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What Do I Read Next?
(Literary Newsmakers for Students)
- Lucky (1999) is Sebold's memoir of her 1981 rape. In it, she details the rape itself and chronicles the arrest, trial, and conviction of the rapist. She also addresses the emotional aftermath and consequences of the attack.
- Sue Monk Kidd's novel The Secret Life of Bees (2003) is a coming-of-age story. Set in the 1960s, The Secret Life of Bees deals with tragedy, the absence of a mother, and the protagonist's need to look backward and then to let go in order to move on.
- The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003), by Mitch Albom, follows the protagonist, Eddie, through his last moments on earth, his funeral, and the days after his death. Then the story shifts to Eddie's arrival at and experiences in heaven.
- Aimee Bender's first novel, An Invisible Sign of My Own (2000), is about a girl named Mona who deals with her father's mysterious illness by withdrawing from the things she likes to do: eating dessert, playing piano, spending time with her boyfriend. She grows up to become a second-grade math teacher, and must use her own experiences with illness to help a student through her mother's cancer.
- Family (1991), by J. California Cooper, is narrated by a dead main character. Clora, a pre-Civil War slave, escapes slavery through suicide. After her death, her spirit narrates the story of her children and grandchildren as they live through slavery and the Civil War.
- The Afterlife (2003), by Gary Soto, is the story of Chuy, a murdered seventeen-year-old boy. Now deceased, Chuy must solve the mystery of his murder and come to terms with his new identity in death.