Book Recommendations! | Fiction & Nonfiction Matchups

But that's not the case in At Loggerheads. Sea turtles are the majority of Brooke's life. She is so passionate about what she does.

Reading these two together is something I really recommend. This nonfiction book gave me such a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the character of Isobel.

But at the center of this trio is a deeply unsettling novel called Death of a Bookseller by Alice Slater in which we follow a true crime-obsessed bookseller at a struggling bookshop who quickly becomes overly attached, in a scary and delusional way, to one of her new coworkers, a fellow bookseller.

It's a complicated novel to describe, but I would say it's part coming-of-age story. We follow a young woman by the name of Sallie Kincaid as she grows up. But then it's also part family drama -- a lot of family secrets that we see in this book are inspired by the Tudors.

Laurie Lico Albanese does such a fantastic job in the novel of describing what Isobel sees, describing what she experiences, talking about what makes her different.

But if you're ready to go there, matching up either or even both of these nonfiction books with the novel will make for quite the experience.

And for that reason, I think you should read Hang the Moon either at or around the same time as you read Moonshine: A Cultural History of America's Infamous Liquor by Jaime Joyce which is a very fun, quick-reading little history book that talks about the legacy and the art of making moonshine, which is white, aka unaged "whiskey," here in the USA.

So I think pairing this book up with a memoir written by a fellow female marine biologist and a book that gives you so much more information on sea turtles that interest Brooke so much -- I think this pairing would have the ability to bring you so much deeper inside of Brooke's world.

I should warn you: There is never one concrete answer as to why women are so enamored of this genre, but there is so much mental food for thought to be had in the ruminating.

In both of these books, our leading ladies leave literary-type jobs in New York City in order to join start-ups in Silicon Valley and they tell us all about their wild experiences in those very tech-y, male-dominated spaces.

Of course, Valley Verified is a lot more laid-back, but I was really surprised just how similar these two are and how well they work together to give you a sense of what it would be like to make this intense life and career transition.