Star-crossed Love Stories, Survival Thrillers, and This Week’s Trending Reads ✨
 | | Hello there! We’re in the mood for a little escape, so today we’re getting lost— figuratively and literally—in lush love stories and survival thrillers. Plus, the top trending books on Likewise this week. |  | The Bookends |
| | | Sweeping Stories of Star-Crossed Love | | | In The Bookends, we pick an exciting new release and pair it with an older title readers will also love. This week: Teenagers on opposing sides of cultural, political, and religious conflicts fall for each other in these moving and evocative stories of star-crossed love. | | |
 | | The Book of Everlasting Things | | A Hindu boy and a Muslim girl fall in love in Lahore, but they are torn apart by the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. | |
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| |  | | The Stationery Shop | | 77-year-old Roya reflects on her first love: A boy she met in a stationery shop in Tehran, Iran, and how they were torn apart by the 1953 coup. | |
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| | | | | |  | Trending Now on Likewise |
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|  |  | Guess The Writer |
| - This writer is best known for a 1983 coming of age novel that’s still read in many high school and college classes.
- Although she lives in Mexico now, she was born in Chicago and spent many years in San Antonio, Texas.
- A literary critic called her “the most famous Chicana writer.”
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| Answer in footer |  | Ask a Librarian |
| | Can you suggest a book that’s similar to Small Game by Blair Braverman? - Sara | Shout-out to my eighth grade English teacher, who taught me that “man vs. nature” is one of the five possible conflicts in literature. Braverman’s excellent thriller, set on a survival-themed reality TV show, combines the terrifying brutality of nature with another one of the five conflicts: “Man vs. man” (or, in Small Game’s case, woman vs. man).
Fine Print
Survival fiction has been around since the publication of Robinson Crusoe more than 300 years ago. In the best survival stories, the characters’ internal or interpersonal conflicts complicate their efforts to make it back to the comforts of civilization.
Between the Lines
Like Braverman’s novel, these three suggestions take modern elements like TV and use them as a frame to pit characters against the inhospitable outdoors, each other, and themselves. | | | | | |
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 | | The Last One | | A young woman joins a wilderness reality TV show. At first, she’s a top contender, but when fellow contestants and then cameramen start disappearing, she realizes there’s more at stake than winning the game. | |
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|  | | The Speed of Falling Objects | | When Danny’s famous and semi-estranged survivalist dad invites her to appear on his TV show, she jumps at the chance, but when their plane crashes in the Amazon, Danny has to rely on what he’s taught her to keep herself and a group of strangers alive. | |
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 | | Lost Canyon | | Three strangers join their shared trainer for a backpacking trip that quickly goes very, very awry. | |
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| Meet the Librarian
Emily Calkins has worked at public libraries across the US. Tell her what you’re looking for! | | |
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| | | | PS: Products you purchase through our links may earn Likewise a commission. |
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