by Dorothy Allison (1992)
A young girl grows up rough in the South with plenty of abuse, drinking, family, and lessons.. it sounds like the kind of book that writes itself and may prove predictable in it’s drama, but Dorothy Allison does something quietly magical with her debut darling, The Bastard Out of Carolina. She creates a living, breathing world that feels authentic in no small part to the autobiographical elements of the story. Both author Allison, and protagonist Bone have a very tough life but one that still has some hope, love of family, and incredible personal spirit.
I can listen to people tell tales of their family gossip for hours, and Bastard Out of Carolina kind of feels like that to an extreme. It received numerous honors when it was published and his lauded not only by critics but readers. It was made into an Anjelica Houston directed showtime movie starring Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jena Malone.
I got into serious trouble once back in elementary school for bringing this V.C. Andrews book, 
Here's what I said back on 
It's hard to believe that 
It took ten years for Donna Tartt to release her second book. It was well worth the wait. The Little Friend opens with the murder of a young boy, he is hung from a tree on Mother's Day. The rest of the novel takes place eleven years later, when Harriet, the little boy's baby sister, decides she is going to solve the murder. Like a Harriet the Spy in Mississippi in the 1970s, only with a very dark and realistic coming of age story. Like her other book, The Secret History, you will be lost in her world, reading late into the night.
On the other hand, if you don't want to actually enjoy the holiday, you should read this brutally honest portrait of an asshole during his final breakdown. This is an extremely well written novel and the best I've read in a long time.
This book takes place in the future (the future Wallace envisioned in the mid 1990s, the future we envision today is a bit different, there's really no place for the Clean Party in the coming years), in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, which I think is 2009. Set in the Metro Boston area, about half of the story takes place at the Enfield Tennis Academy, an elaborate campus atop a scenic hill offering a view of the massive catapults that hurl waste north to the Great Concavity, while the other half of the book (it's a massive tome, 1000 or so pages including the copious foot notes, which you really can't skip) focuses on a halfway house half way down the same hill. A number of unforgettable characters populate the pages, the entire Incandenza family (including the long departed patriarch, the “Mad Stork” James Orin Incandenza, who visits Don Gately in wraith form after Gately gets shot by the Canuck with the “Moose” shirt after the coke addict who kills the dogs… it gets complicated.) The book is excellent, the first fifty pages or so may not be exactly easy going, but soon the book opens right up and you< do not want it to end. Which it does, eventually. Kind of. Oh–and there's Eschaton and the wheelchair assassins and the Madame Psychosis radio program and the Whataburger invitational and Pemulis buying that DMZ...