Once Upon a River

10 best books like Once Upon a River (Bonnie Jo Campbell): Velva Jean Learns to Drive, The Circus in Winter, A Parchment of Leaves, The Grief of Others, Learning to Breathe: My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life, Crush: 26 Real-life Tales of First Love, The Reservoir, The Year We Left Home, In Zanesville, This Beautiful Life

Velva Jean Learns to Drive

Author	Jennifer Niven
ISBN	0452289459

In this spellbinding debut, Velva Jean Hart finds true love-and then risks everything to follow her dreams.

Set in Appalachia in the years before World War II, Velva Jean Learns to Drive is a poignant story of a spirited young girl growing up in the gold-mining and moonshining South.

Before...

The Circus in Winter

Author	Cathy Day
ISBN	0156032023

From 1884 to 1939, the Great Porter Circus makes the unlikely choice to winter in an Indiana town called Lima, a place that feels as classic as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, and as wondrous as a first trip to the Big Top. In Lima an elephant can change the course of a man's life-or the manner of his...

A Parchment of Leaves

Author	Silas House
ISBN	0345464974

Winner-Kentucky Novel of the Year, 2003
Winner-Award for Special Achievement from Fellowship of Southern
Writers
Nominee-Southern Book Critics Circle Prize
Nominee-BookSense Book of the Year (longlist)

"So it is that Vine, Cherokee-born and raised in the early 1900s,...

The Grief of Others

Author	Leah Hager Cohen
ISBN	1594488053

Is keeping a secret from a spouse always an act of infidelity? And what cost does such a secret exact on a family? The Ryries have suffered a loss: the death of a baby just fifty-seven hours after his birth. Without words to express their grief, the parents, John and Ricky, try to return to their previous...

Learning to Breathe: My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life

Author	Priscilla Warner
ISBN	1439181071

Priscilla Warner has had a great life: a supportive husband, a flourishing marriage, two loving sons, and a bestselling book, The Faith Club. Despite all her good fortune and success, she suffers from anxiety and panic attacks so debilitating that they leave her unable to breathe. She’s tried self-medicating—in...

Crush: 26 Real-life Tales of First Love

Author	Andrea N. Richesin
ISBN	0373892330

Readers will fall head over heels for this nostalgic and irreverent collection.Twenty-six bestselling authors return to the teenage bedrooms, school hallways and college dorms of their youth to share passionate essays of love lost and found and lessons learned along the way. Whether heartbreaking...

The Reservoir

Author	John Milliken Thompson
ISBN	1590514440

On an early spring morning in Richmond, Virginia, in the year 1885, a young pregnant woman is found floating in the city reservoir. It appears that she has committed suicide, but there are curious clues at the scene that suggest foul play. The case attracts local attention, and an eccentric group of men...

The Year We Left Home

Author	Jean Thompson
ISBN	1439175888

From National Book Award–finalist Jean Thompson comes a mesmerizing, decades-spanning saga of one ordinary American family—proud, flawed, hopeful—whose story simultaneously captures the turbulent history of the country at large.
In The Year We Left Home, Thompson brings together...

In Zanesville

Author	Jo Ann Beard
ISBN	0316084476

The beguiling fourteen-year-old narrator of IN ZANESVILLE is a late bloomer. She is used to flying under the radar-a sidekick, a third wheel, a marching band dropout, a disastrous babysitter, the kind of girl whose Eureka moment is the discovery that "fudge" can't be said with an English accent.

Luckily,...

This Beautiful Life

Author	Helen Schulman
ISBN	0062024388

When fifteen-year-old Jake Bergamot receives—and then forwards to a friend—a sexually explicit video that an eighth-grade admirer sent to him, the video goes viral within hours. The scandal that ensues threatens to shatter his family’s sense of security and identity—and, ultimately,...

The Beginners

Author	Rebecca Wolff
ISBN	1594487995

The chilling, hypnotically beautiful story of a girl whose coming of age is darkened by the secret history of her small New England town.

Theo and Raquel Motherwell are the only newcomers to the sleepy town of Wick in fifteen-year-old Ginger Pritt's memory. Hampered by a lingering innocence...

Big Girl Small

Author	Rachel DeWoskin
ISBN	0374112576

A scathingly funny and moving book about dreams and reality, at once light on its feet and unwaveringly serious.

Judy Lohden is your above-average sixteen-year-old - sarcastic and vulnerable, talented and uncertain, full of big dreams for a big future. With a singing voice that can shake...