11 books like Amy and Isabelle
The Centaur
In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur is one of John Updike's…
Shares: High school teachers, Teacher-student relationships
Annie John
Since her first, prize-winning collection of stories, At the Bottom of the River, Jamaica Kincaid's work has been met with nothing short of amazement. The New York Times hailed her "prophetic power" and the Los Angeles Times Book Review said: "No one else seems to be writing quite this way right now." With Annie John, the story of a young girl coming of age in Antigua, Kincaid tore open the theme…
Shares: Mothers and daughters, Teenage Girls
My Mother/My self
My Mother/My Self examines the first, most lasting--and most crucial--time of every woman's life, and shows how, in all the passages of a woman's life--with men, with other women, on the job, and with her own daughters--every woman can begin to change the childhood patterns of the mother/daughter bond, and become the vital, independent, fully sexual woman she wants to be.
Shares: Mother and child, Mothers and daughters
God Help the Child
Spare and unsparing, God Help the Child--the first novel by Toni Morrison to be set in our current moment--weaves a tale about the way the sufferings of childhood can shape, and misshape, the life of the adult. At the center: a young woman who calls herself Bride, whose stunning blue-black skin is only one element of her beauty, her boldness and confidence, her success in life, but which caused…
Shares: Mother and child, Mothers and daughters
The probable future
Alice Hoffman's most magical novel to date--three generations of extraordinary women are driven to unite in crisis and discover the rewards of reconciliation and love. Women of the Sparrow family have unusual gifts. Elinor can detect falsehood. Her daughter, Jenny, can see people's dreams when they sleep. Granddaughter Stella has a mental window on the future--a future that she might not want to…
Shares: New england, Mothers and daughters
The dead secret
The Dead Secret is a novel published by Wilkie Collins, first in 1857 as a series in Charles Dickens Household Words weekly magazine and later the same year as a book. Much like his later novel The Woman in White (1860), it can be considered one of the earliest example of a sensation novel, as it contains themes of illegitimacy, blackmail, and false identity.
Shares: Illegitimate children, Mothers and daughters
Watermelon
February the fifteenth is a very special day for me. It is the day I gave birth to my first child. It is also the day my husband left me...I can only assume the two events weren't entirely unrelated. Claire has everything she ever wanted: a husband she adores, a great apartment, a good job. Then, on the day she gives birth to their first baby, James informs her that he's leaving her. Claire is…
Shares: Single mothers, Mothers and daughters
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts.
At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves.
Shares: Mothers and daughters, Teenage Girls
My Dark Vanessa
"2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa…
Shares: Teacher-student relationships, Teenage Girls
Unless
Reta Winters has many reasons to be happy. Then in the spring of her forty-fourth year, all the quiet satisfactions of her well-lived life disappear in a moment: her eldest daughter Norah suddenly runs from the family and ends up mute and begging on a Toronto street corner with a hand-lettered sign reading GOODNESS around her neck.
Piercing and sad, astute and evocative, full of tenderness and…
Shares: Mothers and daughters, Teenage Girls
REST OF HER LIFE, THE
This incredibly nuanced, beautifully written novel treats moral dilemma with the riveting, character-driven plot of a Jane Hamilton or a Jodi Picoult. This novel looks at one incident and how it changes everything for Leigh, the mother of a pretty, popular high school senior, and their entire family. It’s a novel about mothers, daughters, sisters, and female friends, and the ripple effect that an…
Shares: Mothers and daughters, Teenage Girls