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Writer's pictureLauren Epperson
Jan 147 min read

Books I do NOT See Recommended Enough!

Disclaimer: Please be sure to check trigger warning on the below books prior to reading

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It is not uncommon for people to head to BookTok or Bookstagram for recommendations on the next book they read. I have found them over saturated with the same trendy books! Here are a list I do not see recommended enough on these platforms.


What is your go-to book to recommend to others?


I may lose some people after recommending this BIG one.... (over 1000 pages) But I have not met one person who read this and hated it. The HBO show does not do it justice!. It is an emotional rollercoaster with so many turns. It follows Dominick Birdsey, a forty-year-old housepainter Who is also the twin to a paranoid schizophrenic. Dom is trying to navigate life while dodging every bump thrown at him from his Mom, Step-Dad, Brother, Grandfather, Girlfriend and others. There is the Main Story but also the story of their Grandfather that is just ats good, at times better than Dom's Story. I know it is long, but give it a chance. I know you guys read ACOTAR and Priory of the Orange Tree I promise you can get through this one! If I can ever get my TBR list down I promise this is on my Re-read list. When people ask me for book recommendations or favorite books ever, this one always comes to mind.



 

I LOVE a good historical fiction book! Being a nurse it was fun to read a book with some nurse history of the profession. The Nurse's Secret is based on Florence Nightingale’s nursing principles, Bellevue is the first school of its kind in the country. Ironically enough a girl furthest from Nitingale's values, Una Kelly, Is enrolled in the school. She is a con artist and a thief running from the law and being accused of murder. She teams up with a classmate to try and solve the murders in town and clear her name, Hiding in broad daylight.


"Based on the little-known story of America’s first nursing school, a young female grifter in 1880s New York evades the police by conning her way into Bellevue Hospital’s training school for nurses, while a spate of murders continues to follow her as she tries to leave the gritty streets of the city behind…"


 


If you are from Kentucky or love Kentucky or Horses you will love this. It is a historical fiction book based on the traveling library set up in Kentucky by Elenor Roosevelt. It is so well written and has just about everything from Humor, Romance, and suspense. Moyes did a great job with her research to make this one come to life. This would be the perfect read to librarian or retired librarian or anyone dealing with censorship, banning, or hostility in their community. Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve, hoping to escape her stifling life in England. But small-town Kentucky quickly proves equally claustrophobic, especially living alongside her overbearing father-in-law. So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically. The leader, and soon Alice's greatest ally, is Margery, a smart-talking, self-sufficient woman who's never asked a man's permission for anything. They will be joined by three other singular women who become known as the Packhorse Librarians of Kentucky

“A great narrative about personal strength and really captures how books bring communities together.” —Reese Witherspoon


 

4. The People We Keep by: Alison Larkin The People We Keep: Larkin, Allison: 9781982171308: Amazon.com: Books {BUY HERE}

I am not going to lie, I was not expecting to like this book as much as I did. Honestly I can't really tell you why I liked it so much, but it is one of those books you find yourself thinking about and one I would LOVE to be turned into a movie. I loved all the characters and the relationship developments. This book reminds you there are just some people you keep in our lives (sometimes for a reason, sometimes for no reason) and others who are let go. It makes you thankful for the ones who are by your side when bad things happen.


But also.... I mean look at that cover. I would've bought it just for that.


Little River, New York, 1994: April Sawicki is living in a motorless motorhome that her father won in a poker game. Failing out of school, picking up shifts at a local diner, she’s left fending for herself in a town where she’s never quite felt at home. When she “borrows” her neighbor’s car to perform at an open mic night, she realizes her life could be much bigger than where she came from. After a fight with her dad, April packs her stuff and leaves for good, setting off on a journey to find a life that’s all hers.

Driving without a chosen destination, she stops to rest in Ithaca. Her only plan is to survive, but as she looks for work, she finds a kindred sense of belonging at Cafe Decadence, the local coffee shop. Still, somehow, it doesn’t make sense to her that life could be this easy. The more she falls in love with her friends in Ithaca, the more she can’t shake the feeling that she’ll hurt them the way she’s been hurt. As April moves through the world, meeting people who feel like home, she chronicles her life in the songs she writes and discovers that where she came from doesn’t dictate who she has to be.


“This is a novel of great empathy, about connections and coming-of-age, built families and self-acceptance. It contains heartbreak and redemption, and a plucky, irresistible protagonist…[A] propulsive, empathetic novel.” —Shelf Awareness


 

Yup, Like I said before I LOVE a good historical fiction book. Better than just being a historical fiction, It has two time period POVs! This one is a little hard to believe that it was based on true events. The back of the book will sell itself.....

Memphis, 1939. Twelve-year-old Rill Foss and her four younger siblings live a magical life aboard their family’s Mississippi River shantyboat. But when their father must rush their mother to the hospital one stormy night, Rill is left in charge—until strangers arrive in force. Wrenched from all that is familiar and thrown into a Tennessee Children’s Home Society orphanage, the Foss children are assured that they will soon be returned to their parents—but they quickly realize the dark truth. At the mercy of the facility’s cruel director, Rill fights to keep her sisters and brother together in a world of danger and uncertainty.


Based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country—Lisa Wingate’s riveting, wrenching, and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though the paths we take can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.



 

Let's stick with the theme of Historical fiction, shall we! Another great one based on the real-life Alice Network. Takes place in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947—are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption. It is a page turner, Be sure to check any trigger warnings though!


Also another dual POV!


I am almost afraid to talk too much about my feelings on this one as I do not want to spoil anything, so you're just going to have to trust me on this one!


Summary: 1947. In the chaotic aftermath of World War II, American college girl Charlie St. Clair is pregnant, unmarried, and on the verge of being thrown out of her very proper family. She's also nursing a desperate hope that her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, might still be alive. So when Charlie's parents banish her to Europe to have her "little problem" taken care of, Charlie breaks free and heads to London, determined to find out what happened to the cousin she loves like a sister.

1915. A year into the Great War, Eve Gardiner burns to join the fight against the Germans and unexpectedly gets her chance when she's recruited to work as a spy. Sent into enemy-occupied France, she's trained by the mesmerizing Lili, the "Queen of Spies", who manages a vast network of secret agents right under the enemy's nose.

Thirty years later, haunted by the betrayal that ultimately tore apart the Alice Network, Eve spends her days drunk and secluded in her crumbling London house. Until a young American barges in uttering a name Eve hasn't heard in decades, and launches them both on a mission to find the truth...no matter where it leads.



 

I had a hard time putting this one down while reading. So much going on and so many cliff hangers! This book gives us Americans a new perspective on the World and the blessings we have. With that being said, If you are currently sad, or depressed, or just got out of being sad or depressed, I would not recommend this one just yet.

Born a generation apart and with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will ultimately alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, that is often the key to survival.



 

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