John Gaines

03/13/2015 - 8:43am
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins


This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: "After witnessing something shocking, Rachel offers what she knows to the police, and becomes inextricably entwined in what happens next, as well as in the lives of everyone involved. Has she done more harm than good?" 

If you enjoyed The Girl on the Train, you may like the following novels:
 

The Disappearance of Emily Marr by Louise Candlish
When Tabby Dewhurst arrives heartbroken and penniless on a picturesque, windswept island off the coast of France, her luck appears to change when she overhears a villager repeating aloud the access code to her front door. Hardly believing her own actions, Tabby waits for the woman to leave and then lets herself into the house. And so she enters the strange, hidden world of Emily Marr--or so her new friend introduces herself. (catalog description)

The First Wife by Erica Spindler
As a child, Bailey Browne dreamed of a knight in shining armor swooping in to rescue her and her mother. As she grows older, those dreams transform, becoming ones of a mysterious stranger who will sweep her off her feet and whisk her away from her ordinary existence. Then, suddenly, there he is. (catalog description)
 

02/20/2015 - 11:02am
If you like  The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.

 The Invention of Wings by Sue Monk Kidd: "The story follows Hetty "Handful" Grimke, a Charleston slave, and Sarah, the daughter of the wealthy Grimke family. The novel begins on Sarah's eleventh birthday, when she is given ownership over Handful, who is to be her handmaid. 'The Invention of Wings' follows the next thirty-five years of their lives. Inspired in part by the historical figure of Sarah Grimke (a feminist, suffragist and, importantly, an abolitionist), Kidd allows herself to go beyond the record to flesh out the inner lives of all the characters, both real and imagined." (Book Description)

If you enjoyed  The Invention of Wings, you may also like these titles:

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
A young woman from Nigeria leaves behind her home and her first love to start a new life in America, only to find her dreams are not all she expected (catalog description)

 

Belle Cora by Phillip Margulies
A sweeping historical tale based on the life and times of the daughter of a New York merchant finds the orphaned Belle suffering at the hands of a rival cousin before working as a prostitute and transforming herself repeatedly to win the love and life she desires. (catalog description)
 

01/16/2015 - 2:19am
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry: "A portrait of India featuring four characters. Two are tailors who are forcibly sterilized, one is a student who emigrates, and the fourth is a widowed seamstress who decides to hang on." (Book description).  

Animal’s People by Indra Sinha
Ever since That Night, the residents of Khaufpur have lived a perilous existence. Their world is poisoned. Nobody has received compensation or help for the chemical leak, least of all Animal, as he is known, whose spine twisted at a young age, leaving him to walk on all fours. (catalog description)

A Breath of Fresh Air by Amulya Malladi
In December of 1984 in Bhopal, India, Anjali survives a catastrophic gas leak but her marriage to her army officer husband does not. Years later, she is remarried with an ill son when her first husband suddenly reappears in her life. She is forced to reconcile her roles of wife, ex-wife, working woman, and mother. (catalog description)

01/05/2015 - 10:17am
Divergent by Veronica Roth

Here's a recent Book Match for Veronica Roth's Divergent. Want your own book match? Request one now!

Divergent by Veronica Roth
In a future Chicago, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she is an anomaly who does not fit into any one group, and that the society she lives in is not perfect after all. Followed by ...

Insurgent by Veronica RothInsurgent by Veronica Roth
As war surges in the dystopian society around her, sixteen-year-old Divergent Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves--and herself--while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love.

If you enjoy the dystopic setting, female main character and romantic aspects of these novels, here are some other titles you may enjoy: 

Birthmarked by Caragh M. O'Brien
A fast-paced dystopian novel about a midwife who willingly turns over her quota of infants, until the night one agonized mother objects. In the future, in a world baked dry by the harsh sun, there are those who live inside the wall and those, like sixteen-year-old midwife, Gaia Stone, who live outside. Gaia has always believed it is her duty, with her mother, to hand over a small quota of babies to the Enclave. But when Gaia's mother and father are arrested by the very people they so dutifully serve, Gaia is forced to question everything she has been taught to believe. Gaia's choice is now simple: enter the worldof the Enclave to rescue her parents, or die trying.

Breathe by Sarah Crossan
In a barren land, a shimmering glass dome houses the survivors of the Switch, the period when oxygen levels plunged and the green world withered. A state lottery meant a lucky few won safety, while the rest suffocated in the thin air. And now Alina, Quinn, and Bea--an unlikely trio, each with their own agendas, their own longings and fears--walk straight into the heart of danger. With two days' worth of oxygen in their tanks, they leave the dome. What will happen on the third day? 

The Compound by S.A. Bodeen
After his parents, two sisters, and he have spent six years in a vast underground compound built by his wealthy father to protect them from a nuclear holocaust, fifteen-year-old Eli, whose twin brother and grandmother were left behind, discovers that his father has perpetrated a monstrous hoax on them all. 

Delirium by Lauren Oliver
They say that the cure for Love will make me happy and safe forever. And I've always believed them. Until now. Now everything has changed. Now, I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie. 

 

Feed by M. T. Anderson
Feed
 by M. T. Anderson
In a future where most people have computer implants in their heads to control their environment, a boy meets an unusual girl who is in serious trouble.
 

Girl in the Arena
Girl in the Arena: A Novel Containing Intense Prolonged Sequences of Disaster and Peril
 by Lise Haines
In Massachusetts, eighteen-year-old Lyn, who has grown up in the public eye as the daughter of seven gladiators, wants nothing less than to follow her mother's path, but her only way of avoiding marriage to the warrior who killed her last stepfather may be to face him in the arena.

  Graceling by Kristin CashoreGraceling by Kristin Cashore
In a world where some people are born with extreme and often-feared skills called Graces, Katsa struggles for redemption from her own horrifying Grace, the Grace of killing, and teams up with another young fighter to save their land from a corrupt king. 

 

12/26/2014 - 2:07am
Little Star by John Advide Lindqvist

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.

Little Star by John Advide Lindqvist: "Rescuing and raising an abandoned baby girl in the woods, a man enters the child in a singing competition when she develops an astonishingly beautiful voice, a performance that leads to the girl's encounter with another youngster with whom she triggers a horrifying force." 

If you liked Little Star, you may enjoy some of the following titles:
 

20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill
A compilation of short fiction includes the tales of Imogene, the legendary ghost of the Rosebud theater, and Francis, an unhappy, hopeless human turned giant locust seeking revenge on his Nevada hometown. (catalog description)

 

Carrie by Stephen King
Carrie White may have been unfashionable and unpopular, but she had a gift. Carrie could make things move by concentrating on them. A candle would fall. A door would lock. This was her power and her sin. Then, an act of kindness, as spontaneous as the vicious taunts of her classmates, offered Carrie a chance to be a normal and go to her senior prom. (catalog description)

12/19/2014 - 2:03am
The Space Between Us by Thrity N. Umrigar

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.

The Space Between Us by Thrity N. Umrigar: "Family crisis closes up the space between wealthy Parsi widow Sera Dubash and her hardworking domestic, Bhima, whose granddaughter Sera is putting through university. " (Library Journal)

If you like The Space Between Us, you may also like these titles:

Animal's People by Indra Sinha
Ever since That Night, the residents of Khaufpur have lived a perilous existence. Their world is poisoned. Nobody has received compensation or help for the chemical leak, least of all Animal, as he is known, whose spine twisted at a young age, leaving him to walk on all fours. Though he inhabits a dark kind of half-life, he knows what love is. He has long harboured feelings for his friend Nisha but since she is enamoured of his friend Zafar he cannot even allow himself to hope. When Elli Barber arrives, an "Amrikan" keen to set up a free clinic to help the victims of the disaster, deep suspicion arises amongst the community. Animal resolves to turn the situation to his advantage and starts to investigate Elli's motives. 

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
A portrait of India featuring four characters. Two are tailors who are forcibly sterilized, one is a student who emigrates, and the fourth is a widowed seamstress who decides to hang on. A tale of cruelty, political thuggery and despair by an Indian from Toronto, author of Such a Long Journey. 

 

12/12/2014 - 8:20am
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.
 

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood: "As in The Handmaid's Tale, Atwood has seen the future, and it isn't good: get ready for ecological devastation." (Library Journal) 

If you like Oryx and Crake, you may also enjoy some of the following novels:

 

The Children of Men by P.D. James
The human race has become infertile, and the last generation to be born is now adult. Civilization itself is crumbling as suicide and despair become commonplace. Oxford historian Theodore Faron, apathetic toward a future without a future, spends most of his time reminiscing. Then he is approached by Julian, a bright, attractive woman who wants him to help get her an audience with his cousin, the powerful Warden of England. She and her band of unlikely revolutionaries may just awaken his desire to live . . . and they may also hold the key to survival for the human race. (catalog description)
 

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
The Chyrsalids is set in the future after a devastating global nuclear war. David, the young hero of the novel, lives in a tight-knit community of religious and genetic fundamentalists, always on the alert for any deviation from the norm of God's creation. Abnormal plants are publicly burned, with much singing of hymns. Abnormal humans (who are not really human) are also condemned to destruction--unless they succeed in fleeing to the Fringes, that Wild Country where, as the authorities say, nothing is reliable and the devil does his work. (catalog description)

12/10/2014 - 1:23pm
The Garden of Evening Mists by Twan Eng Tan

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.

The Garden of Evening Mists by Twan Eng Tan: "After having endured the miseries of a Japanese internment camp during WWII, 28-year-old Yun Ling Teoh makes her way in 1951 to the only Japanese garden in her native Malaya in a bid to convince its caretaker, Nakamura Aritomo, the former gardener for the Emperor of Japan, to establish a commemorative plot for her sister who died in the camp." (Library Journal Review)

If you liked The Garden of Evening Mists, you may also like these books:

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds him of his mother: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into the art underworld. (catalog description)

 

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck
Wang Lang, a simple peasant farmer, takes as a wife a battered slave girl who becomes an indomitable, loyal woman. Working the land together, they prosper and increase their holdings, yet Wang eventually betrays his family and neglects the earth he had worshipped. (catalog description)

 

12/10/2014 - 1:29pm
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith: "A story as light and sweet as a Victoria Sponge cake. Although they are castle dwellers, 17 year old Cassandra's family is quite impoverished, and the castle is decrepit, drafty and moldering. Her diary entries chronicle six months in the castle - a time of great changes, and a first taste of love. "

If you enjoyed this novel, you may enjoy some of the following titles:

 

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson
A deeply moving family story of happiness and heartbreak, Behind the Scenes at the Museum is bestselling author Kate Atkinson's award-winning literary debut. National Bestseller Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets. 


 

A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper
On her sixteenth birthday in 1936, Sophia begins a diary of life in her island country off the coast of Spain, where she is among the last descendants of an impoverished royal family trying to hold their nation together on the eve of the second World War.

 

09/26/2014 - 5:13pm
If you like The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich

This readalike is in response to a customer's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. Available for adults, teens, and kids.  You can browse the book matches here.

The Master Butcher's Singing Club by Louise Erdrich: "What happens when a trained killer discovers that his true vocation is love? Having survived the killing fields of World War I, Fidelis Waldvogel returns home to his quiet German village and marries the pregnant widow of his best friend who was killed in action. With a suitcase full of sausages and a master butcher's precious set of knives, Fidelis sets out for America, getting as far as North Dakota, where he builds a business, a home for his family -- which includes Eva and four sons-and a singing club consisting of the best voices in town. When the Old World meets the New -- in the person of Delphine Watzka -- the great adventure of Fidelis's life begins. Delphine meets Eva and is enchanted; she meets Fidelis, and the ground trembles. " (Book description) 

If you enjoyed this novel, you may also enjoy these other titles:

Dancing at the Rascal Fair by Ivan Doig
The central volume in Ivan Doig's acclaimed Montana trilogy, Dancing at the Rascal Fair is an authentic saga of the American experience at the turn of this century and a passionate, portrayal of the immigrants who dared to try new lives in the imposing Rocky Mountains. Ivan Doig's supple tale of landseekers unfolds into a fateful contest of the heart between Anna Ramsay and Angus McCaskill, walled apart by their obligations as they and their stormy kith and kin vie to tame the brutal, beautiful Two Medicine country.

 

 

 

The Night Birds by Thomas James Maltman
For Asa the summer of 1876 was a time of fear and uncertainty, when his mysterious aunt, Hazel, arrives and turns his entire life upside-down with her tales and secrets from the past. 

 

 

 

 


 

Pages

Subscribe to John Gaines
http://www.librarypoint.org/taxonomy/term/1566
www.librarypoint.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-14
84939
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:7BP5ZYKW4LX32MF7QARK67O4YS3WLPOH
<urn:uuid:866c9c28-9278-40f3-a3c9-174af9598355>
2015-04-01T05:17:25Z
8.224.162.25
sha1:NC4KQTYE67U6JVD4N7N2WP2EOJBKXPDI
<urn:uuid:0de92f00-7bd3-41a6-8997-61704b2e2fe1>
http://www.librarypoint.org/taxonomy/term/1566
length
response
<urn:uuid:1862ca9c-c6f1-4efd-a820-88fbd1089a63>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-168-14-71.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-14
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for March 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf