crossing into adulthood.

We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates
As in previous works, Oates here covers many years and retraces the complicated, twisting paths that bring her characters to their present plight. But We Were the Mulvaneys departs from earlier works in the brilliance and vividness with which it evokes the tensions and pleasures of family life and family relationships. The Mulvaneys manage to be both "every family" and minutely realized individuals with their own quirky obsessions and personal tragedies. The book is also packed with the images and ideas of the decades it covers – the music, products, politics, social norms and mores of the late 1950s through the early 1990s. This large, sharply etched, immensely readable book is an examination of the American dream, and of the harsh but also beautiful realities that have transformed that dream over those past four decades.

Unless by Carol Shields
The oldest daughter of 44-year-old Reta Winters suddenly, inexplicably, drops out of college and ends up on a Toronto street corner panhandling, with a cardboard sign around her neck that reads "goodness." The quiet comforts of Reta's small-town life and the constancy of her feminist perspective sustain her hope that her daughter will snap out of this, whatever "this" is. Threaded into her family's crisis is her ongoing internal elegy on the exclusion of women from the literary canon, which she transposes to mean her daughter's exclusion from humanity. Reta wonders if her daughter has discovered, as she herself did years before, that the world is "an endless series of obstacles, an alignment of locked doors," and has chosen to pursue the one thing that doesn't require power or a voice: goodness.

Brother and Sister by Joanna Trollope
Brought up by the same parents but born to two different mothers, Nathalie and David have grown up as brother and sister and share a fierce loyalty. Their decision as adults to try to find their birth mothers is no straightforward matter. It affects, acutely and often painfully, their spouses and children, the people they work with and, most poignantly, the two women who gave them up for adoption all those years ago. Exploring her subject with inimitable imagination and humanity, the celebrated author of Marrying the Mistress and The Rector's Wife once again works her magic.