Books like

Books like Brown Girl Dreaming

12 books with a reading profile close to Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. Inward-looking and contemplative; an easy read.

1

I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death

by Maggie O'Farrell

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

This memoir documents seventeen instances where Maggie O’Farrell narrowly escaped death.
2

The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

by Marina Keegan

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

The collection compiles fiction and non-fiction written by Marina Keegan before her death just days after graduating from Yale.
3

Solutions and Other Problems

by Allie Brosh

Also inward-looking · memoir, narrative

Allie Brosh uses crude digital illustrations and humorous vignettes to document her life after a long public absence.
4

Persepolis, Volume 1

by Marjane Satrapi

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel chronicles her childhood in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution and the subsequent outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War.
5

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

by Sherman Alexie

Also inward-looking · memoir, narrative

Fourteen-year-old Arnold Spirit Jr., a budding cartoonist born with physical vulnerabilities, lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation where poverty and alcoholism are pervasive.
6

Beautiful Country

by Qian Julie Wang

Also inward-looking · memoir, narrative

Qian Julie Wang was seven when she and her parents left China for New York in 1994, where her mother and father, a former professor and a professional, became undocumented workers.
7

Truth & Beauty

by Ann Patchett

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Ann Patchett narrates the decades-long friendship between herself and the writer Lucy Grealy, beginning at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
8

Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?

by Roz Chast

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Roz Chast uses a mix of cartoons, sketches, and personal photographs to document the final years of her aging parents, George and Elizabeth.
9

The End of Eddy

by Édouard Louis

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Eddy Bellegueule grows up in a poor village in northern France, in a family where men are expected to be tough and unemployment and alcohol are common.
10

Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo

by Christiane V. Felscherinow

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Christiane Felscherinow narrates her descent into heroin addiction in 1970s West Berlin, beginning with her experimentation with hashish and pills at age twelve.
11

Solito

by Javier Zamora

Also inward-looking and contemplative · memoir, narrative

Nine-year-old Javier Zamora departs his small town in El Salvador to reunite with his parents in the United States, traveling three thousand miles without his family.
12

The Light Between Oceans

by M.L. Stedman

Also inward-looking and contemplative · narrative, accessible

Tom Sherbourne, a traumatized veteran of the Great War, takes a job as a lighthouse keeper on Janus Rock, a remote island off the Western Australian coast.

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