Still waiting to get your hands on Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful?
Consider reading one (or more) of the following books while you wait! MML owns several, but not all, of these titles. If it’s one we don’t have, you can request it from another library in the Minerva consortium and likely still get it before Hello Beautiful is available.
Most of the books listed below fall under the category of domestic fiction – family drama, mothers and daughters, etc. The other recurring theme is coming of age. The fancy literary term for this, in German, is Bildungsroman, in case you were curious. A classic Bildungsroman included in this list of readalikes is Louisa May Alcott’s iconic Little Women (serialized between 1868 and 1869). This beloved American classic would pair well with Napolitano’s latest book.
8 Titles avail. at the library
| TITLE | AUTHOR | CALL NO. & LOCATION | SUMMARY/BLURB |
| All Adults Here (2020) | Straub, Emma | STR (Fiction) | When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days, years earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children |
| Ask Again, Yes (2019) | Keane, Mary Beth | KEA (Fiction) | A family saga about two Irish American families in a New York suburb, the love between two of their children, and the tragedies that threaten to tear them apart and destroy their futures. |
| The Dutch House (2019) | Patchett, Ann | PAT (Fiction) | A tale set over the course of five decades traces a young man’s rise from poverty to wealth and back again as his prospects center around his family’s lavish Philadelphia estate. |
| Little Women (1868-69, 2008 ed.) | Alcott, Louisa May | J ALC (Juvenile Fiction) | Chronicles the joys and sorrows of the four March sisters as they grow into young ladies in nineteenth-century New England. |
| The Lost Family (2018) | Blum, Jenna | BLU (Fiction) | Resigning himself to solitude, chef and Auschwitz survivor, Peter Rashkin, in 1965 Manhattan, devotes himself to running Masha’s restaurant, until he meets and marries June, but the horrors of his past soon overshadow him, June and their daughter. |
| Saints for All Occasions (2017) | Sullivan, J. Courtney | SUL (Fiction) | Moving from Ireland to America upon coming of age, a shy and responsible older sister and a gregarious young sister who thrives in their new Boston home endure the long-term repercussions of a fateful decision when the younger sister becomes pregnant. |
| Someone (2013) | McDermott, Alice | McDER (Fiction) | The story of a Brooklyn-born woman’s life — her family, her neighborhood, her daily trials and triumphs — from childhood to old age. |
| Writers & Lovers (2020) | King, Lily | KIN (Fiction) | Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey’s fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. |
1 Title available Through the MINERVA network
| TITLE | AUTHOR | # of Minerva libraries holding this title | SUMMARY/BLURB |
| The Ocean in Winter (2021) | De Veer, Elizabeth | 2 | The lives of the three Emery sisters were changed forever when Alex, eleven at the time, found their mother drowned in the bathtub of their home. Decades may have passed, but the unresolved trauma of their mother’s death still looms over them, creating distance between the sisters. |
Check out Fantastic Fiction to find your favorite authors’ recommended reads. For example, if you want to know what Stephen King reads when he isn’t writing, check it out! This fantastic resource is where I pulled the following 17 titles from!
Napolitano’s Recommendations (9 Titles avail. at the library)
| TITLE | AUTHOR | CALL NO. & LOCATION | SUMMARY/BLURB |
| Beyond That, the Sea (2023) | Spence-Ash, Laura | SPE (New Fiction) | The story of two families living through World War II on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and the shy, irresistible young woman who will call them both her own. |
| Friends and Strangers (2020) | Sullivan, J. Courtney | SUL (Fiction) | Elisabeth struggles to adjust to motherhood and living in a small town. She loses interest in her work, and spends hours scrolling Facebook and Instagram. Enter Sam, a senior at the local women’s college, whom Elisabeth hires to babysit. Sam is struggling to decide between the path she’s always planned on and a romantic entanglement that threatens her ambition. |
| The Good Left Undone (2022) | Trigiani, Adriana | TRI (Fiction) | From present day Viareggio to Glasgow during World War II, a multigenerational sweeping tale of love lost, family secrets, and reconciliation over decades. |
| The Great Reclamation (2023) | Heng, Rachel | HEN (New Fiction) | With the future of their fishing village in jeopardy after the Japanese army invades Singapore, Ah Boon, gifted with the unique ability to locate bountiful, movable islands that no one else can find, and Siok Mei, the spirited girl he has come to love, must decide who they want to be. |
| If I Had Your Face (2020) | Cha, Frances | CHA (Fiction) | In Seoul, South Korea, four young women make their way in a world defined by impossibly high standards of beauty, secret salons catering to wealthy men, strict social hierarchies and K-pop fan mania. Together, their stories tell a gripping tale at once unfamiliar and unmistakably universal–their tentative friendships perhaps these women’s only saving grace. |
| It All Comes Down to This (2022) | Fowler, Therese Anne | FOW (New Fiction) | Meet the Geller sisters: Beck, Claire, and Sophie, a trio of strong-minded women whose pragmatic, widowed mother, Marti, will be dying soon and taking her secrets with her. Marti has ensured that her modest estate is easy for her family to deal with once she’s gone–including a provision that the family’s summer cottage on Mount Desert Island, Maine, must be sold, the proceeds split equally between the three girls. |
| Morningside Heights (2021) | Henkin, Joshua | HEN (Fiction) | When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976 after graduating from Yale, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. But when she falls in love with Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn’t have anticipated. |
| Sam (2023) | Goodman, Allegra | GOO (New Fiction) | Grappling with self-doubt and insecurity as she grows into her teens, Sam, yearning for her climbing coach’s attention, dealing with her father’s absence and raging against her mother’s constant pressure, must decide who she wants to be in the face of what she’s expected to do. |
| What Comes After (2021) | Tomkins, JoAnne | TOM (Fiction) | In coastal Washington state, Isaac lives alone with his dog, grieving the recent death of his teenage son. Next door, Lorrie, a working single mother, struggles with a heinous act committed by her own teenage son. The two are emotionally isolated by their great losses–until an unfamiliar sixteen year-old girl shows up, bridges the gap, and changes everything. |
Napolitano’s Recommendations (10 Titles available Through MINERVA)
| TITLE | AUTHOR | # of Minerva libraries holding this title | SUMMARY/BLURB |
| The Book of V (2020) | Solomon, Anna | 16 | This propulsive historical novel intertwines the lives of the Bible’s Queen Esther, a senator’s wife in the 1970s, and a Brooklyn mother in 2016, whose stories trace surprising and moving parallels across centuries. |
| Gold Diggers (2021) | Sathian, Sanjena | 21 | An Indian-American serio-comic and magical realist epic love story about the perils of ambition, tracing the mysterious alchemy of its characters’ transformation from high school in an Atlanta suburb through young adulthood in the Bay Area. |
| The Half Moon (2023) | Keane, Mary Beth | 20 (and on order at MML) | Malcolm Gephardt, has always dreamed of owning a bar and when his boss finally retires, Malcolm buys the Half Moon. His wife, Jess, has devoted herself to her law career. But, after years of trying to have a baby, she is struggling to accept the idea that parenthood may not be in the cards for them. |
| In the Quick (2021) | Day, Kate Hope | 7 | A young, ambitious female astronaut’s life is upended by a love affair that threatens the rescue of a lost crew. |
| Life and Other Love Songs (2023) | Gray, Anissa | 8 | When her husband disappears on his 37th birthday, Deborah and her daughter, in the days, months and years to follow, look backward and forward as they piece together the life of the man they love, but whom they come to realize they might never have truly known. |
| Marrying the Ketchups (2022) | Close, Jennifer | 18 (and on order at MML) | An irresistible comedy of manners about three generations of a Chicago restaurant family and the private jokes, ancient grudges, broken hearts, and deep, abiding love that feeds them all. |
| Miss Benson’s Beetle (2020) | Joyce, Rachel | 28 | In 1950 London Margery Benson sets out on an expedition in search of an insect that may or may not exist: the golden beetle of New Caledonia. With her assistant, Enid Pretty, they will find themselves drawn into an adventure that takes them to the last place two proper British ladies would expect to find themselves. |
| This Shining Life (2021) | Kline, Harriet | 5 | Olli is eleven years old and loves rules, has memorized every world capital and every soccer player in the Premier League. When his dad dies the only thing that makes sense to Ollie is the puzzle he’s convinced his dad left behind for him to solve. Six gifts, one for each member of the family, that will spell out the secret he’s sure his dad figured out right before he died: what it means to be alive. |
| When the Vanished Earth (2022) | Swan, Erin | 7 | Told over seven generations, this sweeping family epic explores ancestry, legacy, motherhood, the trauma we inherit and the power of connection in the face of our planet’s imminent collapse. |
| Winterland (2022) | Meadows, Rae | 8 | Soviet Union, 1973: There is perhaps no greater honor for a young girl than to be chosen for the famed USSR gymnastics program. When eight-year-old Anya is selected, her family is thrilled. What is left of her family, that is. Years ago, her mother disappeared without a trace, leaving Anya’s father devastated and their lives dark and quiet in the bitter cold of Siberia. Anya’s only confidant is her neighbor, an older woman who survived unspeakable horrors during her ten years imprisoned in a Gulag camp—and who, unbeknownst to Anya, was also her mother’s confidant and might hold the key to her disappearance. |
Looking for more titles beyond this list pulled, in part, from MML’s NoveList subscription (available through Digital Maine Library resources)? For the author, Napolitano’s, own book recs., see her Fantastic Fiction page. Finally, reach out to MML’s adult services librarian, Courtney Kleftis (ckleftis@yarmouthlibrary.org), and she can help you out.
Leave a Reply