Here are 100 books that How It Feels to Float fans have personally recommended if you like
How It Feels to Float.
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Aside from my brief stint as a bossy know-it-all when I was little, I have always been that quiet girl no one notices. In high school, it took me at least ten minutes and five tries to get myself to wish my desk partner a happy birthday. I spent a lot of my adolescence trying to find myself, so I understand what it’s like to feel lost. My greatest wish is for my book to help at least one person feel how these books helped me.
This book is one of the first to teach me how wonderfully odd people can be. Jandy Nelson’s ability to write about lovable, flawed people who see the world differently gave me the courage to take pride in my peculiarity.
With memorable characters and strong familial relationships, this book is one of my go-to recommendations for anyone wondering if there is space for the strange.
Shortlisted for the Waterstones Children's Book Prize
Winner of the 2015 Michael L. Printz Award
Winner of a 2015 Stonewall Honor
"This is the big one - the BLAZING story of once inseparable twins whose lives are torn apart by tragedy." Entertainment Weekly
From the critically acclaimed author of The Sky Is Every where, a radiant novel that will leave you laughing and crying - all at once. For fans of John Green, Gayle Forman and Lauren Oliver.
Jude and her twin Noah were incredibly close - until a tragedy drove them apart, and now they…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am a writer who was first a reader and am convinced that novels can speak profound truth. They’ve helped me too many times to believe otherwise. I write novels about how we unwind from painful pasts to create new and better lives. In my experience, that requires us to face difficult truths and choose to be different until we are. I write fiction because I can begin with something awful, cut out boring detours that didn’t matter, and get my honorable and well-intentioned characters to happy endings faster than I’ve gotten to mine. These books map similar journeys, and all have left me better off for having read them.
I fell into this story with the first line and barely came up for air until I was done.
I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book filled with so much beautiful and tragic truth, or an ending that filled me with so much optimism. Thousands have written gorgeous reviews about the story, the characters, the writing—so I won’t even attempt that here.
These lines, from the book, are among the most beautiful and meaningful to me: “If you are surrounded by those who call what you are different instead of beautiful. If your mind or body has cried out for peace and acknowledgement and understanding, just know…You are part of an infinite family. The people who have been through terrible things and survived them. If you are reading these words, you WON today.”
A modern cult classic, a major motion picture and a timeless bestseller, The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a deeply affecting coming-of-age story.
Charlie is not the biggest geek in high school, but he's by no means popular.
Shy, introspective, intelligent beyond his years, caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie is attempting to navigate through the uncharted territory of high school. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and music - when all one requires to feel infinite is that…
I have long been fascinated by how personal and singular the experience of grief is. There is something soothing and relatable about reading others’ experiences—the more strange, nonsensical, or even supernatural the better. My own novel, The Secret Garden of Yanagi Inn, is a retelling of The Secret Garden, but with an adult protagonist moving through grief over the death of her complicated mother, striving to see a bright ray of hope on the other side. Each of the books on my list about unusual manifestations of grief tackles this same concept in new and surprising ways, and I hope they touch you as they have touched me.
Don’t let the YA tag dissuade you if you don’t generally read books for that audience; Watch Over Me has definite appeal for an adult crowd.
The main character is an 18-year-old young woman who has aged out of foster care and is searching for her place in the world. A ghost-story-that-isn’t-a-ghost-story, Watch Over Me is a book about confronting our own ghosts—literally and figuratively.
La Cour’s arresting prose seamlessly inserts the speculative elements into an exploration of recovery from guilt and grief in a way I found breathtaking.
A modern ghost story about trauma and survival, Watch Over Me is the much-anticipated new novel from the Printz Award-winning author of We Are Okay
"Gripping; an emotion-packed must-read." -Kirkus, starred review "A painfully compelling gem from a masterful creator." -Booklist, starred review "Moving, unsettling, and full of atmospheric beauty." -SLJ, starred review
Mila is used to being alone.
Maybe that's why she said yes. Yes to a second chance in this remote place, among the flowers and the fog and the crash of waves far below.
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
Aside from my brief stint as a bossy know-it-all when I was little, I have always been that quiet girl no one notices. In high school, it took me at least ten minutes and five tries to get myself to wish my desk partner a happy birthday. I spent a lot of my adolescence trying to find myself, so I understand what it’s like to feel lost. My greatest wish is for my book to help at least one person feel how these books helped me.
I know that including a Peter Pan reimagining where the narrator is a fairy in Neverland seems odd for a list like this, but this book captured my heart as few others have.
It focuses on Tiger Lily but is told from Tinkerbell’s perspective: an outsider is looking upon an outsider. The unique perspective and beautiful narrative made me, a girl on the periphery, wonder what stories even the quietest of us have to tell.
In the forbidden woods of Neverland, Tiger Lily falls under the alluring Peter Pan's spell. She will risk everything - her family, her future - to be with him. But Tiger Lily soon discovers that the most dangerous enemy can live inside even the most loyal and loving heart. From the New York Times bestselling author comes a magical and bewitching story of the romance between a fearless heroine and the boy who wouldn't grow up.
As a kid, I devoured books with any magical element, especially those somehow linked to nature. As I grew older and discovered that my emotional struggles were a signal of mental health issues, I turned to books again to make sense of my shattered world. I've found that magical realism is an incredible vehicle to explore the deep truths and questions behind mental health, healing, and grief, providing a way to make sense of the unexplainable. I slowly found my way to my own healing and wrote the book I needed as a young adult. I'm forever grateful to the authors of these books for providing a haven for souls like mine.
A novel in verse with a thrilling magical bent, this book defied all my expectations while somehow exceeding them.
Out of all the books on my list, this one is the most blatantly magical, but the wild happenings are so woven into the contemporary setting that they feel believable. I also love how this book deals with two protagonists who struggle with depression and grief in different ways and find ways to support each other without belittling the intensity of each other’s suffering. Add in a satisfying plot twist, and this book is a soulful, brilliant ride.
They Both Die at the End meets The Bell Jar in this haunting, beautiful young adult novel-in-verse about clinical depression and healing from trauma, from National Book Award Finalist Amber McBride.
Whimsy is back in the hospital for treatment of clinical depression. When she meets a boy named Faerry, she recognizes they both have magic in the marrow of their bones. And when Faerry and his family move to the same street, the two start to realize that their lifelines may have twined and untwined many times before.
They are both terrified of the forest at the end of Marsh…
As a kid, I devoured books with any magical element, especially those somehow linked to nature. As I grew older and discovered that my emotional struggles were a signal of mental health issues, I turned to books again to make sense of my shattered world. I've found that magical realism is an incredible vehicle to explore the deep truths and questions behind mental health, healing, and grief, providing a way to make sense of the unexplainable. I slowly found my way to my own healing and wrote the book I needed as a young adult. I'm forever grateful to the authors of these books for providing a haven for souls like mine.
Although this book is aimed at slightly younger readers, I’d be remiss not to mention it – this book is such a valuable read for both kids and adults alike.
Another book that deals with processing grief and the terrible weight of guilt through magic and nature. Of the dual points of view, one is a fox, the main character’s dead sibling reborn, giving this book a tender, poignant throughline.
Worlds collide spectacularly when Newbery and National Book Award finalist Kathi Appelt and Pulitzer Prize nominee and #1 New York Times bestseller Alison McGhee team up to create a fantastical, heartbreaking and gorgeous tale about two sisters, a fox cub ... and what happens when one sister disappears.
Sylvie and Jules, Jules and Sylvie. Better than just sisters, better than best friends. Jules' favourite thing is collecting rocks, and Sylvie's is running - fast. But Sylvie is too fast, and when she runs to the most dangerous part of the river one snowy morning to throw in a wish rock,…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
As a kid, I devoured books with any magical element, especially those somehow linked to nature. As I grew older and discovered that my emotional struggles were a signal of mental health issues, I turned to books again to make sense of my shattered world. I've found that magical realism is an incredible vehicle to explore the deep truths and questions behind mental health, healing, and grief, providing a way to make sense of the unexplainable. I slowly found my way to my own healing and wrote the book I needed as a young adult. I'm forever grateful to the authors of these books for providing a haven for souls like mine.
This book is a heavy read but a vital one. After the main character dies by suicide before the book begins, a fragment of her is left in the world, attempting to piece her shattered memory back together and remember why she left.
A heartbreaking but hope-giving look at the heaviest and most beautiful moments in life, this book ultimately reminds readers that there’s always a reason to hold on.
For fans of Girl in Pieces, All the Bright Places, and Girl, Interrupted comes a haunting and breathtaking YA contemporary debut novel that packs a powerful message: hope can be found in the darkness.
“Achingly poignant . . . a love letter and a life raft to the brokenhearted.” –New York Times bestselling author Alison McGhee
Seventeen-year-old Ellie had no hope left. Yet the day after she dies by suicide, she finds herself in the midst of an out-of-body experience. She is a spectator, swaying between past and present, retracing the events that unfolded prior to her death.
Aside from my brief stint as a bossy know-it-all when I was little, I have always been that quiet girl no one notices. In high school, it took me at least ten minutes and five tries to get myself to wish my desk partner a happy birthday. I spent a lot of my adolescence trying to find myself, so I understand what it’s like to feel lost. My greatest wish is for my book to help at least one person feel how these books helped me.
I will never pass up an opportunity to discuss one of Zack Smedley’s books. This one is one of the most beautiful, truthful, and book-hangover-inducing stories I have ever enjoyed reading.
Its narrator, a boy struggling to tell and come to terms with a difficult truth, will live in my heart and mind forever. I advise people to check for content warnings, as Smedley’s work never fails to leave me an emotional wreck.
Owen Turner is a boy of too many words. For years, they all stayed inside his head and he barely spoke-until he met Lily. Lily, the girl who gave him his voice, helped him come out as bi, and settle into his ASD diagnosis. But everything unravels when someone reports Owen's biggest secret to the school: that he was sexually assaulted at a class event. As officials begin interviewing students to get to the bottom of things, rumors about an assault flood the school hallways. No one knows it happened to Owen, and he's afraid of what will happen if…
Three biographical facts that well equip me to write about both monsters and mental health: I am a psychologist who researches, writes, and teaches about emotions, learning, and quality of life. I am also someone who suffers from panic disorder. I am also someone who enjoys interacting with the world of the dark and spooky, in part to tame my internal fears. I think that many of us use fiction in general and horror in particular as a sandbox of sorts—a safe place where we can expose ourselves to our fears, to test out scenarios, and to explore hidden parts of our psyche.
In my book I frequently draw upon monsters in fiction to understand our complicated relationship with both our own messy, unpredictable embodied minds and the uncertain, often-terrifying world that we operate these embodied minds within.
This haunting book of short stories is a great example of grappling with the complexities of our lives through a monstrous lens in order to better understand the human condition.
An NPR, Book Riot, Chicago Public Library, Tor.com, South China Morning Post,Ms. Magazine, and Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2022
2023 Pacific Northwest Book Prize Winner & Longlisted for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates Prize
A BuzzFeed, WIRED, LitHub, ALTA, and PureWow Best Book of Winter
"The strange and wonderful define Kim Fu’s story collection, where the line between fantasy and reality fades in and out, elusive and beckoning." ―The New York Times Book Review
In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
The world is an amazing, diverse place that needs stories that represent everyone. I identify as gender fluid and am part of my city’s LGBTQIA+ community. For kids, there aren’t enough stories that feature non-straight cis protagonists where that identity isn’t the focus. LGBTQIA+ kids exist. They are normal. Let a gay kid go into space. Let a teenage lesbian solve a mystery. Let a trans girl defeat a dragon. Let an ace teen be a witch. Everybody deserves their adventure.
The City of Lucille has gotten rid of all its monsters.
That’s what Jam, a teenage trans girl, believed until the demonic-looking Pet emerged from one of her mother’s paintings. But despite their monstrous appearance, Pet isn’t the monster, but came forth to hunt a monster already living among the people of Lucille undetected.
Pet contains vivid imagery, powerful themes, and a sensitive and brave protagonist. Be bold. Be vigilant. Monsters never entirely go away because we are the monsters.
4
authors picked
Pet
as one of their favorite books, and they share
why you should read it.
This book is for kids age
12,
13,
14, and
15.
What is this book about?
How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?
She stumbled backwards, her eyes wide, as the figure started coming out of the canvas ... She tried to be brave. Well, she said, her hands only a little shaky, at least tell me what I should call you. ... Well, little girl, it replied, I suppose you can call me Pet.
There are no more monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught. With doting parents and a best friend named Redemption, Jam has grown up with this…
