Hometown Glory highlights the backgrounds of your favorite booksellers through the literature they love. For this series, we have selected books which represent our histories and remind us of home. Up this week is Lindsay, who grew up in Massachusetts.

Picture a historic coastal New England town, full of hundred-year-old red brick buildings, beautiful riverside parks which lead down to the beach, and thousands of tourists swarming the quaint downtown in the warm summer months. The population is less than 20,000 people and everyone goes to school with the same 500 kids from kindergarten all the way up through high school. On the weekends, teens pile into their mom’s SUV’s and drive forty minutes into Boston where they hang around the Public Garden and the North End before heading back home in time for dinner. This is the hometown of my childhood, flip-flopping from the small idyllic (and sometimes stifling) port city to the exciting buzz of Boston. These are a few titles which capture my childhood in New England.

Very Cold People by Sarah Manguso

Let’s be honest, certain New Englanders, specifically Bostonians and those in the city’s immediate outskirts, have a reputation for being a bit prickly (we’re called Massholes for a reason). In Manguso’s novel, she highlights the harsher qualities of some Massachusetts residents, comparing these rough exteriors with the cold winter weather. This book depicts the extreme–the main character experiences trauma and loss in many different forms–but much of the everyday life and community behavior is true to life. The separation of the old, wealthier New England families from the rest of the community and their higher social status is particularly interesting and accurate.

Blackbird House by Alice Hoffman

In Blackbird House, Hoffman sets her story in Cape Cod and follows the lives and loves of a large cast of characters. Hoffman writes some of the most complex female characters I’ve come across, and their relationships with one another are both devastating and lovely. The story also has moments of magic, which touches on the history of witchcraft in New England, something I will always appreciate in a book. Everytime I visit the Cape, I picture Blackbird House and its occupants in the landscape, as if they have always been there and always will be.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder

In high school, I had an assignment to rewrite a piece of literature to reflect my own life and I chose this play. Our Town is about childhood neighbors and how their relationships evolve over time. As a child, my next door neighbor was my best friend, and our two older brothers were best friends. This is a staple of small town life: running next door to play with your best friend, playing tag in your two front yards, having lunch at your house and dinner over at theirs. Much like the characters in the play, my relationship with this friend has followed us into adulthood and we are still very close, even though we now live on opposite sides of the country.

Make Way For Ducklings by Robert McCloskey

Of course this New England fangirl blog post would not be complete without what is arguably the most well-known Boston book: Make Way For Ducklings. This was mandatory reading for everyone growing up within a hundred mile radius of Boston, and I remember a very fun, very educational first grade class trip into the city to visit the Duckling statues which are proudly displayed there. This sweet story highlights one of the most scenic parts of the city, the Public Garden, and has a charming and nostalgic tone, one everyone can enjoy regardless of whether or not they have visited Boston. And despite the book being about 80 years old, the historic illustrations are surprisingly similar to how the city still looks today.