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Downers Grove

10 best books like Downers Grove (Michael Hornburg): Goats, Lo's Diary, Brave New Girl, Chloe Doe, Love, Sara, Serious Girls, The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale, New Rules of High School, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations, Welcome to Higby

Goats
AuthorMark Jude Poirier
ISBN0786866802
Fourteen-year-old Ellis is getting ready to leave the Southwest for a boarding school in the East. This means leaving behind his mother, and the only real father figure he has ever known, Goat Man. Goat Man has done more for Ellis than giving him his first bong hit. He has maintained a home on Ellis's mom's...
Lo's Diary
AuthorPia Pera
ISBN0964374013
Now, in Pia Pera's controversial new book, Lolita speaks for herself in her own naked voice. Listening to her tale, readers enter a universe in which events, apparently the same as in Nabokov's novel, are radically different. Truths clash, collide, and ultimately diverge. Nabokov's Lolita is not...
Brave New Girl
AuthorLouisa Luna
ISBN0743407865
A fourteen-year-old trying to find her way in the world, Doreen is as much an outcast at school as she is at home. Marginalized by her peers, misunderstood by her parents, and mourning the loss of her older brother who disappeared when she was just a child, Doreen finds solace in her fierce love of music...
Chloe Doe
AuthorSuzanne Marie Phillips
ISBN0316014133
Chloe Doe chronicles a 17-year-old girl's tumultuous path to becoming a prostitute and her ultimate transformation back into mainstream society. During her therapy at Madeline Parker Institute for Girls, Chloe slowly reveals aspects of her painful past--the stepfather who abused her sister,...
Love, Sara
AuthorMary Beth Lundgren
ISBN0805067973
"From the computer files of Sara J. Reichert:
My life, from the last day of summer vacation,
to almost spring of my Junior year.
No matter what you might have heard,
this is the real story."

Love, Sara is the story of two teenage best friends, Sara and Dulcie. Sara, the narrator,...
Serious Girls
AuthorMaxine Swann
ISBN0312288018
Sixteen year olds Maya and Roe form an intense friendship when they find themselves cast as outsiders at an all girls boarding school. Sharing their life stories, and curiosity about the adult world, they wonder how they might become "people" with style and character as opposed to school girls. When...
The London Monster: A Sanguinary Tale
AuthorJan Bondeson
ISBN0306811588
"The facts in this case are so bizarre that no novelist would have dared to invent them," said the Philadelphia Inquirer. Indeed. A century before Jack the Ripper haunted the streets of London, another predator held sway: a "vulgar-looking man" who slashed at female pedestrians with a knife while uttering...
New Rules of High School
AuthorBlake Nelson
ISBN0670036447
I had thought there was a lot of freedom being a good student, being trusted, being given special privileges, but that was nothing compared to the freedom I felt now. Once people gave up on you, once people wrote you off, now that was freedom.

Max Caldwell is tired. He's tired of having a "perfect"...
A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations
AuthorCintra Wilson
Whether you lust after it, loathe it, or feign apathy toward it, fame is in your face. Cintra Wilson gets to the heart of our humiliating fascinating with celebrity and all its preposterous trappings in these hilarious, whip-smart, and subversive essays. Often radical and always a scream, Wilson takes...
Welcome to Higby
AuthorMark Dunn
ISBN0743249887
Following the national success of Ella Minnow Pea, this second novel from Mark Dunn brings the same charm and love of good language to a small town in the South. A Robert Altmanesque comedy, Welcome to Higby follows the hilarious goings-on in a small town in northern Mississippi over Labor Day weekend....
Suffer the Flesh
AuthorMonica J. O'Rourke
ISBN1894815351
Zoey Masterson didn't know what pain was before, but she's learning fast. Kidnapped off the Manhattan streets and whisked away from the safe, normal world she once knew, she finds herself the victim of one reprehensible man's vision. Forced to witness the depravities of the seedy underworld where...
Scarred
AuthorMonique Polak
ISBN1550289640
CURRENTLY READING (post reading review way, way below):
For some reason, the self-injurer artist stereotype really bothers me. Partially because author's make the character unrealistically talented at it. I get the feeling we're headed that route.

Ah, yes, let's introduce the boy...
Things Unspoken
AuthorAnitra Sheen
ISBN0811831574
The halcyon days of Los Angeles in the '50s are the seductive setting for this mesmerizing novel, chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of the year. After her mother's death, young Jorie grows up with her two older brothers and a mostly absent physician-father. While her brothers become...
Solitaire: The Compelling Story of a Young Woman Growing up in America and Her Triumph over Anorexia
AuthorAimee Liu
ISBN0595002994
I first read this book, about the author's struggles with (and apparently spontaneous recovery from) anorexia many years ago. I can clearly remember the circumstances in which I read it. I was in training at a military base in Texas, eating as little as possible and running the six mile perimeter every...
sMothering
AuthorWendy French
ISBN0765347032
A smart, fast, funny take on mother-daughter relationships, boyfriend-girlfriend disasters, and the career-girl blues.

Meet Claire McLeod, a twenty-something American girl living in Portland, Oregon. Claire's got big problems: her mother's a tyrant, her sister's a lesbian, and her...
Stripper Lessons
AuthorJohn O'Brien
ISBN0802135072
John O'Brien's books have established him as a writer who communicated the voice of the loner with blistering realness and unmistakable force. Stripper Lessons is perhaps O'Brien's most interior and intense novel, a powerful story of one man's obsessive search to belong. Here is the dark and simple...
Mall
AuthorEric Bogosian
ISBN0743214552
From the award-winning avatar of contemporary urban theater and author of such modern classics as Talk Radio and subUrbia comes this outrageous novel about five suburbanites whose lives intersect in one violent and life-altering night -- at the local mall.
Mal, a thirtysomething speed freak,...
Lightning Field
AuthorDana Spiotta
ISBN0743223756
The Los Angeles Dana Spiotta evokes in her bold and strangely lyrical first novel is a land of Spirit Gyms and Miracle Miles, a great centerless place where chains of reference get lost, or finally don't matter. Mina lives with her screenwriter husband and works at her best friend Lorene's highly successful...
Good Girls Gone Bad
AuthorJillian Medoff
ISBN0066212693
"Jillian Medoff takes an intriguing premise, turns it upside down, and sends it careening ahead, trailing delight and debauchery in its wake." — Maggie Estep

"A fact every actuary learns: Regardless of how many 'What, if" scenarios you design or assumptions you make, reality is always...
America the Beautiful
AuthorMoon Unit Zappa
ISBN0743213831
America Throne is living the good life in L.A. Her career is sprouting, and she is in love -- with Jasper Husch, a sexy-sultry artist from San Fran. But just as soon as they've realized domestic bliss, Jasper has a change of heart, and America falters on the slippery slope of hope: hoping that he will come...
Nothing but a Smile
AuthorSteve Amick
ISBN0307377369
From the author of the widely praised The Lake, the River & the Other Lake comes the delightful love story of a man and a woman who choose an unconventional way to redefine themselves during and after World War II.

It’s 1944, and Wink Dutton, a former illustrator for Yank and Stars and Stripes,...
Seeking Rapture: Scenes from a Woman's Life
AuthorKathryn Harrison
ISBN0812972058
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK

In this exquisite book of personal reflections on a woman’s life as a child, wife, and mother, Kathryn Harrison, “a writer of extraordinary gifts” (Tobias Wolff), recalls episodes in her life, exploring how the experiences of childhood recur in memory,...
On Flirtation
AuthorAdam Phillips
ISBN0674634403
People tend to flirt only with serious things - madness, disaster, other people's affections. So is flirtation dangerous, exploiting the ambiguity of promises to sabotage our cherished notions of commitment? Or is it, as Adam Phillips suggests, a productive pleasure, keeping things in play, letting...
Bald in the Land of Big Hair: A True Story
AuthorJoni Rodgers
ISBN0060955260
Bald in the Land of Big Hair is the hilarious—and often heartbreaking—tale of Joni Rodgers's journey through the badlands of cancer told with humor, occasional anger, and unflinching honesty. More than just a cancer book, this is a deeply affecting memoir of one woman's struggle to come to terms...
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