r/booksuggestions • u/Shiri-33 • 8h ago
Historical Fiction American Historical Fiction, just not depressing, please!
Thank you to everyone who took time to understand my request and give an answer based on that! I have enough suggestions to have a running list for any future reading challenges.
I need a book suggestion for the WNYC Get Lit Summer Reading Challenge for the category "American-set historical fiction", but I'm not a fan of horror, don't like graphic violence, or topics like The Revolutionary War, The Civil War, Jim Crow & the Civil Rights Movement, World Wars I & II, The Great Depression, slavery, Reconstruction era South, colonization & displacement of Indigenous nations and the like. These topics can be minor background themes but not dominate the story. Please help me find a book that won't depress me!
3
3
u/Shiri-33 4h ago edited 4h ago
ANSWERED.
THANK YOU!
In three posts in three subreddits, I have such a plethora of possibilities! So many people left really interesting suggestions! A few folks, I think, probably innocently enough probably read too fast and put the exact stuff I was asking to NOT suggest, so just a friendly reminder to please read requests carefully, but I'm giving the benefit of the doubt that most people made honest mistakes. No harm, no foul. It's all good. This subreddit started with what seemed like intentional trolling because every single suggestion was the exact 180 degree opposite of the request. Has anyone else had a similar experience?
2
u/ham_rat 7h ago
For adults? Something by Edith Warton, Mark Twain (hilarious short stories) E. L. Doctrow, Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), Isabel Allende (Daughter of Fortune)
I get what you mean that you want something non-violent, but “struggle” is a key ingredient in fiction. The events you listed are fertile ground for overcoming conflict.
Also, this list: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1E3RwDqiSk/?mibextid=wwXIfr
1
1
u/Shiri-33 4h ago
Struggle is fine, but unfortunately, the majority of American historical fiction is CHOCK FULL TO OVERFLOWING with war and ghastly, harrowing eras of violence and desperate times. There's regular struggle and then there's America. LOL! I mean, our whole history is one bad era after another, going from the first European settlers right down through the Vietnam war (latest time for HF is 1976). I don't enjoy those reads, so I'd rather read about something more personal or more general that doesn't focus on this big historical events where "everybody dies" as the trope goes. Obviously that's not meant literally, but you probably get the idea.
2
2
2
u/superfuluous_u 6h ago
North Woods by Daniel Mason follows the history of a house built in early colonial days through the present day. Some of the things in your list occur in the background, but the book is mainly concerned with the inhabitants of the house and they mostly are concerned with their own lives, not the world outside the house.
For a very light, fun recommendation, try Jane Smiley's A Dangerous Business about two women in 1850s Monterey, CA trying to solve murders of sex workers. It's light, a little silly, and the violence and sex work are not graphic at all and mainly occur off-page. Think Only Murders in the Building for tone.
And my third recommendation is Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott Odell based on a true story of a young indigenous woman who is stranded alone on an island off the coast of California who has to survive for several years before she is rescued. I read it in fourth grade.
2
u/sozh 5h ago
I've got two words for you: GORE VIDAL
grandson of a senator, friend of the Kennedys. After a brief unsuccessful political career, he went into writing about U.S. history, and went HARD
his stuff is super well-researched, and at least to me, seems accurate, but it's also super gossipy, super bitchy, super vibrant...
I'd recommend these to start with
BURR - told partly from the perspective of Aaron Burr, an alternate look at the Revolutionary War, and the Founding Fathers. Burr talks A LOT of shit, including frequently referring to the fact that Washington has a big butt and married a very rich widow.
LINCOLN - just a really detailed and lively look at this president, who was already melancholy, and then had the Civil War to deal with, plus some personal tragedies...
Those two books became part of a larger series that came to be called Narratives of Empire, tracing how the U.S. went from a series of colonies, to a world empire and superpower.
Vidal's critiques of the U.S. come from someone who was deeply embedded in the establishment, and then went onto take contrarian views...
2
u/BookDragon3ryn 4h ago
Tell the Wolves I am Home is about a family in NYC during the AIDS epidemic.
2
u/stealthmodeme 4h ago
Try some middle grade & young adult books.
I recommend: Prairie Lotus The War That Saved My Life
1
u/theresah331a 8h ago
Hard Country Reavis Z. Wortham
This Wounded Land Kathleen o'neal gear
This Scorched earth William Gear
-1
u/Shiri-33 7h ago
Two of these (#2, #3) fall directly into the do-not-suggest categories, but thanks anyway.
1
u/fauxmica 6h ago
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff
Ok young girl escapes Jamestown during the starving period and that is let’s say horrific vs horror but the majority of the book and focus is on survival and the sublime landscape. Being at the whim if others then finally being free of that control but hapless in a way - naive. Lots of descriptions of nature. Interesting perspective and reflection
1
u/halcyonwade 6h ago
The Given Day - Patrick Lehane. Family saga set in Boston immediately Post-WWI. Covers the Yellow Flu epidemic, Irish immigrants and what they face, unionizing struggles, Babe Ruth, the Black migration. There is violence and struggle though that's not the main theme. Not sure how that's avoidable in historical fiction set in the US honestly.
1
u/ReadWriteHikeRepeat 5h ago
Maybe something more recent, just barely in the historical fiction category? Like Nothing North of Delmar, set in St Louis in 1976.
1
1
u/backcountry_knitter 4h ago
Stoner by John Williams - focused entirely on the life of one character. Any big historical events are minimal background color.
The Rathbones by Janice Clark - fair warning that this is a weird book, but I enjoyed it. It’s about a New England whaling family on the decline. Not really about the whalers, just about their spouses and kids left behind.
Echo Mountain by Lauren Wolk - the depression is the background setting, but not the story.
1
1
u/Fireblaster2001 4h ago
Chesapeake by James Michener does a chapter for every generation of history in the Chesapeake Bay, starting with indigenous times and going up through whatever present day was when it was published (the 80’s maybe?) it follows a few of the same families and the historical events that happened there but is just like a 300 year story of the region.
1
u/sloppyandfrizzy 4h ago
I just read Go as a River by Shelley Read. It’s a coming of age story set in a town that was intentionally drowned by the US government in the 60s. I had never heard that piece of history and it was a really incredible book.
0
u/babybeluga25 6h ago
You could try:
The Four Winds - set during the Dust Bowl
The Help - set during segregation south
Fever 1793, it’s a YA novel about the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia.
The Things they Carried, it’s short stories about soldiers during Vietnam.
-1
u/Shiri-33 7h ago
Am I being trolled? I mean... HUH?! LOL! What is going on here?
1
u/sidecarjoe 6h ago
Agreed - there’s a lot more going on here than wars and past discriminations. A lot of glass half empty commenters !
9
u/pm_me_ur_fit 7h ago
I’m a bit confused. It sounds like you want a book about American history, but have listed practically every bit of American history in your “not interested” topic. The US has a short and bloody and depressing history. Maybe try little house on the prairie? Only thing I can think of is