Top Ten Tuesday: Favorite Tropes: The Sequel

For That Artsy Reader Girl’s Top Ten Tuesday:

March 8: Books With Your Favorite Trope/Theme (Submitted by Raincheckandread.com and Sara Beth @ Life, Love, Writing)

I did something like this a while back but I figured that doing another could be fun. So here are some tropes/themes I love and some books that use them.

Book within a book where we read both books

• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz
• The House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski

Found Families

• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro – This is actually a complicated, sort of dysfunctional found family but for the characters it’s what they have.
• The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter by Theodora Goss – This is a rather “monstrous” family! (actually this reminds me that I planned to finish this series this year)
• The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows
• Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Magic School – Not just a school where one learns magic, but also a school with magical happenings about.

• Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray
• Blythewood trilogy by Carol Goodman
• Fairwick trilogy by Juliet Dark (who is also Carol Goodman!)

Gruff older person’s life is changed by a child

• Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett– I think this still applies even though Archibald isn’t really “old.” His is older than Mary after all
• Silas Marner by George Eliot

Lifestyles of the rich and famous

• Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
• The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
• Angel by Elizabeth Taylor
• Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Dishonest/deceptive protagonist

• White Ivy by Suzie Yang
• Sometimes I Lie by Alice Feeney
• My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing
• Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Secret Societies

• River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (though this ended in a way that was setting things up for a sequel that never came…)
• Gemma Doyle trilogy by Libba Bray
• The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club by Theodora Goss

Retellings of classic novels/works of literature

See these lists:

• Literary “Fanfiction”
• Star Crossed Lovers

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