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Recommendations based on Ellen Fosterby Kaye Gibbons
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Charms for the Easy Life
by Kaye Gibbons
Three generations of women in the South navigate love, family, and independence in the early 20th century.
A family without men, the Birches live gloriously offbeat lives in the lush, green backwoods of North Carolina. Radiant, headstrong Sophia and her shy, brilliant daughter, Margaret, possess powerful ... (Goodreads)
A Virtuous Woman
by Kaye Gibbons
A woman's struggle to overcome poverty and take control of her own destiny.
When Blinking Jack Stokes met Ruby Pitt Woodrow, she was twenty and he was forty. She was the carefully raised daughter of Carolina gentry and he was a skinny tenant farmer who had never owned ... (Goodreads)
Cold Mountain
by Charles Frazier
A Confederate soldier's homecoming journey, filled with danger and adventure.
The novel opens in a Confederate military hospital near Raleigh, North Carolina , where Inman is recovering from battle wounds during the American Civil War . The soldier is tired of fighting for a ... (Wikipedia)
I Know This Much Is True
by Wally Lamb
A man's journey of self-discovery, coming to terms with family trauma and understanding his identity.
The novel takes place in Three Rivers, Connecticut in the early 1990s. Dominick Birdsey's identical twin , Thomas Birdsey, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia . With medication, Thomas is able to ... (Wikipedia)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith
A coming of age story set in Brooklyn, depicting a young girl's struggles and growth.
The novel is split into five "books", each covering a different period in the characters' lives. Book One opens in 1912 and introduces 11-year-old Francie Nolan, who lives in the Williamsburg ... (Wikipedia)
A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving
A boy's search for faith, set against a backdrop of unlikely events.
The story is narrated by John Wheelwright, a former citizen of New Hampshire who has become a voluntary expatriate from the United States, having settled in Toronto , Ontario , Canada and taken on ... (Wikipedia)
She's Come Undone
by Wally Lamb
A young woman's trial-filled journey to self-acceptance and self-preservation.
Dolores Price is heartbroken when her handsome, but irresponsible father, Tony, leaves their suburban home for another woman. She and her mother, Bernice, move into her uptight Catholic grandmother's ... (Wikipedia)
Icy Sparks
by Gwyn Hyman Rubio
A young girl with Tourette's syndrome navigates life in rural Kentucky during the 1950s.
The story focuses on a grown-up Icy Sparks recounting her childhood and adolescence struggling with accusations of Tourette's Syndrome . The novel begins with Icy Sparks, a 10-year-old girl living in ... (Wikipedia)
The Awakening
by Kate Chopin
A woman's journey of self-discovery, challenging the norms of the Victorian era.
When first published in 1899, The Awakening shocked readers with its honest treatment of female marital infidelity. Audiences accustomed to the pieties of late Victorian romantic fiction were taken ... (Goodreads)
The Education of Little Tree
by Forrest Carter
A young Native American boy is taken in by his grandparents and learns about their way of life and the importance of nature.
The Education of Little Tree tells of a boy orphaned very young, who is adopted by his Cherokee grandmother and half-Cherokee grandfather in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee during the Great ... (Goodreads)
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
A haunting story of loss and resilience in the aftermath of slavery.
Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio , where the protagonist Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, has been living with her eighteen-year-old daughter Denver at 124 Bluestone Road. The book ... (Wikipedia)
Crossing to Safety
by Wallace Stegner
An exploration of friendship, the power of love, and the nature of life's transitions.
Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations ... (Goodreads)
My Ántonia
by Willa Cather
A young man's reminiscences of his childhood in rural Nebraska, and of his friendships with the immigrants he met there.
Orphaned Jim Burden rides the trains from Virginia to Black Hawk, Nebraska, where he will live with his paternal grandparents. Jake, a farmhand from Virginia, rides with the 10-year-old boy. On the ... (Wikipedia)
Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
A story of two sisters navigating their lives in a small town, and the matriarchal figure that unites them.
Ruthie narrates the story of how she and her younger sister Lucille are raised by a succession of relatives in the fictional town of Fingerbone, Idaho (some details are similar to Robinson's ... (Wikipedia)
Sula
by Toni Morrison
Story of two childhood friends, exploring social and racial issues in a small Ohio town.
The novel begins when the construction of a golf course is announced, the site being the destroyed remnants of what used to be the Bottom. The Bottom is a black neighborhood on the hill above the ... (Wikipedia)
Plainsong
by Kent Haruf
Interconnected stories of rural life in small-town America, and the struggles of the people living there.
A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver. In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his ... (Goodreads)
The Stone Diaries
by Carol Shields
A woman's life story told through a series of vignettes, examining the joys and sorrows of life.
The book is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, a seemingly ordinary woman whose life is marked by death and loss from the beginning, when her mother dies during childbirth. Through ... (Wikipedia)
We Are Water
by Wally Lamb
A family's struggle to reconcile their differences and make peace with their past.
In middle age, Annie Oh—wife, mother, and outsider artist—has shaken her family to its core. After twenty-seven years of marriage and three children, Annie has fallen in love with Viveca, the ... (Goodreads)
A Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
A satirical tale of an eccentric slacker's misadventures in New Orleans.
Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found, here, "A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles ... (Goodreads)
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water
by Michael Dorris
A multi-generational story of three Native American women and their struggles with identity, family, and love.
Michael Dorris has crafted a fierce saga of three generations of Indian women, beset by hardships and torn by angry secrets, yet inextricably joined by the bonds of kinship. Starting in the present ... (Goodreads)
The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie: Three Novels
by Ágota Kristóf
A trio of novels exploring the effects of war, and the power of love in a family.
These three internationally acclaimed novels have confirmed Agota Kristof's reputation as one of the most provocative exponents of new-wave European fiction. With all the stark simplicity of a ... (Goodreads)
Skinny Legs and All
by Tom Robbins
A tale of love, loss, and mystery that revolves around a small diner in the American Southwest.
This is a gutsy, fun-loving, and provocative novel in which a bean can philosophises, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers ... (Goodreads)
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
A grand narrative of life in a small English town, exploring the lives of its inhabitants.
Middlemarch centres on the lives of residents of Middlemarch, a fictitious Midlands town, from 1829 onwards – the years up to the 1832 Reform Act . The narrative is variably considered to consist of ... (Wikipedia)
Interpreter of Maladies
by Jhumpa Lahiri
Collection of stories exploring the struggles of Indian-American immigrants in the US.
A married couple, Shukumar and Shoba, live as strangers in their house until an electrical outage brings them together when all of sudden "they [are] able to talk to each other again" in the four ... (Wikipedia)
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner
Tragic story of the decline of a southern family, exploring the human condition.
The first section of the novel is narrated by Benjamin "Benjy" Compson, a source of shame to the family due to his diminished mental capacity; the only characters who show genuine care for him are ... (Wikipedia)
The Bluest Eye
by Toni Morrison
Coming of age story of a young Black girl dealing with prejudice and racism in 1940s Ohio.
In Lorain, Ohio , nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her 10-year-old sister Frieda live with their parents, a tenant named Mr. Henry, and Pecola Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house was ... (Wikipedia)
Empire Falls
by Richard Russo
A small town's citizens struggle to find meaning and find their place in a rapidly changing world.
Set in the decaying, nearly bankrupt, small town of Empire Falls, Maine, this is the story of the unassuming manager of the Empire Grill, Miles Roby, who has spent his life in the town. The town, and ... (Wikipedia)
For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
A soldier's story of courage and survival in the Spanish Civil War.
The novel graphically describes the brutality of the Spanish Civil War. It is told primarily through the thoughts and experiences of the protagonist, Robert Jordan. It draws on Hemingway's own ... (Wikipedia)
Snow Falling on Cedars
by David Guterson
A murder trial in a small, coastal town reveals secrets of the past and its inhabitants.
Set on the fictional San Piedro Island in the northern Puget Sound region of the state of Washington coast in 1954, the plot revolves around a murder case in which Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American ... (Wikipedia)
White Oleander
by Janet Fitch
A young girl's struggles to survive in a series of foster homes, finding strength in her resilience.
Astrid Magnussen is a 12-year-old girl living in Los Angeles , California with her mother, Ingrid Magnussen, a self-centered and eccentric poet. Astrid's father, Klaus Anders, left before Astrid was ... (Wikipedia)
