18 books like Wish You Well
Hotel Paradise
1st book in Emma Graham series
Shares: Mountain life, Girls, Bildungsromans
Prodigal Summer Display
This lush tale interweaves the narratives of three women in southern Appalachia, where the reproductive urge rages through the verdant natural world, but where science and economics play their prominent roles, also. Barbara Kingsolver shows her highest powers in this impressive and vibrant piece. Her technical expertise teaches us a great deal about wildlife management and agricultual economics,…
Shares: Mountain life, Farm life, Domestic fiction, Social life and customs
A Cumberland vendetta
Clayton was attending a German university because his father had recognized his scientific aspirations and encouraged his curiosity of the arts. But as Clayton groomed his talents his family encountered an unexpected financial disturbance that compelled him to return to New York. Even in this calamity there was still a resource available after the family's economic collapse--ownership of mineral…
Shares: Mountain life, Social life and customs
New-England tale
The Early American Women Writers series offers rare works of fiction by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women, each reprinted in its entirety, each with a foreword by General Editor Cathy N. Davidson, who places the novel in a historical and literary perspective.
Written in 1822, A New-England Tale is the first of the many novels, tales, and short magazine pieces Catharine Sedgwick published…
Shares: Girls, Bildungsromans, Social life and customs
So Big
So Big - winner of the Pulitzer Prize - the unforgettable story of Selina Peake Dejong, her marriage, widowhood, eventual success as a truck farmer, and of her son, Dirk. In So Big, Ferber simultaneously created a vivid picture of turn-of-the-century Chicago and dealt with the contemporary issues of poverty, Americanization, family tensions, sexism, and success.
Shares: Family relationships, Bildungsromans, Domestic fiction, Social life and customs
Look Homeward, Angel
An elaborate and moving coming-of-age story about Eugene Gant, a restless and energetic character whose passion to experience life takes him from his small, rural hometown in North Carolina to Harvard University and the city of Boston. The novel's pattern is artfully simple--a small town, a large family, high school and college--yet the characters are monumental in their graphic individuality and…
Shares: Mountain life, Domestic fiction
A Student of Weather
A Student of Weather is the brilliant first novel by acclaimed storywriter, Elizabeth Hay. It tells the story of the rivalry between two contrasting sisters and of a stranger who changes both of their lives forever. Spanning thirty years, it opens in the Prairie Dust Bowl of the 1930s and, later, in the decades following the war, moves back and forth between Ottawa and New York City.
Maurice…
Shares: Farm life, Bildungsromans, Domestic fiction
Mockingbird
In Caitlin's world, everything is black or white. Things are good or bad. Anything in between is confusing. That's the stuff Caitlin's older brother, Devon, has always explained. But now Devon's dead and Dad is no help at all. Caitlin wants to get over it, but as an eleven-year-old girl with Asperger's, she doesn't know how. When she reads the definition of closure, she realizes that is what she…
Shares: Family relationships, Girls
A Painted House
Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres. But racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder cause Luke to grow up before he's ready.
Shares: Farm life, Bildungsromans
The Long Valley
A collection of interconnected short stories, all set in the Salinas Valley in California. The book includes classic Steinbeck stories such as ‘The Vigilante’ and ‘The Red Pony’.
Shares: Farm life, Social life and customs
Volevo i pantaloni
The ironic tale of a 12-year-old Sicilian girl who decides to show her independence by flouting convention, in this case by wearing trousers and flirting with boys. When she is caught kissing, the parents punish her by sending her to another village to live with an uncle, unaware he molested her when she was younger.
Shares: Girls, Bildungsromans, Social life and customs
Far from the Madding Crowd
Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy ensues,…
Shares: Farm life, Social life and customs
Tea
On a spring day in 1968, eight-year-old Isabel Gold prepares tea for her mother, certain she will drink it and recover from her mysterious sadness. But the tea remains untouched. Not long after, her mother takes her own life. Struggling to understand the ghost her mother left behind, Isabel grows up trying on new identities. Her yearning for an emotional connection finds her falling in and out of…
Shares: Family relationships, Bildungsromans
The peppered moth
"It is 1912 and Bessie Bawtry is a small child living in Breaseborough, a South Yorkshire mining town. Unusually gifted, she sits quietly and studies hard, waiting for the day when she can sit the Cambridge entrance exam and escape the kind of life her ancestors have never even thought to question. Her parents are in awe of her - who is this swan-child, is she a freak? (Where did she get her…
Shares: Bildungsromans, Social life and customs
The egg and I
When Betty MacDonald married a marine and moved to a small chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, she was largely unprepared for the rigors of life in the wild. With no running water, no electricity, a house in need of constant repair, and days that ran from four in the morning to nine at night, the MacDonalds had barely a moment to put their feet up and relax. And then came…
Shares: Farm life, Social life and customs
The Wonder Spot
Follows the quest of Sophie Applebaum for her own identity--who she is, what she loves, whom she loves, and occasionally whom she feels others should love--over the course of 25 years.
Shares: Girls, Bildungsromans, Domestic fiction
Christy
The train taking nineteen-year-old teacher Christy Huddleston from her home in Asheville, North Carolina, might as well be transporting her to another world. The Smoky Mountain community of Cutter Gap feels suspended in time, trapped by poverty, superstitions, and century-old traditions.
But as Christy struggles to find acceptance in her new home, some see her — and her one-room school — as a…
Shares: Mountain life, Bildungsromans
The selected works of T.S. Spivet
This brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel traces 12-year-old genius map-maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world, taking T.S. on a journey from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the Smithsonian's hallowed halls.
Shares: Family relationships, Bildungsromans