By Collection Management Librarian Kathy
I love how much our community uses the library. Sometimes that means waiting for the hottest titles. Don’t fret! I can help you find a similar reading experience to THAT book you are waiting for or that you finally read and loved.
Tom Lake readalikes
The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
Why you should try it: There’s grief and tension, but lots of joy in this novel that also examines relationships between daughters and their mothers.
Description: When Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, they are blithely ignorant of all that’s to come. By 2016, their four radically different daughters are each in a state of unrest: Wendy, widowed young, soothes herself with booze and younger men; Violet, a litigator turned stay-at-home mom, battles anxiety and self-doubt when the darkest part of her past resurfaces; Liza, a neurotic and newly tenured professor, finds herself pregnant with a baby she’s not sure she wants by a man she’s not sure she loves; and Grace, the dawdling youngest daughter, begins living a lie that no one in her family even suspects. Beneath it all, the daughters share the lingering fear that they will never find a love quite like their parents’ love.
Good Company by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney
Why you should try it: A big chunk of this book is also told in flashbacks and takes place at a summer stock-like theater. Plus, it has well-drawn characters and revolves around their relationships (and assumptions about those relationships).
Description: Flora Mancini has been happily married for more than 20 years. But everything she thought she knew about herself, her marriage, and her relationship with her best friend, Margot, is upended when she stumbles upon an envelope containing her husband’s wedding ring, the one he claimed he lost one summer when their daughter, Ruby, was five.
Good Dirt by Charmaine Wilkerson
Why you should try it: Like Ann Patchett, Wilkerson is a master storyteller and writes extremely readable fiction with well-drawn characters.
Description: When 10-year-old Ebby Freeman heard the gunshot, time stopped. And when she saw her brother, Baz, lying on the floor surrounded by the shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar, life as Ebby knew it shattered as well. The crime was never solved, and because the Freemans were one of the only Black families in a particularly well-to-do enclave of New England, the case has had an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public. The last thing the Freemans want is another media frenzy splashing their family across the papers, but when Ebby’s high-profile romance falls apart without any explanation, that’s exactly what they get. So Ebby flees to France, only for her past to follow her there.
Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart
Why you should try it: Not family, but friends, ride out the early days of the pandemic in a country house AND a famous actor is involved. Shteyngart is also a masterful developer of character and writer of relationships.
Description: A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next few months, new bonds of friendship and love will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge among this unlikely cast of characters: a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a young flame-thrower of an essayist, originally from the Carolinas; and a movie star, The Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.
Family Lore by Elizabeth Acevedo
Why you should try it: Even when the families in Patchett’s novels are in upheaval, their love and dedication to each other shine through. While this book has a bit of magic in it, this book embodies those same sentiments.
Description: Sisters Matilde, Pastora, Camila, and Flor thought they knew each other well, until Flor—inspired by a documentary her daughter Ona made her watch—decides she wants a living wake, a party to bring her family and community together and celebrate the long life she’s led, while she’s still around to enjoy it. She’s not ill, as far as anybody knows, but Flor does have a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. Has she foreseen her own death, or someone else’s, or does she have other motives? She refuses to say. But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets.
Our Town by Thornton Wilder
Why you should try it: Why not read the play that takes center stage (hehe, see what I did there) in Patchett’s novel?
Description: The story of the fictional American town Grover’s Corners as told through the everyday lives of its citizens.
About Kathy
Kathy is a Collection Management Librarian who loves reading, sharing, and talking about books. Her missions in life are to create communities of readers, convince folks that her official title should be “Book Pusher,” and refute that “disco” is a dirty word.