One of the best books I’ve read this year is This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger. (It’s our May afternoon book discussion book.) It is a 
coming-of-age book modeled on Huckleberry Finn in that the main characters take a journey on a river and discover themselves along the way. I was again struck by how much I like coming-of-age stories. I had written about this in a 2013 blog post (https://wp.me/p9tYO-7p). I thought it might be worthwhile updating the book list. Check out the 2013 blog for more titles and a description of Bildungsroman, the literary term for Coming-of-Age stories.
- Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
- Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
- Boat Runner by Devin Murphy
- This Tender Land by William Kent Krueger
- Calligrapher’s Daughter by Eugenia Kim
- Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach
- Call Me American by Abdi Nor Iftin (another absolutely wonderful book I recently read.)
- City of Thieves by David Benioff (a book discussion favorite)
- Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. I read this one on my way to Washington state where the action takes place.
- Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya
- Almost anything by John Irving or Flannery O’Connor.
- Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford. This 1968 novel is no longer in our library. I read it almost 20 years ago and I still remember the New Mexico setting.
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