Mothers
With classics like J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan and contemporary hits like Min Jin Lee's Pachinko, this collection gathers texts that grapple with the complex and archetypal role of the mother.
A Game of Thrones is a 1996 epic fantasy novel by George R. R. Martin and is the first in his long-running A Song of Ice and Fire series. The novel introduces the audience to the fictional world of Westeros, where characters become embroiled in a complicated web of plots, conspiracies, and betrayals as they pursue power. A Game of Thrones won numerous awards on publication and was adapted for television in 2011. This guide... Read A Game of Thrones Summary
A List of Cages is a 2017 young adult novel by Robin Roe. The story centers on the friendship between two teenagers, Adam Blake and Julian Harlow. Adam and Julian first become friends when Adam is Julian's reading buddy in grammar school. The friendship deepens when Julian's parents die, and he lives in Adam’s house as a foster child. Although they knew each other in grammar school, the main action of this story takes place... Read A List of Cages Summary
"All the Years of Her Life" is a short story by Canadian author Morley Callaghan, first published in his collection Now That April’s Here and Other Stories in 1936. Set in a drugstore in an unknown city, it centers around a young man named Alfred Higgins, who is caught by his boss stealing items from his workplace. Instead of calling the police, the owner, Mr. Carr, calls Alfred’s mother to discuss her son’s actions. Exploring... Read All the Years of Her Life Summary
Annie John, published in 1985, is the second book by the Antiguan American author Jamaica Kincaid (née Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson). Annie John is a coming-of-age novel that follows the life of a young girl from age 10 to 17, until she leaves her home in Antigua, bound for nursing school in England. In the novel, Annie describes her most important relationships, and the bond with her mother is chief among them. Life is heaven... Read Annie John Summary
“A Pair of Silk Stockings” (1897) is a short story (2000-words) written by Kate Chopin, first published in Vogue magazine. The story is a work of Literary Realism, set at the time of publication and told from the third-person point of view. It describes the experience of Mrs. Sommers, a married, middle-class woman raising a family on a modest income, who unexpectedly comes into $15, a considerable amount of money in 1897. The interest of... Read A Pair of Silk Stockings Summary
A Pale View of Hills (1982) is Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel. Born in Nagasaki in 1954, Ishiguro immigrated with his family to the United Kingdom when he was five years old. Despite his family’s Japanese origins, the author frequently states in interviews that his experience with Japanese culture is very limited, as he spent all his adult life in England. Simultaneously, however, growing up in a Japanese family developed in Ishiguro a different perspective compared... Read A Pale View of Hills Summary
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a 1970 middle-grade novel by bestselling American author Judy Blume. The story focuses on 11-year-old Margaret Ann Simon and her family’s move to New Jersey at the beginning of her sixth-grade year. As Margaret navigates her new public school and new friend dynamics, she struggles to form a positive self-image about her changing body and starts exploring her religious beliefs. Although it was not Blume’s first novel... Read Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret Summary
As I Lay Dying is a Southern Gothic novel by William Cuthbert Faulkner, which he published in 1930. The story follows a poor, rural family’s journey across Mississippi to bury their dead matriarch and is marked by dark humor and stream-of-consciousness style narration.Faulkner (1897-1962) was a writer from Oxford, Mississippi. His novels and works of short fiction, including The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), earned him the Nobel Prize... Read As I Lay Dying Summary
“A Sorrowful Woman” is Gail Godwin’s most anthologized short story and tackles the themes of depression, domesticity, and female identity. Godwin is a best-selling American author and multiple National Book Award finalist who often explores these themes in her novels. “A Sorrowful Woman,” a subversion of the fairy tale, details a woman’s struggles with her role as wife and mother and the expectations and disappointments that lead her to suicide. Godwin’s unnamed characters upend the... Read A Sorrowful Woman Summary
“Average Waves in Unprotected Waters,” originally published in the February 28, 1977 edition of The New Yorker, is one of American author Anne Tyler’s most anthologized stories. Through the third-person-limited point of view of the protagonist, Bet Blevins, Tyler presents the story of a single mother on the day she intends to institutionalize her developmentally disabled son, Arnold. As Bet struggles to navigate her complex emotions regarding Arnold, the story explores themes of the conflicting... Read Average Waves in Unprotected Waters Summary
Pat Conroy’s 1995 novel Beach Music is a work of historical fiction. Set primarily in South Carolina, the novel follows a community fractured by memories of the Holocaust and the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. Beach Music explores the nature of generational trauma and the way our pasts shape our futures. The power of forgiveness and the differences between duty and loyalty are also prominent themes. The setting and culture of the American... Read Beach Music Summary
Bird Box is a 2014 post-apocalyptic, dystopian horror novel by Josh Malerman. The story follows a woman’s struggle to protect two children in a world where people are driven to violence by unseen monsters, touching on such themes as paranoia, raising children to deal with an uncertain future, and the dangers of exceptionalism. Bird Box won a Michigan Notable Book Award and was also nominated for the James Herbert Award as well as the Bram... Read Bird Box Summary
Bluebird, Bluebird (2017) by Texas native Attica Locke, published by Little, Brown and Company, is a 2018 Edgar and Anthony award-winning mystery novel. It was also selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Kirkus Best Mysteries and Thrillers of 2017. The first in the Highway 59 series follows Texas Ranger Darren Mathews through the backroads of Texas in search of justice and reform... Read Bluebird, Bluebird Summary
Bluefish (2011) is a young adult novel by Pat Schmatz. This text is also sometimes classified as middle grade. The novel centers around Travis, an eighth grader who has lost his parents and dog and recently moved to a new school. Travis befriends Velveeta, a charismatic girl who is grieving the loss of her stand-in father figure, Calvin. As Travis and Velveeta’s friendship develops, they explore the challenges of coping with loss and family trauma... Read Bluefish Summary
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Breath, Eyes, Memory is a novel by Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat, first published in 1994. The book is semi-autobiographical: like the protagonist, 12-year-old Sophie Caco, Danticat herself was born in Haiti but moved to the United States at a young age. She has since written several novels and short stories about Haiti, immigration, and the complex ways that one’s identity is formed by where they are from and where they now live. The novel... Read Breath, Eyes, Memory Summary
Carmilla is a Gothic novella in which a young woman named Laura details her relationship with a vampire in the form of a young woman named Carmilla. The first event that Laura details in the novella is an episode from her childhood: a six-year-old Laura is attempting to sleep when she is visited by a mysterious young lady (later revealed to be the vampire Carmilla, or at least a representation of Carmilla) who bites her... Read Carmilla Summary
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a key figure in the British Romantic Era of poetry wrote the Gothic narrative poem “Christabel” in two parts, the first in 1797, and the second in 1800. Though it was still unfinished, “Christabel” was published in 1816.“Christabel” is Coleridge’s longest poem, at almost 700 lines. It is also the least edited of Coleridge’s work. Most of the poem contrasts the innocent piety of Christabel with the experience and supernatural abilities of... Read Christabel Summary
Clock Dance (2018) is Anne Tyler’s 22nd domestic literary fiction novel that explores the smaller details of the human condition. Clock Dance, which spans time periods from 1967 to 2017, follows Willa, a woman who’s always made herself useful to those around her without any regard for her own needs. Through Willa’s life, Clock Dance explores themes of self-fulfillment, appreciation, passivity, and community to show how people do (or don’t) change throughout time. This novel... Read Clock Dance Summary
Neil Gaiman’s Coraline is a 2002 middle-grade horror novel that follows the titular character through a strange world of wonder and fear. Coraline must use her wit, her bravery, and the help of her allies to survive and escape the strange world. As the story unfolds, it examines What It Means to Be Brave, The Drawbacks of Always Getting What You Want, and The Importance of Having Allies. Coraline is a New York Times bestseller... Read Coraline Summary
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Published in 1989, Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil, is an in-depth and long-ranging look at the crisis of infant and early-child mortality in the rural communities of the Brazilian Northeast. The author of the book is Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a former aidworker who returned to Brazil as an anthropologist. While the object of this book is infant and child mortality, its main focus is not a medical or scientific approach to... Read Death Without Weeping Summary
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982) is a hybrid form of prose poetry, autobiography, ethnography, criticism, and fictional experiments. Cha was a Korean American visual artist, poet, and filmmaker. She was tragically murdered only a week after the book was published. The book went out of print for several years before interest in Cha’s work was revived in the 1990s by feminist authors, such as Norma Alarcón. Cha’s work was honored with an exhibition including... Read Dictee Summary
Dreaming in Cuban is Cuban American author Cristina García’s first novel. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992 and garnered positive reviews from readers and critics alike. A multi-generational family saga that shifts back and forth between the experiences and eras of multiple narrators, Dreaming in Cuban explores themes of immigration and exile, family dynamics, political ideology, religion, and the impact of the Cuban Revolution on Cubans and Cuban Americans. The... Read Dreaming in Cuban Summary
In Dreamland, a young adult novel by Sarah Dessen, a teenage girl named Caitlin O’Koren reacts to the disappearance of her sister by breaking away from the path that was set out for her. The novel is broken into three parts that focus on the core of the conflicts in each section. Part I, “Cass,” traces the O’Koren family after Cass, the eldest of two daughters, runs away instead of attending Yale. Part II, entitled... Read Dreamland Summary
Ellen Foster is a work of adult fiction by US novelist Kaye Gibbons, first published by Algonquin Books in 1987. The novel was Gibbons’s debut, and it won the Sue Kaufman Prize for literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a notable citation from the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Critics praised the novel for its unsentimental outlook and the wry, distinct voice of its protagonist. Ellen, a young girl living in the American... Read Ellen Foster Summary
In Empire Falls, published in 2001, award-winning author Richard Russo focuses his sharp observations on family, faith, and hope for the future in small-town America, where the factories have left, the populations are dwindling, and the prospects are shrinking. Miles Roby almost got out of Empire Falls, but his mother’s illness brought him back a semester shy of graduating college. Now he runs the Empire Grill, a landmark that still anchors the dying town, and... Read Empire Falls Summary
IntroductionEliot Schrefer’s coming-of-age novel Endangered was published by Scholastic in 2012 and is the first book in The Ape Quartet. Set the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the story is written for a young adult audience and is a 2012 National Book Award finalist in Young People’s Literature. The novel follows Sophie Biyoya-Ciardulli’s journey as she navigates the perils of war-torn Congo in search of her mother, protecting a young, orphaned bonobo throughout her journey... Read Endangered Summary
Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with His Mother is a best-selling nonfiction book by Sonia Nazario, an American journalist best known for her work on social justice. Originally published in 2006, the book is based on Nazario’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Enrique’s Journey” series, which was written in six parts and published in The Los Angeles Times.The book, which has been published in eight languages and adapted for young adults in... Read Enrique's Journey Summary
A thrilling tale of thievery, betrayal, and mistaken identity, Fingersmith, by Welsh author Sarah Waters, tells the story of two women from two very different stations of life whose fates are inextricably linked. Set in the 1860s, Fingersmith is narrated alternately by Sue Smith (also known as Sue Trinder) and Maud Lilly. One is a young “fingersmith”—slang for a thief—lovingly protected from the worst of her world by Mrs. Sucksby; the other is an aristocratic... Read Fingersmith Summary
Barbara Kingsolver’s 2012 novel Flight Behavior presents a symbolic connection between Dellarobia Turnbow, an unhappy farm wife who secretly dreams of running away from it all, and a surprising migration of monarch butterflies that alight upon her in-laws’ property in Feathertown, Tennessee. As the butterflies struggle to survive and reproduce to continue their species, Dellarobia struggles in her efforts to deal with the consequences of her past decisions and the possibility of her new life... Read Flight Behavior Summary
Forged by Fire is a novel for young adults written by Sharon M. Draper. It is the second book in the Hazelwood High trilogy, which focuses on the lives of high schoolers in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was first published in 1997 and won the Coretta Scott King Award. Forged by Fire focuses on the life of Gerald Nickelby, a young African American boy, and his struggles with physical and emotional abuse.Plot SummaryGerald lives with his... Read Forged By Fire Summary
For One More Day, by Mitch Albom, tells the story of Charles “Chick” Benetto, a retired baseball player fallen on hard times. The story is framed by a prologue and epilogue where a narrator explains that they are telling the story from Chick’s perspective, “because I’m not sure you would believe this story if you didn’t hear it in his voice” (7). The book is comprised of short chapters told in the first person, and... Read For One More Day Summary
“Friend of My Youth” is the title short story from the collection of the same name by Alice Munro, published in 1990. The collection won the 1990 Trillium Book Award, which recognizes writers from Ontario, Canada.Narrated in the first person, the story is told from the perspective of an unnamed female writer in mourning for her mother, who died some years earlier of Parkinson’s disease. The narrator describes a recurrent dream that she used to... Read Friend of My Youth Summary
Future Home of the Living God is a 2017 speculative fiction novel by American author Louise Erdrich. Told by Cedar Hawk Songmaker, a pregnant Native American woman in her mid-twenties living in Minneapolis, the story consists of her reflections as she waits to give birth. In the novel’s pre-apocalyptic America, human evolution has reversed, meaning that the species has begun to biologically regress into an infertile state. Meanwhile, the United States government has undermined citizens’... Read Future Home of the Living God Summary
Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” was first published on June 26, 1978 in The New Yorker and was later included in Kincaid’s debut 1983 short story collection, At the Bottom of the River. According to Kincaid, her works, including “Girl,” can be considered autobiographical. Kincaid grew up on the Caribbean island of Antigua and had a strained relationship with her mother before Kincaid moved to New York City. These same cultural and familial contexts are present in... Read Girl Summary
Girl, Stolen (2010) is a young adult crime/thriller novel written by April Henry. It tells the story of Cheyenne Wilder, a blind 16-year-old girl who is abducted during a car theft, and of Griffin Sawyer, the teen who steals the car while unaware Cheyenne is inside it. The novel has received numerous awards since publication, including the Young Adult Library Services Association Best Fiction for Young Adults Award. The book was also selected as a... Read Girl, Stolen Summary
God Help the Child, the eleventh novel by critically-acclaimed writer Toni Morrison, was published in 2015. This guide is based on the 2015 Kindle book published by Borzoi Books, an Alfred A. Knopf imprint. One of Morrison’s few works with a contemporary setting and cast of characters, the novel explores themes related to the impact of racism and colorism on children, the prevalence of trauma such as child sexual abuse in the lives of children... Read God Help The Child Summary
English poet and classicist Robert Graves wrote his autobiography, Good-Bye to All That, in 1929, at the age of 34. Graves undertook the writing of his autobiography with the hope of crafting a best-selling book that would support his career as a writer. Good-Bye to All That details Graves’s life from his upper-middle-class childhood in England to his service as a military officer in World War I, and on to his first few years as... Read Goodbye to All That Summary
“Good Country People” first appeared in Flannery O’Connor’s short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find in 1955 and is widely regarded as an exemplary work of Southern Gothic literature. Like many of O’Connor’s works, “Good Country People” contains a critique of the American South and religious hypocrisy rooted in O’Connor’s worldview informed by her Catholic faith. This study guide uses the 1988 Library of America edition of Flannery O’Connor’s Collected Works. The... Read Good Country People Summary
Goodnight Mister Tom is a work of historical fiction written by Michelle Magorian and published in 1981. The novel is aimed at an audience of middle grade readers. It tells the story of eight-year-old William Beech, who, at the start of WWII, has to move with his abusive mother from an impoverished suburb of London to the countryside, where they are in the care of an elderly recluse, Thomas Oakley. The novel explores the impact... Read Goodnight Mister Tom Summary
Originally published in 1993, Heart of a Champion is a young adult novel written by award-winning author Carl Deuker, whose work is primarily about sports and intended for young adult readers. The novel is the first-person narrative of a California boy, Seth, whose father died prematurely, leaving a huge void. Seth befriends Jimmy, whose love of baseball quickly becomes Seth’s passion as well. After the death of his friend after an alcohol-induced car crash, Seth... Read Heart of a Champion Summary
Here by Richard McGuire is a graphic novel published on December 4, 2014, by Pantheon Books. The graphic novel focuses on the same corner of a room over billions of years. It depicts the area long before the house is built and long after it falls. By using different visual styles, overlapping panels, and non-chronological narration, McGuire creates a narrative that comments on the nature of time and life. Here is considered a transformative work... Read Here Summary
Originally published in 2002, Markus Zusak’s I Am the Messenger is a young adult realistic fiction novel. Ed Kennedy, the protagonist and narrator, is a 19-year-old cab driver whose average life takes an unexpected turn when he stops a bank robber. After this moment of heroism, he begins receiving mysterious playing cards with cryptic messages that lead him to people in need of his assistance. The novel is set in suburban Sydney and draws on... Read I Am The Messenger Summary
I’ll Give You the Sun (2015) is an award-winning novel penned by Jandy Nelson about relationships, art, and destiny. It follows the story of twins Noah and Jude Sweetwine who once shared a close relationship but find themselves barely speaking to each other two years after their mother’s death.Jandy Nelson is an American author who writes young adult fiction. I’ll Give You the Sun is her second novel, which won numerous awards and honors, including... Read I'll Give You the Sun Summary
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens is a collection of essays, speeches, and letters by Alice Walker. The collection was published in 1983. Walker is also a novelist and a poet. Her most famous novel, The Color Purple, was published in 1982 and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1983. The novel was adapted into a movie as well as a musical. These essays are collected from different books and... Read In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens Summary
In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio is a critically-acclaimed work of nonfiction by Philippe Bourgois, first published in 1995. It won the 1996 C. Wright Mills Award and the 1997 Margaret Mead Award. A second edition, with a prologue and an additional epilogue, was released in 2003. The book explores themes of respect, independence, autocracy, self-worth, racism, and social marginalization. Bourgois is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and... Read In Search of Respect Summary
“In the Land of the Free” is the first short story written by British Canadian author Edith Maude Eaton, who was of British and Chinese descent. As one of the first Asian North American writers, her works explored themes of racial discrimination, the difficulties of assimilation, and the effects of the legal system on immigration and kinship. “In the Land of the Free,” originally published by the Montreal Daily Witness in 1890, explores the latter... Read In the Land of the Free Summary
In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), which premiered on Broadway in 2010, has since become one of Sarah Ruhl’s best-known and most popularly produced plays. Prior to Ruhl’s Broadway debut with In the Next Room, she earned a MacArthur Genius Fellowship and a PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award, and her 2004 play The Clean House was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In the Next Room was also a Pulitzer Prize finalist and... Read In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) Summary
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“I Stand Here Ironing” was originally published in 1961 in Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen’s first collection of short stories. Since then, it has greatly impacted feminist scholars and creative writers alike and is often anthologized. The short story is an intimate exploration of one woman’s experience with motherhood between the 1930 and 1950s. Her oldest daughter, Emily, is 19 years old and has been neglected and separated from the narrator due to factors... Read I Stand Here Ironing Summary
Leaving Time, the 2014 novel by Jodi Picoult, is the story of a young girl’s search for her missing mother. When Jenna Metcalf was 3 years old, her mother, Alice, went missing under mysterious circumstances. Jenna’s parents run an elephant sanctuary in New Hampshire. One night, an employee’s body is found trampled by an elephant. Jenna’s mother is taken to the hospital with a head injury, possibly caused by the same elephant, but checks herself... Read Leaving Time Summary
Like Water for Chocolate is the debut novel of Laura Esquivel, published in Mexico in 1989 and then translated into English by Carol and Thomas Christensen. Esquivel has sold over four million copies of the novel worldwide. She is a novelist and active politician serving in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. She collaborated with her husband at the time to adapt the novel into a film in 1992, which was then nominated for a Golden... Read Like Water for Chocolate Summary
Little Fires Everywhere is a New York Times bestselling novel by Celeste Ng published in 2017. In the town of Shaker Heights, Ohio, Elena Richardson rents her family’s property on Winslow Road to Mia and Pearl Warren, a mother and daughter duo who inspire her sense of charity. Mia is an artist, and her lack of rootedness and intense focus on her art unnerve Mrs. Richardson, who lives an orderly life. Their lives become further... Read Little Fires Everywhere Summary
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro was published in 1971 and is composed of eight interlinked short stories. Munro examines the everyday life of a young girl, Del Jordan, as she comes of age in a small, Canadian town during the 1940s, against the backdrop of World War II. Inspired by Munro’s childhood, the narrator explores the setting, including local wildlife and the town’s inhabitants, and focuses on themes surrounding coming of age... Read Lives of Girls and Women Summary
Lives of the Saints (1990) by Nino Ricci is the first in a trilogy of novels about an Italian immigrant to Canada, Vittorio Innocente, and his family. The author, Nino Ricci, is the son of Italian immigrants who grew up in Leamington, Ontario, home to a large community of Italian immigrants. The novel is a coming-of-age story told in first-person narration that details Vittorio’s life growing up in an impoverished small town in Italy, and... Read Lives of the Saints Summary
Locomotion, Jacqueline Woodson’s 2003 novel in verse, follows the perspective of Lonnie Collins Motion, nicknamed Locomotion. After his parents die in a fire and his sister is adopted, Lonnie grieves and navigates life, first in a group home and then with Miss Edna, his foster mother. Through poetry, he slowly finds joy in life again, highlighting the themes of The Search for Identity and Belonging, The Healing Power of Writing, and The Enduring Support of... Read Locomotion Summary
Longbourn (2013) is a work of fiction by British author Jo Baker, who is the author of several other novels of historical fiction and literary suspense. Longbourn depicts what life is like for the servants of the Bennet family of Jane Austen’s classic novel Pride and Prejudice. While events in Austen’s book frame this novel, Longbourn follows the inner lives of housemaid Sarah, housekeeper Mrs. Hill, and James Smith, the mysterious footman who shows up... Read Longbourn Summary
The novel predominantly takes place in the slums of Montreal, Canada. Baby, the thirteen-year-old protagonist of the novel, lives with her heroin-addicted father, Jules. Her mother died when she was still a baby, leaving fifteen-year-old Jules to care for her on his own. His young age, addiction, and overall immaturity leads to an unstable and dangerous life for Baby. The novel is told from Baby’s adult point of view, and each section and subsequent chapters... Read Lullabies for Little Criminals Summary
"Lullaby” is a short story by Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko—a key figure in the Native American Renaissance. Indeed, “Lullaby” was first published at the height of this literary movement, in Silko’s 1981 collection Storyteller. This collection includes not only short stories but also poetry and photographs; the first edition was also printed in landscape (i.e. horizontal) orientation. By blending genres and playing with form in this way, Silko seeks to capture something of... Read Lullaby Summary
Margaret Atwood’s novel MaddAddam, published in 2013, completes her post-apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy that begins with Oryx and Crake (2003) and continues with The Year of the Flood (2009). The trilogy takes place in the aftermath of a destroyed technological dystopia, a world in which corporations have totalitarian control. Atwood, an award-winning Canadian author, has been a prolific writer of poetry, short stories, novels, and many other forms since the early 1960s. She is known for... Read MaddAddam Summary
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive is Stephanie Land’s first book. Land is a former professional house cleaner whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Her writing explores issues related to systemic poverty, the hardships and stigmas associated with social services, surviving in the gig economy, and the challenges of motherhood. Maid was originally inspired by a Vox article she wrote about... Read Maid Summary
First published in 1993, Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade is a young adult novel written in free verse. The novel received numerous awards, including the Golden Kite Award for Fiction and the Parents’ Choice Book Award, and was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and School Library Journal Best Book. While Wolff herself defines her novel as “prose” with “stanzas” rather than poetry, she includes poetic imagery and innovative use of language and... Read Make Lemonade Summary
Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) is a play by German author Bertolt Brecht (1898-1980). It tells the story of Anna Fierling, nicknamed Mother Courage, a peddler who travels across Europe during the Thirty Years’ War. It is a drama that questions the justification of warfare, revealing the hypocrisy of a war fought on religious grounds. As the war unfolds, Mother Courage struggles to keep her business afloat and her three children safe. The play... Read Mother Courage and Her Children Summary
In writing Mother to Mother, Sindiwe Magona drew inspiration from a real event: the murder of a white American named Amy Biehl by young black men in 1990s South Africa. The crime caused shockwaves around the world, not least because Biehl herself had come to South Africa to combat apartheid—the system of segregation and discrimination that relegated black South Africans, as well as other people of color, to second-class citizenship.On the face of it, then... Read Mother to Mother Summary
Mrs. Fletcher is a 2017 comic novel by American author Tom Perrotta. It follows the sexual reawakening of middle-aged divorcée Eve Fletcher after her son, Brendan Fletcher, departs for college. Meanwhile, Brendan finds the campus environment inhospitable to his unthinking “lacrosse bro” misogyny. Mrs. Fletcher is the seventh novel by Perrotta, best known for 1998’s Election (adapted into a movie of the same name, starring Reese Witherspoon) and 2011’s The Leftovers, which was adapted into... Read Mrs. Fletcher Summary
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH is a children’s science fiction novel written in 1971 by Robert C. O’Brien. It tells the story of a field mouse whose son becomes ill as moving day approaches, so she enlists the help of a group of highly intelligent experimental rats for help. Robert C. O’Brien was inspired to write the Rats of NIMH after a visit to the National Institute of Mental Health’s experimental rat compound... Read Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH Summary
Elizabeth Strout’s New York Times bestselling novel My Name is Lucy Barton follows the titular character on a journey of healing. Published in 2016, My Name is Lucy Barton explores the impact of trauma as Lucy navigates her reunion with her estranged mother. Longlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, My Name is Lucy Barton was adapted for the stage as a one-woman show featuring acclaimed actress Laura Linney in 2018 and 2020. Strout’s novel... Read My Name is Lucy Barton Summary
’Night, Mother by Marsha Norman opened on Broadway in 1983, earning the Tony Award for Best Play and the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play takes place in real time, with no intermission or breaks in the action, to depict the unrelenting emotional exchange between Thelma and her daughter, Jessie, after Jessie announces that she plans to commit suicide. As Jessie sets her affairs in order, Thelma tries unsuccessfully to stop Jessie’s plan from... Read Night, Mother Summary
Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes, was first published in 1936. It tells the story of Robin Vote and the lives of those she becomes entangled with as she struggles with her desires and need for freedom. While set mostly in 1930s Paris, the novel is cosmopolitan in nature, with action also taking place in Vienna, Berlin, and various parts of America. This book is an example of modernist literature from the period between world wars and... Read Nightwood Summary
No Telephone to Heaven is the critically-acclaimed 1987 sequel to Michelle Cliff’s first novel, Abeng. This novel continues the semi-autobiographical story of Cliff’s Jamaican-American heroine, Clare Savage. Clare—just as Cliff—was born in Jamaica, moved to New York, and pursued university studies in London.The novel opens with Clare traveling across the Jamaican countryside with a revolutionary resistance group. The group members have settled on farmland formerly owned by Clare’s grandmother. They use this land to grow food... Read No Telephone to Heaven Summary
On Beauty by the celebrated British author Zadie Smith was published in 2005. On Beauty was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Smith is known for writing novels and essays that analyze the intersections of identity in the contemporary world with nuance, clarity, and empathy. She is also known to be influenced by the classic English author E.M. Forster. On Beauty is loosely based on Forster’s masterpiece... Read On Beauty Summary
One! Hundred! Demons! is a semi-autobiographical genre-defying graphic novel by American cartoonist and pedagogue, Lynda Barry. Over the course of her career as a prominent cartoonist with nationally syndicated comic strips, published collections, and illustrated novels, Barry has received many national and state-wide awards for her work, including two Eisner awards and MacArthur Genius Grant.Originally published serially in Salon magazine, the collected cartoon chapters were collected and published by Sasquatch Books in 2002, and later... Read One! Hundred! Demons! Summary
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is the debut novel of Jeannette Winterson, originally published on March 21, 1985 by Pandora Press in London. The story is a semi-autobiographical novel that closely follows the childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood of Jeanette, who, like Winterson, is adopted into a Pentecostal Evangelist household and raised in the church. As she grows, she comes to terms with her sexuality as a lesbian and faces condemnation and judgment from... Read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit Summary
Written in 1823 by Claire de Duras, Ourika is a French novella based on real events about a Senegalese woman taken as a slave from her native country and raised in French high society. Ourika is one of the first European texts to feature a black protagonist, the psychological depth of whom promotes empathy with the racial “Other” and highlights the importance of nurture (versus nature) in human psychological development. In the Introduction, a young doctor is summoned to an... Read Ourika Summary
Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust is a historical middle-grade novel in verse first published in 1997. Through 110 first-person free verse poems, the narrative tells the story of two years in the life of Billie Jo Kelby, young daughter of a struggling farming family in the Oklahoma Panhandle in the mid-1930s. After a tragic accident results in the death of Billie Jo’s mother and baby brother, she and her father must find a way... Read Out of the Dust Summary
Out of the Easy, written by Ruta Sepetys and published in 2013, is a young adult historical fiction novel. Sepetys is an award-winning Lithuanian American writer of young adult historical fiction. Her honors include the Carnegie Medal, awarded to one work of children’s or young adult literature per year. Her novels are international best sellers and are widely translated. Out of the Easy is about Josie, a teenage girl living in the French Quarter of... Read Out of the Easy Summary
Pachinko, written by Min Jin Lee (Free Food for Millionaires) and published in 2017, is the story of five generations of a Korean family living in both Korea and then later Japan from 1910 to 1989. Pachinko was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2017. In Book 1, “Gohyang/Hometown 1910-1933,” the opening setting is the village of Yeongdo, Korea. The reader is introduced to the first generation of the family, the... Read Pachinko Summary
Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book (2008) is a historical fiction novel about a book conservator named Dr. Hanna Heath and her intensive research on the history of the famous Sarajevo Haggadah. The book is an imagined history following the real clues found in the manuscript, and the novel jumps back and forth between Hanna’s findings and historical events that brought the book to its current home in the National Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Brooks... Read People of the Book Summary
Author James Matthew Barrie adapted his 1904 play Peter Pan; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up to novel in 1911 with the hit Wendy and Peter, known today simply as the timeless classic Peter Pan. The mischievous character Peter Pan first appeared in Barrie's 1902 novel The Little White Bird and later in the 1906 novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. Barrie's works explore themes of coming-of-age, the importance of imagination, the clash of... Read Peter Pan Summary
Peyton Place is a novel depicting sensational and melodramatic events in a small New England town in the 1930s and 1940s; it was written by American novelist Grace Metalious and published in 1956. Peyton Place provoked controversy due to its depiction of taboo topics including sexuality, sexual abuse, and abortion. Nonetheless, the novel sold extremely well, and it was also adapted into successful films and television series. Metalious explores themes such as Shame and Ambivalence... Read Peyton Place Summary
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Kent Haruf's Plainsong was published in 1999 and addresses such powerful themes as community, acceptance and loneliness, as well as the effects of isolation on the individual. The novel focuses on several storylines and takes place in the high plains of eastern Colorado. The characters face daunting trials and tribulations, and many of their paths cross with one another.Other works by this author include Our Souls At Night, Benediction, and Eventide.In Holt, Colorado, Tom Guthrie... Read Plainsong Summary
Presumed Innocent (1987) is Scott Turow’s first novel, originally published by Farrar Straus & Giroux. The hit novel stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 44 weeks and is often credited as an early example of the modern legal thriller, helping to shape the genre’s conventions. Turow went on to publish 12 additional novels and three nonfiction works. He also continued to practice law, specializing in criminal defense, contrasting with Presumed Innocent’s protagonist... Read Presumed Innocent Summary
Psycho (1959) is a horror novel by Robert Bloch and the inspiration for filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock’s film of the same name, which came out one year later. While Hitchcock’s adaptation has largely eclipsed Bloch’s original in the public eye, fans of the film will recognize the basic plot and the major twists in Bloch’s novel. However, Bloch’s Norman Bates is (physically) unrecognizable from the version Anthony Perkins played on screen. Psycho is a slasher thriller... Read Psycho Summary
Part 1Twyla and Roberta, the two main characters in Toni Morrison's short story, "Recitatif," meet at the Saint Bonaventure orphanage (St. Bonny's) as 8-year-old girls. When Twyla first arrives at the shelter and sees Roberta, who is another race (the reader is not told which girl is white and which girl is black), Twyla immediately tells the staff, "My mother won't like you putting me in here" (243). Twyla's mother has warned Twyla about people... Read Recitatif Summary
Riders to the Sea (1904) is a one-act Irish play by John Millington Synge, originally performed in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. The play portrays the events of one day in the cottage of a low-income family living on Inishmaan, one of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, as they cope with the loss of male relatives to the rough waters between the islands and mainland Ireland. This short play incorporates themes... Read Riders to the Sea Summary
IntroductionEmma Donoghue’s Room is a 2010 novel about a boy named Jack who lives in a single room with his mother, Ma. Room is a crime thriller novel that explores themes of trauma, innocence, and adaptability through the eyes of five-year-old narrator, Jack. Room has received many awards, including the ALA Alex Award, the Indies Choice Book Award for Fiction, and The New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year award. Room was... Read Room Summary
Rosemary’s Baby is a Gothic horror novel by American writer Ira Levin. Published in 1967, it was a bestseller that was adapted into a critically acclaimed 1968 film starring Mia Farrow and directed by her husband, Roman Polanski. The novel is known for its focus on themes like women’s liberation and reproductive freedom, urban paranoia and fears of surveillance, and the relationship between conservative Christianity and the occult in the 20th century. Critics have also... Read Rosemary's Baby Summary
Rules was the first novel published by Cynthia Lord. Rules is a book for middle-grade readers that has remained popular and in print from the time of its initial publication. The Scholastic paperback version summarized here first appeared in 2018. For a debut novel, Rules was immediately accepted by young readers and by the literary community. The book won a prestigious Newberry Honor Book award and received the Schneider Family Book Award. It was named... Read Rules Summary
“Rules of the Game” is a story in Amy Tan’s 1989 collection, The Joy Luck Club, which was adapted into a film by the same name. Tan was born in California to Chinese immigrant parents and grew up in the San Francisco Bay area. She wrote the short story in response to an article she read about Chinese Americans playing chess.The story is told by Waverly Place Jong, the daughter of Chinese immigrants living in... Read Rules of the Game Summary
Salvage the Bones tells the story of the Batiste family in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, in the twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. Claude Batiste’s wife, mother of Randall, Skeetah (Jason), Esch and Junior, died a few years ago, right after Junior was born. The kids still live with their father, in an area called the Pit. They are a poor, black family, who mainly survive on what Claude can make by salvaging and then... Read Salvage the Bones Summary
In the novel Sister of My Heart, the Indian-born American author and poet Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores issues of family, womanhood, and diasporic experience, constantly affirming and exploring the redemptive power of storytelling. Divakaruni’s first collection of stories, Arranged Marriage, won an American Book Award, a PEN Josephine Miles Award, and a Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Her novel The Mistress of Spices was released as a film of the same name in 2005. Sister of My Heart was made into a television series... Read Sister of My Heart Summary
Small as an Elephant is a middle grade realistic fiction novel written by Jennifer Richard Jacobson and originally published in 2011. In addition to writing, Jacobson teaches literacy workshops across the US. She grew up in Maine, which is the inspiration for the setting of many of her stories. Small as an Elephant examines several themes related to unstable attachment, support, and hardship. The novel received more than 10 awards, including the Maine Lupine Award... Read Small as an Elephant Summary
Someone Like You is a 1998 young adult novel by Sarah Dessen. The novel follows 16-year-old Halley as she navigates the complexities and challenges of growing up. Halley’s best friend, Scarlett, discovers that she is pregnant after her boyfriend, Michael, dies in a motorcycle accident. Halley steps up to help her friend through this unexpected challenge. Halley also begins dating Michael’s best friend, Macon, and must decide whether she is ready to have sex with... Read Someone Like You Summary
Sons and Lovers is a 1913 novel by English author D. H. Lawrence. The novel explores the relationship between Gertrude Morel and her son Paul, who live in a small mining town in North England at the turn of the 20th century. Though met with a lukewarm response on release, Sons and Lovers has since been critically reappraised as one of Lawrence’s most important works and has been adapted for film and television. This guide... Read Sons and Lovers Summary
Stealing Buddha’s Dinner is a memoir by Bich Minh Nguyen that tells the story of her childhood in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a young Vietnamese refugee. Bich’s family, made up of her father; her grandmother, Noi; her sister, Anh; and her uncles, Chu Anh, Chu Cuong, and Chu Dai; flee to the United States from Vietnam in April 1975, just as Saigon is falling to the North Vietnamese. Her mother is left behind, and the... Read Stealing Buddha's Dinner Summary
Fifteen-year-old Felton Reinstein hits puberty and transforms from a nerd to an athlete but struggles to cope with his mom’s growing mental health struggles in Geoff Herbach’s young adult novel, Stupid Fast (2011). Bullied and teased most of his young life, Felton has anxiety caused by his dad’s death by suicide. Now, he grows huge and fast, joins the football team, and gains new jock friends and a smart, talented girlfriend named Aleah. Outwardly things... Read Stupid Fast Summary
Such a Fun Age (2019) is a debut novel from Kiley Reid, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons (an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC). The novel quickly garnered critical acclaim, including a NY Times Bestseller spot, and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award in 2020. Another novel by Reid is Come and Get It. Plot Summary Though it starts with Emira’s perspective, Such a Fun Age alternates almost evenly between Emira Tucker and Alix Chamberlain... Read Such a Fun Age Summary
A loose adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s Summer of the Mariposas (2012) follows five Mexican American sisters on an epic journey from Texas to Mexico. Drawing deeply from Mexican folklore, the book’s genre blends magical realism and fantasy. The book was a 2013 Andre Norton Award Nominee, won the Westchester Fiction Award, and made the list of 2012 School Library Journal Best Books. Guadalupe Garcia McCall was born in Piedras Negras in Coahuila... Read Summer of the Mariposas Summary
Surviving the Applewhites is a children’s novel written by American author Stephanie S. Tolan and was first published in 2002.The narrative follows Jake Semple, a troubled teenager forced to move in with the unconventional and eccentric Applewhite family following an incident at school. Jake struggles to fit in at first but gradually sheds his past transgressions and undergoes a transformative journey toward self-discovery and redemption. The novel touches on Personal Growth and Transformation, Individuality Versus... Read Surviving the Applewhites Summary
Swing Time (2016) is renowned author Zadie Smith’s fifth novel. Inspired by classic movie musicals and Smith’s childhood passion for musical theater, Swing Time is a story about women, how forms of privilege warp our worldviews, and the ways in which history informs our present. The novel is divided into seven parts, each narrated by the same unnamed protagonist sometimes as a child and sometimes as an adult.One of the most respected literary voices of... Read Swing Time Summary
Writer and professor Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, originally published in 2015, is a work of “autotheory”— it combines Nelson’s personal experiences of marriage and motherhood with reflections on the writing process, queer and feminist theory, and psychoanalysis and developmental psychology. This blending of genres gives the book its unconventional form; unlike a more traditional memoir, The Argonauts jumps backwards and forwards in Nelson’s life as she explores ideas and images related to pregnancy, sexuality, identity... Read The Argonauts Summary
The Awakening is Kate Chopin’s second novel. It was first published in 1899 and is considered one of the first examples of feminist fiction.The novel opens in the 1890s Louisiana, at Grand Isle, a summer holiday resort popular among wealthy Creoles who live in nearby New Orleans. Edna Pontellier, her husband, Léonce, and their two children are vacationing at the cottages of Madame Lebrun. Léonce is a kind and devoted husband, but he is often... Read The Awakening Summary
The Cage is the 1986 memoir of Ruth Minsky Sender, nee Riva Minska, detailing her family’s struggle to survive the Holocaust. Born in Lodz, Poland, Riva inhabits a close-knit community that integrates both Jews and non-Jews through shared traditions and intergenerational spaces. When Hitler’s Nazis invade Poland, thirteen-year-old Riva watches this peace crumble, as non-Jewish friends accept her family’s persecution and as Jews themselves adopt positions of power that hurt others in the community.After Riva’s... Read The Cage Summary
Bertolt Brecht’s celebrated play, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, was written in 1944. The story is structured as a play within a play and touches on themes of justice, motherhood, and moral choices in times of crisis. Brecht, a German playwright best known for his unique style of drama called “epic theater,” was based in the United States at the time, and the play was translated into English by his friend, Eric Bentley. It went on... Read The Caucasian Chalk Circle Summary
Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, or, The History of Eliza Wharton, was first published, anonymously, in 1797. The book was not attributed to Foster until 1856, more than a decade and a half after her death. The Coquette is the story of the seduction of a young socialite woman, Eliza Wharton, by the devious Major Peter Sanford. The Coquette is an epistolary novel: it is comprised of dozens of letters written by its main characters. This... Read The Coquette Summary
The Couple Next Door, Shari Lapena’s 2016 international best-seller, begins as a classic detective story. As the mystery deepens, the novel turns into a tense psychological study of a dysfunctional family, the calculating logic of emotional manipulation, the spiral of post-partum depression, and the corrupting power of greed. Paramount Television optioned the novel for a TV series adaptation in 2018. Shari Lapena is the author of eight novels for adults, including The Couple Next Door... Read The Couple Next Door Summary
The Courage of Sarah Noble, written by Alice Dalgliesh and published in 1954, follows the experience of young Sarah as she accompanies her father to Connecticut. It is based on a true story that took place in 1707, though Dalgliesh admits in the “Author’s Note” that she has “had to imagine many of the details” of Sarah’s story; thus, this is a work of historical fiction and not a biography or nonfiction text.Dalgliesh was a... Read The Courage of Sarah Noble Summary
The Darkest Child (2004) is a coming-of-age historical fiction novel by Delores Phillips. The teenage protagonist and first-person narrator, Tangy Mae Quinn faces racism and segregation in the Jim Crow South, as well as domestic abuse, poverty, and nonconsensual sex work. Despite these challenges, Tangy finds eventual escape when she leaves her abusive mother, Rozelle, and her past behind her to pursue her own goals, which are rooted in education. The novel explores The Role... Read The Darkest Child Summary
The Death of Mrs. Westaway is a 2018 mystery novel by the British author Ruth Ware. The story concerns a young woman named Hal Westaway, a poor and lonely tarot card reader who becomes embroiled in a mystery involving an inheritance, her family, and a possible murder. The novel was nominated for several awards. This guide references the 2018 Simon and Schuster eBook edition.Plot SummaryHarriet “Hal” Westaway lives in a small apartment in the British... Read The Death of Mrs. Westaway Summary
The End We Start From (2017) is a dystopian novel by British author Megan Hunter. Set in an apocalyptic version of London, the story centers on climate disaster survival and the trauma of navigating pregnancy and motherhood in the wake of a cataclysmic climate event that alters the world as we know it. The story is primarily told from the first-person perspective of an unnamed narrator and written in a lyrical style that swings between... Read The End We Start From Summary
Written in a style that evokes the oral tradition of storytelling, The Famished Road, by Nigerian writer Ben Okri, follows the peripatetic adventures of Azaro, a young boy who is finding his way amid the poverty and political passions of a newly independent nation. Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize in 1991, the novel presents an allegorical tale of both the pitfalls and the promise latent in the post-colonial moment. Nigeria was one of the... Read The Famished Road Summary
“The Fat Girl” is a short story by Andre Dubus II that was originally published in his 1977 collection Adultery and Other Choices. Dubus was an American writer of short stories and essays from Louisiana. “The Fat Girl” chronicles nearly two decades in protagonist Louise’s life, spanning childhood to motherhood. The story explores Louise’s issues with body image, food and dieting, secrecy, gender roles, and relationships.This guide is based on the version of the text... Read The Fat Girl Summary
The Fifth Season is the first installment of author N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy—a “science fantasy” series that blends scientific explanation with the magical or supernatural elements of the fantasy genre. After its publication in 2015, the novel received the 2016 Hugo Award recognizing excellence in science fiction or fantasy writing. Jemisin was the first black woman to win the prize, and went on to break another record when her sequels to The Fifth... Read The Fifth Season Summary
The Firm is a legal thriller by author John Grisham. The Firm is Grisham’s second novel, and the first to bring him widespread fame as the number one novel of 1991 on the New York Times bestseller list. The novel was made into a feature film in 1993 directed by Sydney Pollack and starring Tom Cruise. In 2012, The Firm was made into a television series that enjoyed a single season on NBC that portrayed... Read The Firm Summary
The Five People You Meet in Heaven is a novel by best-selling writer Mitch Albom. Published in 2003, it sold more than 10 million copies and appeared on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2004, the story was adapted into a made-for-television movie starring Jon Voight. In 2018, Albom penned a follow-up called The Next Person You Meet in Heaven. The novel follows the story of Eddie, a man who believes his life was... Read The Five People You Meet In Heaven Summary
In 2014’s The Fourteenth Goldfish, by Jennifer L Holm, an aging scientist turns himself into a teenager who must re-enter middle school alongside his granddaughter while they plot to get him back into his lab to finish his brilliant work. A humorous science-fiction novel for middle-grade readers, The Fourteenth Goldfish is the first in a two-book series. New York Times Bestselling author Holm has written nearly 60 books for young readers, including the May Amelia... Read The Fourteenth Goldfish Summary
“The Great Lawsuit” is an essay by Margaret Fuller, an American writer known for her contributions to transcendentalism and the women’s rights movement of the 1800s. It was first published in 1843 in The Dial, a journal she edited at the time. Fuller expanded the piece to create Woman in the Nineteenth Century, a book published in 1845.An early example of feminist writing and a vehicle for transcendental ideas, “The Great Lawsuit” centers on concepts... Read The Great Lawsuit Summary
Published in 1959, The Haunting of Hill House, a Gothic novel by Shirley Jackson, was a 1960 finalist for the National Book Award. The protagonist is Eleanor Vance, a young woman with a troubled past who, along with two other guests, is invited to spend three months in a haunted house to take part in research gathered by Dr. John Montague. Like other Gothic novels, The Haunting of Hill House takes place in an old... Read The Haunting Of Hill House Summary
The Heretic’s Daughter (2008) is the debut novel of author Kathleen Kent. Upon publication, it immediately made the New York Times bestseller list. Kent followed this title with two other best-selling historical fiction works: The Traitor’s Wife (2010) and The Outcasts (2013). She also wrote a crime fiction trilogy that was nominated for an Edgar Award. A resident of Texas, Kent was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2020 for her contribution to... Read The Heretic's Daughter Summary
Liane Moriarty’s novel The Husband’s Secret was published in 2013. It is classified as a thriller, though it could also be classified as women’s fiction because of its focus on women’s life experiences and relationships. Moriarty is perhaps best known for her novels Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, both of which have been adapted for television. Moriarty's other well-known works include The Chaperone (2012), Truly Madly Guilty (2016), and Apples Never Fall (2021)... Read The Husband's Secret Summary
Libation Bearers is an ancient Greek tragedy by the Athenian playwright Aeschylus, first produced in 458 BCE at the City Dionysia in Athens. Libation Bearers is the second part of the Oresteia, a trilogy exploring the themes of justice, retribution, and the cyclical pattern of bloodshed within the family of the mythical king Agamemnon. Following the events of Agamemnon, the first tragedy of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the play depicts the murder of Clytaemestra, the queen of... Read The Libation Bearers Summary
Published in 1998, The Men of Brewster Place is a companion to Gloria Naylor’s acclaimed 1982 novel, The Women of Brewster Place. Written as a series of vignettes, the novel tells the intertwining stories of seven Black men living in Brewster Place, a degrading apartment block in an unnamed American city. Each must fight to define his identity as a man while existing within the confines of a racist, sexist society. With themes of pain... Read The Men of Brewster Place Summary
Spanning the 1950s to the 2010s, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a 2017 novel by Arundhati Roy, follows the interconnected lives of several characters against the backdrop of contemporary India. The novel skips backwards and forwards in time freely, often pauses for detours into the stories of minor characters and includes several texts within the main text (e.g., Bhartiya’s manifesto, or Tilo’s Kashmiri-English Alphabet). At heart, however, the novel consists of two main narrative threads... Read The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness Summary
The Mother-in-Law by Sally Hepworth chronicles the turbulent family dynamics of the wealthy Goodwin family. Published in 2019, the crime thriller explores the complexities of motherhood as Lucy Goodwin struggles to uncover the truth behind the tragic death of her mother-in-law, Diana Goodwin. Hepworth’s sixth novel, the book features multiple narrators and flashbacks that offer a suspenseful examination of Lucy’s self-discovery while grappling with the violent death of her family’s complicated matriarch.Content Warning: The Mother-in-Law... Read The Mother-in-Law Summary
Nathan Hill’s debut novel, The Nix (2016), is a multigenerational family saga that is as much the story of an American immigrant family rent by betrayal and abandonment as it is a panoramic cultural biography that examines more than 50 years of America’s social, political, and pop culture from Vietnam to the rise of Donald Trump. Little was known about Hill at the time of the novel’s publication; his short stories had only appeared in... Read The Nix Summary
The Patron Saint of Liars (1992) is Ann Patchett’s debut novel. Since its publication, Patchett has written seven more novels that feature multifaceted characters and plots that explore ambiguous moral dilemmas. These aspects of her work are present in The Patron Saint of Liars as well, which follows the story of Rose, a pregnant young woman who flees her unhappy marriage to live at a home for unwed mothers. The novel was a bestseller and... Read The Patron Saint of Liars Summary
The Pearl That Broke Its Shell, first published in 2014, is the debut novel by Afghan-American novelist Nadia Hashimi. Set in Kabul in 2007, it centers on a girl named Rahima and her sisters, who struggle in a family run by their drug-addicted father, Arif. With no brothers, their ability to leave the house, attend school, or earn money is limited. Rahima finds hope in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows her to... Read The Pearl That Broke Its Shell Summary
The Perfect Nanny is a thriller written by Franco-Moroccan journalist and author Leïla Slimani. Published in 2016, the novel is inspired by the 2012 murders of two white American children in New York City by their caretaker, a naturalized American citizen born in the Dominican Republic. Slimani resets the narrative in Paris, France, and the nanny she depicts is a native French woman and white. Slimani reframes the crime to explore themes of racism, classicism... Read The Perfect Nanny Summary
The Red Tent (1997) is an adult historical novel by Jewish American author Anita Diamant. It describes the life of Dinah, daughter of Jacob, who appears in the biblical Book of Genesis. While her mention in the Bible only concerns her abduction by a Canaanite man and her brothers’ act of atrocity in response, Diamant imagines a full life for Dinah—including a childhood raised by several mothers, her first marriage, and life in Egypt, where... Read The Red Tent Summary
D. H. Lawrence published “The Rocking Horse Winner” in 1926, just four years before his death in 1930. He had written a story, “Glad Ghosts,” for inclusion in Lady Cynthia Asquith’s supernatural fiction anthology Ghost Book. She did not like the story, partly because of the celebration of male sexuality and other erotic undertones. Lawrence wrote “The Rocking Horse Winner” for her instead. Lawrence sets the story in a haunted house, appropriate for a “ghost”... Read The Rocking Horse Winner Summary
Andrew Clements’s The School Story is a 2001 middle grade fiction novel about two sixth-grade girls who set out to get a book published. The School Story is Andrew Clements’s fourth full-length novel. Prior to writing novels, Clements worked extensively on picture books, and his familiarity with the publishing industry allowed him to create a realistic yet fantastical story about two children trying to navigate it. The School Story explores themes of loss, honesty, and... Read The School Story Summary
Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl is actually two separate (though interrelated) narratives: a short story set during the Holocaust, and a novella set roughly 40 years later in Miami, Florida. In the short story, also titled “The Shawl,” a young Jewish woman named Rosa Lublin is sent with her niece Stella and her infant daughter Magda to a concentration camp. Against all odds, Magda survives much longer than her mother expects, thanks largely to the shawl... Read The Shawl Summary
IntroductionPublished in 1987, The Shell Seekers was written by Rosamunde Pilcher and is her first bestseller. Inspired by Pilcher’s conversation with Tom Dunne at St. Martin’s Press about her children’s desire to see their mother become famous, the novel is the author’s attempt to create a story for women based on the experiences of her generation. Set in 1984, it tells the story of Penelope Stern Keeling and her children (Nancy, Olivia, and Noel) and... Read The Shell Seekers Summary
The Sound of Gravel is a memoir by Ruth Wariner about her experiences growing up in a polygamist colony in Mexico. Originally published in 2015, the memoir is a rare, detailed examination of the life of children in polygamist colonies, and it examines several themes, including The Consequence of Childhood Neglect, The Flaws and Dangers of Fundamentalism, Courage and Resilience in the Face of Adversity, and The Joys, Pains, and Sacrifices of Familial Love. Ruth... Read The Sound of Gravel Summary
The Strangers is a young adult mystery novel published in 2019 by the American author Margaret Peterson Haddix. It tells the story of the three Greystone children who seek to unravel a kidnapping mystery. It is Volume 1 in the Greystone Secrets series, which Haddix returned to in 2020 with Volume 2, The Deceivers. Haddix is the author of more than 40 books for kids and teens, including the Shadow Children series, the Missing series... Read The Strangers Summary
The Talisman is a 1984 novel co-written by Stephen King and Peter Straub. It is a fantasy novel with horror elements and has connections to the works in King’s Dark Tower series. The Talisman is a road trip book that tells the story of Jack Sawyer and his quest to save his mother. The Talisman examines themes of lost innocence, coming of age, friendship, the corrupting nature of power, and more.The Talisman has a sequel... Read The Talisman Summary
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane is a novel by contemporary American writer Lisa See. See is one-eighth Chinese, and most of her books feature Chinese history and traditions. First published in 2017, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane centers around the story of a young girl named Li-yan, who lives with her family in remote tea mountains of China. In their everyday life, her village relies on rituals, belief, and taboos, and they are... Read The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane Summary
The Thirteenth Tale, written by Diane Setterfield, was published in 2006 by Emily Bestler Books/Washington Square Press. The book rose to #1 on The New York Times Best Seller list just one week after publication and won the Quill Award for debut author of the year. Before publishing this first book, Setterfield was an academic, specializing in 20th-century French literature. Since the publication of her first book, Setterfield has published two further books, Bellman &... Read The Thirteenth Tale Summary
The Truth About Forever (2004) is a young adult contemporary romance by Sarah Dessen. The novel follows Macy Queen, a teen girl struggling to heal from the tragic death of her father, only to find that the answers lie not in chasing perfection and control but embracing the unpredictable and chaotic joys of life. The Truth About Forever is Sarah Dessen’s sixth published novel and won the 2004 Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Urban... Read The Truth About Forever Summary
Ayana Mathis’s 2012 novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie follows the lives of the Shepherds, a black family struggling to succeed in Philadelphia between 1925 and 1980. At the center of the family is their inscrutable matriarch, Hattie, who remains an enigma to her children even as they grow into adulthood. With only two exceptions, each of the book’s chapters delves into the mind of one of Hattie’s children (and one granddaughter) over a span... Read The Twelve Tribes of Hattie Summary
The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976) won acclaims such as the US National Book Award and the National Book of Critics Circle Award. Its author, Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990), was an Austrian-born psychoanalyst and public intellectual who worked primarily in the United States. Bettelheim wrote The Uses of Enchantment to persuade parents and educators that the European fairy tale, with all its fantastical and violent content, was a greater aid... Read The Uses of Enchantment Summary
The War I Finally Won is a work of historical fiction written by Kimberley Brubaker Bradley. The novel is intended for middle grade readers. It was published in 2017, and has won numerous awards, including qualifying for the New York Times Best Seller list, winning the California Young Reader’s Medal, and being named one of the Washington Post’s Best Children’s Books of the Year. The War I Finally Won is a sequel to Bradley’s highly... Read The War I Finally Won Summary
The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill follows the gothic literary tradition. Hill explores traditional horror tropes, such as abandoned estates and ghost hauntings, set in an unspecified time in England’s countryside. The horror novella focuses on the first-person point-of-view of Arthur Kipps as he reflects on a ghost haunting he experienced as a young man. Hill explores themes of loss and mourning, the impact of holding onto the past, and the clash between... Read The Woman in Black Summary
This One Summer is a Canadian young adult graphic novel written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by her cousin, Jillian Tamaki. Mariko Tamaki has written several graphic novels, and has worked for both Marvel and DC Comics. This One Summer was originally published in 2014 by Groundwood Books, and follows the summer experiences of two young girls approaching adolescence and watching their parents cope with the various pressures of adulthood. The novel has been the... Read This One Summer Summary
An international bestseller, Ashley Rhodes-Courter’s 2008 memoir, Three Little Words, provides a moving account of her early life in the foster care system. Ashley is born to a teenage mother, Lorraine, who is not well placed to look after her. After her mother’s new partner, Dusty, moves in, things soon deteriorate. When the family moves to Florida, Lorraine and Dusty are both arrested, and Ashley is placed in foster care along with her younger brother... Read Three Little Words Summary
Doris Lessing’s short story “Through The Tunnel” was first published in 1955 in The New Yorker. Widely considered a seminal postwar writer, the British Zimbabwean author explored a wide range of topics but is best known for her interest in the political issues of the 20th century, from race to gender to political systems. However, “Through the Tunnel” concerns individual psychology, and the coming-of-age story follows an English boy and his mother as they vacation... Read Through the Tunnel Summary
British playwright Caryl Churchill’s groundbreaking play Top Girls, which opened in 1982 both at the Royal Court Theatre in London (August) and Off-Broadway at the Public Theatre in New York (December), is Churchill’s second internationally acclaimed play after Cloud Nine (1979). It won the 1983 Obie Award for Best Play of the Year, and it remains one of Churchill’s best-known and most widely produced plays, often anthologized as a canonical contemporary play. Top Girls was... Read Top Girls Summary
Turtle in Paradise is a 2010 historical fiction children’s novel by Jennifer L. Holm. Set in the Florida Keys during the Great Depression, the novel follows an 11-year-old girl’s struggles and successes as she visits her aunt and cousins in the town where her mother grew up. The novel won the Golden Kite Award and is a Newbery Honor Book as well as a Junior Library Guild selection.This guide refers to the 2010 Random House... Read Turtle in Paradise Summary
Unsheltered was written by American author Barbara Kingsolver and first published in 2018. The novel explores themes of family, marriage, science in society, social justice issues, overcoming personal challenges, and new possibilities. Kingsolver is the recipient of the National Humanities Medal, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and winner of the Orange Prize, Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and PEN/Faulkner award, and she has received many other recognitions by national and international associations and publications. Unsheltered is her... Read Unsheltered Summary
Vanity Fair is a serialized novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, published from 1847-1848. The novel was subtitled Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, then changed to A Novel without a Hero in 1848. The novel’s characters generally lack positive qualities and are obsessed with social climbing and the acquisition of wealth. Vanity Fair has been adapted for film, television, and theatre. This guide uses the 2001 Penguin Classics edition. Content Warning: The source material... Read Vanity Fair Summary
Walk Two Moons is perhaps the most famous work of Sharon Creech, a celebrated author of young adult fiction. The novel blends elements of both a coming-of-age narrative and a road story, and is set in the same literary universe as several of Creech’s other works, including Absolutely Normal Chaos (1990) and Chasing Redbird (1997). Following its 1994 publication, Walk Two Moons won numerous awards, including the 1995 Newbery Medal and the 1995 Children’s Book... Read Walk Two Moons Summary
Originally published in 1994, Warriors Don’t Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals primarily focuses on the 1957-58 school year at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, during which Beals was a member of the Little Rock Nine—the first group of Black students to attend the formerly all-white high school of 2,000 white students. Beals’s book, written for young-adult readers, speaks of her early life and her many adult accomplishments. Encouraged by school administrators and local... Read Warriors Don't Cry Summary
Water by the Spoonful is a play by Quiara Alegría Hudes. First produced in 2011, it is the secondplay of a series, known as “The Elliot Trilogy.” Water by the Spoonful tells the story of multiple characters connected by familial bonds and online community, and their experiences with trauma and recovery.The play opens with Elliot and Yaz Ortiz, two cousins, meeting at the college where Yaz works as an adjunct music instructor. Yaz has found... Read Water By The Spoonful Summary
Published in 2014, Laura McBride’s first novel, We Are Called to Rise, narrates the story of four Las Vegas residents with different backgrounds whose lives become interconnected after a series of unexpected events leads to a family tragedy. Though they experience seemingly unrelated situations, they eventually play a role in each other’s lives to help heal the trauma created by loss, grief, and family abuse. This guide references the Scribd version of the Simon &... Read We Are Called to Rise Summary
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a 2003 novel by Lionel Shriver. It is an epistolary novel, comprising the letters that Eva Khatchadourian writes to her husband Franklin in the aftermath of their son’s crime. The novel explores themes of nihilism, motherhood, the relationship between violence and depravity, and much more. The book won the Orange Prize for Literature in 2005 and was adapted into an acclaimed feature film starring Tilda Swindon and John... Read We Need To Talk About Kevin Summary
Lesley Nneka Arimah is a Nigerian writer who has lived in the United Kingdom and the United States. What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky is her debut collection of short stories, many of which have received literary awards, such as the O. Henry Prize and two awards for African writers: the Caine Prize and the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. At the heart of her stories, both realistic and speculative, are relationships... Read What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky Summary
Where’d You Go, Bernadette, published in 2012, is the second novel by Maria Semple, a former television writer who worked on shows such as Mad About You and Arrested Development. A bestseller praised by numerous critics as one of the best books of the year, Where’d You Go, Bernadette is a fast-paced comic novel with a complex narrative structure. The book follows an epistolary format, meaning the text is largely composed of letters, emails, and... Read Where'd You Go, Bernadette Summary
Where the Heart Is was published in 1995 and is the first novel by award winning American novelist Billie Letts. The novel is set in Letts’s home state of Oklahoma and follows the story of teenager Novalee Nation and her ne’er-do-well boyfriend, Willy Jack Pickens. The novel was chosen as a selection for Oprah’s Book Club in December of 1998. It also won the Walker Percy Award in 1994. The novel was made into a... Read Where the Heart Is Summary
Whistling Past the Graveyard (2013) is a coming-of-age novel by Midwest American fiction writer Susan Crandall. The title comes from an English phrase that references how people often try to act unafraid in dangerous situations. The story follows nine-year-old Starla as she runs away from life with her strict grandmother and travels with a cast of characters to find her estranged mother in Nashville. This story takes place during the civil rights movement, exposing Starla... Read Whistling Past the Graveyard Summary
White Oleander was written by Janet Fitch and first published in 1999. It is a young adult realistic fiction novel that functions as a bildungsroman and focuses on the story of a young girl who is separated from her mother and placed in a series of dysfunctional foster homes. The novel was chosen for Oprah’s Book Club in 1999 and achieved national bestseller status afterward. It was also adapted into a 2002 film of the... Read White Oleander Summary
Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991) is a family history and autobiography by Chinese writer Jung Chang. Set against the backdrop of 20th-century China, in particular the first three decades of Communist rule (1949-1978), Wild Swans appeared in print at an important historical moment. Communism was under siege worldwide. In 1991, the year of the book’s original publication, the Soviet Union collapsed. Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist government’s violent crackdown on pro-freedom demonstrators at Tiananmen... Read Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China Summary
Wintergirls is a young-adult novel by Laurie Halse Anderson published in 2009 by Penguin Books. Wintergirls is the winner of the 2010 Milwaukee County Teen Book Award and has received several other award nominations. Wintergirls follows the mental health journey of Lia Overbrook as she attempts recovery from anorexia, depression, and other mental health issues. Lia spends the weeks during Thanksgiving and Christmas struggling to gain closure over her former best friend Cassie’s death. Lia... Read Wintergirls Summary
