The most recommended books about brothers

This book, on the younger range of YA, features twelve-year-old King in Louisiana bayou country. Not only is King Black, but he thinks he might be gay. He has a special friendship with Sandy, who is white and whose father is a known KKK member. The story opens with the sudden and unexpected death of King’s big brother Khalid, a soccer star. Khalid had told King not to hang with Sandy because he would appear to be gay and be shunned by his classmates. While suffering deep grief, King complies for a time, but without Khalid, without Sandy, he has no one to help him sort out his uncertainty and loneliness. He retreats to the bayou and the many dragonflies in this poetic winner of the National Book Award for Young Readers 2020.

The eponymous hero and his brothers embark on an oversexed tropical Homeric epic that builds into nothing less than an origin myth of Brazil.

As in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (also published in the same year, 1928), the trio’s adventures collapse time and space and are notably relaxed about gender identities. Nonchalantly metamorphosing races and species and the animate and inanimate, Macunaíma anticipates much later works of magical realism.

This vibrant new translation by Katrina Dodson captures both its modernist spirit and its authentic roots in the luxuriant rainforest.

I’ve read post-apocalyptic novels for adults, but I know that children have even more reason for anxiety about potential present-day disasters.

96 Miles is a survival novel for readers aged 9-12 that appealed to me because the disaster is a believable, wide-scale power outage. The setting is identifiably now, and it takes place on a lonely road in the desert in Nevada.

The book is a page-turner, but there’s also a sense of hope that kept me reading. The four children pool their resources: food, water, knowledge, and maybe most importantly, emotional support. Their teamwork and a few practical survival skills keep them going when many adults would have given up.

In The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pulls off the difficult task of making hired killers captivating. The sibling antiheroes go on a journey across the western landscape while contemplating their inner selves. In many ways weird, The Sisters Brothers ties a sometimes sad story together in a neat package. The book is a fascinating take on the traditional western.  

This book damn near ticked every single box I have when it comes to what I love in a novel. 

A complex and conflicted addict as the main character? Check. Regrets? Check. Deep childhood friendships? Check. An evil magician and a creepy carnival? Check and check.

Black Mouth is dark and intense, and even though it plunges straight into the supernatural, it’s very much grounded in the real world. A world full of pain, heartache, loss, and broken people. 

It also features a character with a disability, and he’s drawn with such love and tenderness that I can’t help but think more novels would benefit from disability representation. The character of Dennis is often seen most clearly in the way others interact with him, revealing much about the kindness or cruelty of the other characters. 

A special book that I didn’t so much read as live inside. 

What is better than finding a ten-dollar bill on the sidewalk? Finding a copy of a book you haven’t read by a favorite author. 

I still don’t understand how I could have overlooked Black Dove. I shocked myself when I discovered I had not read every single Steve Hockensmith’s western mystery. His mysteries transport me to a time I love — the old west — not the old west of villains in black hats, but citified business bad men like the ones we have today. Better yet, these books are laugh-out-loud hilarious.

I had read most of Dostoyevsky’s other novels twenty-five years ago. I decided then to save up this book for a rainy day. 

The Brothers Karamazov is on a vaster scale than Dostoyevsky’s other novels, less concentrated along one line of supreme intensity. And yet, all the power still bursts forth, in moments where the innards of the characters seem to explode outward, penetrating the reader’s soul. It is hard not to be conscious of the fact that Dostoyevsky wrote this novel following the death of his own three-year-old son. The novel seems to constitute a re-piecing-together of the author’s mind, and, as this was his last book, a final statement on life and death, love and loss.

The book holds a colossal power, quantum neutron-star-like depths wrestling crazily on the page, but underlying that, the restraint still of a great and overwhelming sense of order in the things of… show more.

Although this novel isn’t about a historical biblical woman, both the setting and the premise bring the latter half of the New Testament to vibrant life. In Corinth of the first century, a girl thief is befriended by a Jewish teacher named Paul, leading us into a fast-paced story of action and intrigue. Afshar’s novels brim with authentic historical detail as well as great empathy for what it meant to be a woman in this time in history. Turning the last page of the story, I felt like I’d lived and breathed alongside this long-ago woman.

I love smart characters, and I think too often we don’t get them, or their brains are almost seen as an undesirable trait. That was far from the case here.

Anna was allowed to be smart and capable throughout, and Marco was appreciative of all her quirks. I love how much chemistry (pun intended... sorry!) the author was able to pull out in this closed-door romance. It was sweet and fun and the perfect read for a self-care evening.

Two African American brothers spend their summer in rural Virginia while their parents navigate a rough patch in their marriage. Genie, 11, and Ernie, 13, get to know their blind grandfather who has a special room filled with plants and songbirds. I identified with Genie, a worrier who likes to pose questions in his notebook. As the two brothers respond differently to their grandfather’s announcement that a brave man learns to shoot a gun at 14, Reynolds is also asking readers to consider what it means to be brave and how we should define family. I loved the themes and vivid setting of the book. As someone who visited a grandparent in a small, rural town each summer, I identified with the boys’ sense that they have travelled not just a state but a whole world away from home.