Recommendations
Books Like Bastard Out of Carolina
Best books to read after Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
If Bastard Out of Carolina moved you — Bone's girlhood in Greenville's poor white world, her mother's failure to protect her, the way the novel holds love and violence together without resolving them into anything simple — these eight novels share its portrait of children surviving family violence, its Southern setting, or its unflinching engagement with class and the American poor.
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Buy on AmazonA Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
Jude St. Francis and the childhood abuse he cannot escape — Yanagihara's novel is the most direct companion to Bastard Out of Carolina in its sustained portrait of a person shaped by extreme childhood violence; where Bone's story is compressed into a Southern girlhood, Jude's is stretched across a lifetime in New York, but both novels are organized around the same question: what does it take to survive what has been done to you, and can survival ever be enough
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Buy on AmazonSalvage the Bones
by Jesmyn Ward
The Batiste family's twelve days before Hurricane Katrina — Ward's National Book Award winner shares Bastard Out of Carolina's portrait of a poor Southern family holding together through love and barely; both novels are narrated by a girl whose intelligence and capacity for love are at odds with her social circumstances, and both are organized around a natural catastrophe — Ward's a literal storm, Allison's the storm of Glen's violence — that reveals existing damage
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Buy on AmazonThe Glass Castle
by Jeannette Walls
Jeannette Walls's memoir about her nomadic, impoverished girlhood with eccentric and neglectful parents — the nonfiction companion to Bastard Out of Carolina: the same portrait of a child who must raise herself in the absence of adequate parenting, the same class conditions of poverty and instability, and the same question of how a child makes sense of parents who love her and fail her simultaneously
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Buy on AmazonTheir Eyes Were Watching God
by Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford finding love and identity in a Black Florida community — Hurston's 1937 novel shares Bastard Out of Carolina's portrait of a Southern woman whose desire and interiority are constrained by a community that has decided in advance what her life should be; where Bone is constrained by poverty and family violence, Janie is constrained by marriage and community expectations, but both novels center on a woman's refusal to have her inner life defined by external circumstances
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Buy on AmazonThe Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
Amir and his guilt over Hassan's assault — Hosseini's debut shares Bastard Out of Carolina's engagement with childhood violence and the question of who is responsible for protecting children and what happens when that protection fails; where Bone's damage comes from within the family, Hassan's comes from outside it, but both novels ask how violence in childhood shapes the adult that the child becomes
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Buy on AmazonWhere the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens
Kya Clark raising herself in the North Carolina marshes after her family abandons her — Owens's bestseller shares Bastard Out of Carolina's portrait of a girl surviving without adequate adult protection in the rural American South; both novels are deeply attentive to the natural world as both beauty and threat, and both center on a young woman whose intelligence and capacity for love survive conditions that would destroy most people
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Buy on AmazonPush
by Sapphire
Claireece Precious Jones, a sixteen-year-old Black girl in Harlem who has been raped by her father and abused by her mother, finding her voice in a literacy class — Sapphire's novel shares Bastard Out of Carolina's portrait of a girl surviving extreme family violence and trying to construct an identity from materials the world has given her to destroy herself with; both novels center on a girl's interior voice as the site of a dignity that the external circumstances cannot extinguish
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Buy on AmazonEducated
by Tara Westover
Tara Westover's memoir about growing up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and educating herself out of it — the nonfiction companion to Bastard Out of Carolina: the same portrait of a girl who must reckon with parents she loves and who have damaged her, the same engagement with how class and family isolation combine to make it nearly impossible for a child to find help, and the same question of what it costs to build a life different from the one you were given
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