8 Books About Characters Seeking Community and Connection

As a child growing up in a very small town, interlibrary loan was a lifeline. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, ILL books came by mail, in heavy canvas envelopes with a thick zipper meant to withstand handling by the postal service. The return slip was tucked inside, and it was all very magical to me: putting in a request at the small, regional library (we were lucky to have one, I realize now), and then books appearing in the PO Box, with the checkout stamps spanning the state and sometimes the nation. 

Then, I didn’t have the language to describe what I was feeling: the remoteness and separation from the larger world; the way that anyone who left and stayed away was otherized—as if wanting to get away from a county with a high teen pregnancy rate and a low per capita income was the fault of the leaver; the sense of tension that is often present in rural areas, in that the pastoral beauty is a scrim ov...