Here are 100 books that Calvin fans have personally recommended if you like
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Like many adults, I love a good YA story. YA books take us back to our younger days when we were stronger, faster, and likely better-looking, but also to the confusing transitional time of being a teenager. Mostly, I love reading and writing YA novels because despite being about hard topics–friendship, disease, toppling the patriarchy–they are hopeful. In this confusing, stressful world, we need a little optimism. With that in mind, I offer you five of my favorite YA books that I think adults will love, too.
Although I love a book that takes you traveling to the past or to foreign lands, sometimes I want to jump into the shoes of a contemporary character and understand their world. This book does just that.
Starr Carter is a black teenager who lives in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood but attends an elite, mostly white private school. Starr manages to code-switch between her two lives until her childhood friend is shot by the police.
If you like books about social justice and characters who stand up for what they believe, this is a fantastic read.
Now a major motion picture, starring Amandla Stenberg
No. 1 New York Times bestseller
Winner of the Waterstones Children's Book Prize * Goodreads Choice Awards Best of the Best * National Book Award Longlist * British Book Awards Children's Book of the Year * Teen Vogue Best YA Book of the Year
Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
Since I was a child, stories steeped in secrets have fascinated me. I spent many hours devouring books about detectives and spies, shadows and deceit. As an adult, it is a rare treat to discover one that is so engaging I must know how it unfolds as soon as possible, and is told in a way that leaves me surprised by how it ends. Each of these books is deliciously tricky, inspiring me to read quickly, before the ghosts between the pages could escape to haunt me.
Wintergirls is heart-wrenching and repulsive. Laurie Halse Anderson uses evocative, jarring language to tell a story about deadly friendship and an almost insurmountable eating disorder. This book pried open my eyes to the harsh struggles of people who live with eating disorders, teaching me about a reality I have mercifully never had to face. My heart ached for the main character as she descended farther into her illness, but left me with that cruel but vital ingredient: hope.
"Dead girl walking," the boys say in the halls. "Tell us your secret," the girls whisper, one toilet to another. I am that girl. I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through. I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.
Lia and Cassie are best friends, wintergirls frozen in matchstick bodies, competitors in a deadly contest to see who can be the skinniest. But what comes after size zero and size double-zero? When Cassie succumbs to the demons within, Lia feels she is being haunted by her friend's restless spirit.
Like many adults, I love a good YA story. YA books take us back to our younger days when we were stronger, faster, and likely better-looking, but also to the confusing transitional time of being a teenager. Mostly, I love reading and writing YA novels because despite being about hard topics–friendship, disease, toppling the patriarchy–they are hopeful. In this confusing, stressful world, we need a little optimism. With that in mind, I offer you five of my favorite YA books that I think adults will love, too.
Hands down, this is my favorite coming-of-age novel, written by Rainbow Rowell. Protagonist Cath copes with anxiety, family problems, and being away from home at college for the first time, but I loved this book because it plays with Harry Potter tropes, another book that appeals to adults as well as teens.
Cath is obsessed with a Harry Potter-like series called Simon Snow. Like Harry, Simon attends a school for magic and fights against evil, but he’s also in love with his roommate, a thinly veiled version of Draco Malfoy.
Cath not only reads all the Simon Snow books and dresses up in costumes for the movies, but she is also a devoted fan fiction writer. While Cath copes with her life and falls in love for the first time, it’s her queer Simon Snow fan fiction that kept me reading.
A love story by Rainbow Rowell, the New York Times bestselling author of Eleanor & Park.
Cath and Wren are identical twins, and until recently they did absolutely everything together. Now they're off to university and Wren's decided she doesn't want to be one half of a pair any more - she wants to dance, meet boys, go to parties and let loose. It's not so easy for Cath. She's horribly shy and has always buried herself in the fan fiction she writes, where she always knows exactly what to say and can write a romance far more intense than…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
Like many adults, I love a good YA story. YA books take us back to our younger days when we were stronger, faster, and likely better-looking, but also to the confusing transitional time of being a teenager. Mostly, I love reading and writing YA novels because despite being about hard topics–friendship, disease, toppling the patriarchy–they are hopeful. In this confusing, stressful world, we need a little optimism. With that in mind, I offer you five of my favorite YA books that I think adults will love, too.
I’m fascinated by books that take place in college, a rich transitional time where characters are still teens–insecure and figuring things out–but also with new adult responsibilities and freedoms.
This book took me back to those late teen years of uncertainty and new adventures. The protagonist, Penny, is thrilled to be away from home at the University of Austin, Texas, but even more thrilled by meeting Sam, an aspiring filmmaker who works in a local café. These two couldn’t be more awkward, and through most of the book, they are too anxious to actually meet up and only communicate through text. Their final meet-up, like any good romance, is thrilling.
I loved the snappy dialogue and texts and the deep development of Choi’s characters. I also loved that author Choi’s website is called Choi to the World.
"Smart and funny, with characters so real and vulnerable, you want to send them care packages. I loved this book." -Rainbow Rowell
From debut author Mary H.K. Choi comes a compulsively readable novel that shows young love in all its awkward glory-perfect for fans of Eleanor & Park and To All the Boys I've Loved Before.
For Penny Lee, high school was a total nonevent. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she'd somehow landed a boyfriend, they never managed to know much about each other. Now Penny is heading to college in Austin, Texas, to learn…
I know from my own experience how much kids need books that deal honestly with hard things and point to hope. When I was in fifth grade, a friend was killed by a car while walking to school. I had moved to town not long before; this boy was the first friend I’d made, and suddenly, he was gone. Soon after, I found a novel called Bridge to Terabithia, the story of a fifth-grader, Jess, who loses a friend in an accident. It made me cry, but it was healing: I felt less alone and found strength in watching Jess find his way forward despite his grief.
This book amazed me with its bravery: Bradley takes on child sexual abuse and a teen suicide attempt, and she presents this story, as hard as it is, in a way that young readers can understand and process.
The voice of the narrator, 10-year-old Della, is a big draw for me: She’s tough, candid, and funny, and her personality propelled me through the book. I love that this story ultimately shows a child fighting back effectively in the darkest of circumstances.
Della begins by saying she has a “big mouth” and has been told to keep quiet and edit herself. But in the end, Della’s mouth and her refusal to keep quiet about horrible things done to her big sister get them both to a better place.
*Newbery Honor Book* *Boston Globe-Horn Book Honor*
A candid and fierce middle grade novel about sisterhood and sexual abuse, by two-time Newbery Honor winner and #1 New York Times best seller Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, author of The War that Saved My Life
Kirkus Prize Finalist Boston Globe Best Book of the Year Horn Book Fanfare Best Book of the Year School Library Journal Best Book of the Year Booklist Best Book of the Year Kirkus Best Book of the Year BookPage Best Book of the Year New York Public Library Best Book of the Year Chicago Public Library Best Book…
I’m an American author of young adult novel Romancing the Dark in the City of Light and other fiction for younger readers as well as a trained suicide prevention counselor and mental health advocate. I have long been pulled by the subject of suicide since struggling with depression as an adolescent. Along with my pal, author and psychologist Nancy Bo Flood, we read and keep track of exceptional, traditionally-published books dealing with mental illness—that of the main character or of someone they love—that avoid tropes and stereotypes, model characters seeking and receiving help and support and ultimately coping, all while pursuing their goals and dreams like any other fictional people.
A fascinating, revealing, and sometimes difficult trip into the mind of Caden Bosch, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder, and his wildly creative and disconcerting forays into an alternate reality while suffering an episode. As if trying to navigate high school and family life weren’t hard enough. Co-written with the author’s son who suffers from this mental illness, the novel won the U.S. National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. It captures the fear and confusion as well as the beauty and ineffable nature of a mind perceiving the world differently than most of ours do.
National Book Award and Golden Kite Award Winner A captivating novel about mental illness that lingers long beyond the last page, Challenger Deep is a heartfelt tour de force by New York Times bestselling author Neal Shusterman. Caden Bosch is on a ship that's headed for the deepest point on Earth: Challenger Deep, the southern part of the Marianas Trench. Caden Bosch is a brilliant high school student whose friends are starting to notice his odd behavior. Caden Bosch is designated the ship's artist in residence to document the journey with images. Caden Bosch pretends to join the school track…
I do not remember a time when I wasn’t captivated by stories about adolescence. This was the case when I myself was a teenager—when I sought in these overwrought sagas the sort of sentimental melodrama that eluded the banality of my own life—but curiously it’s no less true at thirty, for reasons that are fundamentally the same but somehow more urgent. Becoming an adult is an exercise in hardening; to grow up is to forget what it’s like to be beholden to one’s own autobiographical romance.The following titles offer a respite from the cynicism that is adulthood; as a writer and a human, I'm forever in their debt.
This is another novel written expressly for teenagers, and all the better for it.
Inflected by the author’s own autobiographical experiences—like Craig, the novel’s narrator, Vizzini spent a week in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager—It’s Kind of a Funny Story was the first work of fiction I’d read that articulated the adolescent experience through the language of mental health. It was here that I learned “depression” isn’t an abstracted emotion but the very real neurochemical imbalance that impels Craig to call the suicide hotline after abandoning his SSRIs.
There’s an uncanny familiarity to the circumstances of Craig’s breakdown—namely in how he struggles to remain above water at a famously rigorous college preparatory high school—and a fundamental earnestness to his story’s confessions that gilds even its grimmest moments with a fifteen-year-old's sense of impressionable wonder.
Like many ambitious New York City teenagers, Craig Gilner sees entry into Manhattan’s Executive Pre-Professional High School as the ticket to his future. Determined to succeed at life—which means getting into the right high school to get into the right college to get the right job—Craig studies night and day to ace the entrance exam, and does. That’s when things start to get crazy.
At his new school, Craig realizes that he isn't brilliant compared to the other kids; he’s just average, and maybe not even that. He soon sees his once-perfect future crumbling away. The stress becomes unbearable and…
I learned early that information doesn’t change people’s minds and that we can’t lecture our way into people’s hearts. Real change comes through building empathy, and we do that through compelling, personal storytelling. I’ve been working on disrupting bias and building empathy my whole life. It’s why I write, and why I teach, and why I travel to speak with different groups. It’s my theory of change in the world—the first step towards moving us to a more caring, kinder global society.
I have never read a book like Babel, that is so deeply entrenched in histories of colonialism, and also sheds so much light on the inequities of our world today.
We see how well-meaning people get sucked into power, and it causes each reader to reflect on how the decisions we make daily can put us on different trajectories.
Babel is such a forceful vision, with beautiful writing and inspiring imagination.
While volunteering in a psychotic disorder unit at a Montreal psychiatric hospital, I witnessed firsthand the extraordinary lives of people hospitalized for their symptoms. As their stories accumulated, I felt compelled to record them. What emerged was a stark indictment of society’s failure to see the human being behind experiences such as hearing voices, delusions, and hallucinations. Compounding this injustice is the persistent, misguided belief that psychosis and violence are intrinsically linked—they are not. My work became a mission: to reveal the humanity behind the diagnosis and to challenge the stigma, opening minds to the creativity, beauty, and love that exist in every person who has endured the profound exclusion of mental illness.
A ground-breaking memoir, this book recounts Elyn Saks’s journey through the depths of schizophrenia while forging a remarkable career as a legal scholar. Saks, diagnosed with chronic schizophrenia during her college years, offers an unflinching account of her psychotic breaks, hospitalizations, and the constant battle to stay grounded in reality.
Yet, her story is one of resilience and hope, showing that a fulfilling life with schizophrenia is possible. Saks’s narrative is both personal and educational, offering insight into the lived experience of mental illness while advocating for compassion and understanding. Her bravery was what captured my attention. Her no-holds-barred personal story gives hope to everyone who has been given a devastating diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Elyn Saks is Professor of Law and Psychiatry at University of Southern California Law School. She's the author of several books. Happily married. And - a schizophrenic. Saks lifts the veil on schizophrenia with her startling and honest account of how she learned to live with this debilitating disease. With a coolly clear, measured tone she talks about her condition, the stigma attached and the deadening effects of medication. Her controlled narrative is disrupted by interjections from the part of her mind she has learned to suppress. Delusions, hallucinations and threatening voices cut into her reality and Saks, in a…
While volunteering in a psychotic disorder unit at a Montreal psychiatric hospital, I witnessed firsthand the extraordinary lives of people hospitalized for their symptoms. As their stories accumulated, I felt compelled to record them. What emerged was a stark indictment of society’s failure to see the human being behind experiences such as hearing voices, delusions, and hallucinations. Compounding this injustice is the persistent, misguided belief that psychosis and violence are intrinsically linked—they are not. My work became a mission: to reveal the humanity behind the diagnosis and to challenge the stigma, opening minds to the creativity, beauty, and love that exist in every person who has endured the profound exclusion of mental illness.
Robert Kolker's book tells the unforgettable story of the Galvin’s, a Colorado family with twelve children—six of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Through meticulous reporting and sensitive interviews with two of the daughters, Kolker weaves together the family's history with the evolving science of schizophrenia research.
The book reveals the heartbreaking toll mental illness takes on individuals and families while offering hope through scientific advancements. It is both a family saga and a medical mystery, painting a profound portrait of violence, love, loss, and resilience in the face of unimaginable challenges. Kolker’s book underlined that mental illness is a combination of genetic heritability and environment.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF GQ's TOP 50 BOOKS OF LITERARY JOURNALISM IN THE 21st CENTURY • The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.
"Reads like a medical detective journey and sheds light on a topic so many of us face: mental illness." —Oprah Winfrey
Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado,…
