I read this waaaaaaay back in high school and re-read it in the last few years. I found it riveting. Yes, it’s kind of gloomy, but it’s also well-written and very interesting. It’s kind of short – so we might want to pair it with another “apocalyptic” book, like Lord of the Flies or Farenheit 451.
If we were to pair it with something - I’d want to pair it with a new book that I haven’t read yet. I feel like we’ve read a lot of apocolyptic books in the last few years. 
maybe just the times we are living in…
If we were looking to pair The House on Mango Street with something, we could read it along with Cisneros’ memoir, A House of My Own. My daughter just read it and loved it.
Lots of suggestions to compile! I’ll work on a list and post soon. I just got home from seeing “A Quiet Place” and am too traumatized to be productive at the moment. >-)
I’d be up for that pairing Mary. DH won’t watch horror, and I feel like we pretty much have seen A Quite Place having seen the trailer umpteen times. (I actually went and looked for spoilers, because it annoyed me so much not to know how it ended!) I am so, so, so not a mystery reader!
No, our group has never read anything by Celeste Ng. I’d like to, though!
I’ll add it to the list. (I read Midwives and Skeletons at the Feast by Bohjalian and found them both disturbing – in a good way, i.e., thought-provoking.)
a genre of which I am blissfully ignorant and happy to remain so
We read Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere At my library Bookclub. My co-leader grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio. On her iPad, she showed us pictures of the homes in that area, with their beautiful lawns. Good discussion
I have The Flight Attendant on my nightstand, along with Lisa Genova’s new book Every Note Played. I’m not sure which one to start first!
@Mary13 – Ha ha! That’s what I get for belonging to 3 Book Clubs – can’t keep it all straight!
Here is our list of suggestions — all great, so we have some tough paring down to do. @mathmom, I added the new The Doomsday Machine to On the Beach re your post #141. It can be changed, of course — I just figured if we are going to read something terrifying, we might as well have both the fiction and non-fiction versions.
Please everyone, review the list and don’t be shy about vetoing. Just think WWNJTMD! (What would NJTheatreMom do? The best vetoer ever. 
)
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
The Power by Naomi Alderman
The House on Mango Street and A House of My Own by Sandra Cisneros
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne
American War by Omar El Akkad
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hanna Tinti
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
On the Beach by Nevil Shute and The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea
The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian
I have no opinion. You all decide without me. I haven’t even heard of most of these.
@VeryHappy - that’s half the fun! Now you get to hunt down reviews! I have to say - it looks like a great list. I will give opinions tonight since I really need to get back to work now.
I’d read any but am least interested in the On the Beach duo. I want to sleep at night and not worry about nuclear war. Consider it an official veto, I guess, in the interest of paring the list down.
If others don’t knock some off the list, we’ll have to choose our top six … see which ones make it onto multiple lists … list our top three … then let @Mary13 figure it all out. Like @mathmom pointed out, this is part of the fun.
I will study the list. Some of the choices are on my “to read” list; I recently read The Flight Attendant. I liked it but am ambivalent about how much discussion it would create. I read the Sandra Cisneros books years ago, I think. I have read A Town like Alice but not On the Beach.
Just in case anyone is interested in a young Australian author writing non-Aussie stories, Hannah Kent is a mesmerizing writer (Burial Rites and her new one, The Good People).
I’d like to read and discuss Little Fires Everywhere. I started the audiobook but abandoned it … the reader’s voice annoyed me, and it seemed to move so slowly! But I’d like to give the book another try, this time in print form, as I’ve heard so much good about it.
I’m vetoing the nuclear annihilation duo based on @ignatius’ post #151. The Flight Attendant and A Town Like Alice are on borrowed time re @Tiredofsnow’s post (she’s read them), but I will wait a little on that, just in case there’s a groundswell of interest in those titles for some reason.
There’s still too many for voting. To help folks a bit (and to get @VeryHappy more excited ), I’m posting a brief description under the title. Two sentences for each, no spoilers (all descriptions from Amazon):
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Benjamin tells the story of four teenage siblings who, on a lark, ask a fortuneteller to reveal the dates of their deaths. Whether that fortuneteller is a con artist or is genuinely gifted with second sight doesn’t interest Benjamin so much as how one piece of possibly spurious information conspires with character and circumstance to warp the siblings’ choices as they grow into adulthood.
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee
Beginning in 1910 during the time of Japanese colonialization and ending many decades later in 1989, Pachinko is the epic saga of a Korean family told over four generations. The family’s story starts with Hoonie, a young Korean man born with physical deformities, but whose destiny comes from his inner strength and kindness.
The Power by Naomi Alderman
Teenage girls now have immense physical power–they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets. The Power is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways.
The House on Mango Street and A House of My Own by Sandra Cisneros
The House on Mango Street is the remarkable story of Esperanza Cordero. Told in a series of vignettes – sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes deeply joyous – it is the story of a young Latina girl growing up in Chicago, inventing for herself who and what she will become.
In the autobiography A House of My Own, made up of essays and images spanning three decades and including never-before-published work, Cisneros has come home at last. Written with her trademark lyricism, in these signature pieces the acclaimed author of The House on Mango Street shares her transformative memories and reveals her artistic and intellectual influences.
Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
The Richardson family lives in the planned community of Shaker Heights, Ohio—a place of wealth, comfort, and stability—and they are a clan that embodies those traits. But when Mia, a single mother, and her fifteen year old daughter, Pearl, rent a house in the area, their very different lives will merge with those of the Richardson family and begin to contort the carefully laid lattice that supports their views.
The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne
Set in Post-War Ireland, when intolerance cloaked in Catholicism is at its height, we follow the lifespan of the adopted boy Cyril Avery. On the first page, Cyril introduces us to his birth mother and the circumstances in which he was born, and for the rest of the book, the reader is in Boyne’s capable hands: waiting, wondering, clamoring to know when he will meet his birth mother and how it will be uncovered that they are related.
American War by Omar El Akkad
Sarat Chestnut, born in Louisiana, is only six when the Second American Civil War breaks out in 2074, but even she knows that oil is outlawed, that Louisiana is half underwater, and that unmanned drones fill the sky. When her father is killed and her family is forced into Camp Patience for displaced persons, she begins to grow up shaped by her particular time and place.
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hanna Tinti
Samuel Hawley is a loner who spent years living on the run and raised his beloved daughter, Loo, on the road, moving from motel to motel, always watching his back. Loo begins to investigate her past and soon encounters the mysteries of her parents’ lives before she was born–a mystery made all the more intriguing by the twelve scars her father carries on his body.
A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
Jean Paget, a young English woman, is captured by the Japanese army in Malaya during World War Two and forced on a brutal march across the country with a group of women and children. During this appalling ordeal, she befriends Joe Harman, an Australian soldier who risks his own life to help the women.
All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai
It’s 2016, and in Tom Barren’s world, technology has solved all of humanity’s problems—there’s no war, no poverty, no under-ripe avocadoes. Unfortunately, Tom isn’t happy because he’s lost the girl of his dreams–and what do you do when you’re heartbroken and have a time machine?
The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urea
In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies herself, leading to a farewell doubleheader in a single weekend.
The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian
Cassandra Bowen is a flight attendant who wakes up in a Dubai hotel room next to a dead body after a night of binge drinking, with no recollection of events. Set amid the captivating world of those whose lives unfold at forty thousand feet, The Flight Attendant unveils a spellbinding story of memory, of the giddy pleasures of alcohol and the devastating consequences of addiction, and of murder far from home.
My top six in alphabetical order:
*The Heart’s Invisible Furies
The House of Broken Angels
The House on Mango Street + A House of My Own
The Immortalists
Little Fires Everywhere
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley*
I would read any of the books under consideration but thought someone should jump in with top choices and encourage others to do so in order to weed out a few of the books. (Plus I have a busy morning tomorrow.) Note that if my six books don’t land on anyone else’s list, I’m good. As I said I could happily read any of the books listed by @Mary13.
Based on the endorsement / interest posted by two readers -
Little Fires Everywhere
The Immortalists
The Hearts Invisible Furies
Based on the endorsement / interest posted by two readers -
Little Fires Everywhere
The Immortalists
The Hearts Invisible Furies
@Mary13 : Thanks for doing that. It helps. I was busy yesterday and I appreciate you’re doing this legwork!
I suppose, if forced to choose, these would be my top three:
The Power
Little Fires Everywhere
Pachinko
I’m going to read The Flight Attendant anyway (it’s on my nightstand already) so I’d be happy with that one also.
I’d be fine with most of the books on this list. I will say, though, that out of these the ones I’d LEAST like to read are: (1) Duo of “The House on Mango Street” & “A House of My Own” (2) “American War” and (3) “The House of Broken Angels.”
@Mary13 - Thanks for putting together the descriptions.