100 Books Like Nowhere Boy

Right off the bat, Darius jumps off the page as a real teen with relatable problems.

He’s the quiet kid at school, who the others tease. And he suffers from clinical depression. What I loved was how well Khorram tackled depression’s subtleties.

I think there is a tendency for society to see depression as this overarching dark cloud that keeps us in bed 24/7. But the truth is, many people who are suffering, are functional.

From the outside, we don’t see the building up of little moments that act like a snowball gradually expanding as it rolls down the mountain face.

Be warned – the food descriptions are amazing, so you might get hungry during the read.

This is my only other fiction pick. I read this many years ago, when it was new, but it stayed with me. We see a lot of relationships between people and dogs or people and horses, but this is a novel about a girl and a group of bonobos. That’s an interesting twist on the human/animal relationship, because other primates are so similar to us in their intelligence and approach to the world. They are mostly helpless against human forces, but then again so are young girls. The bonds formed in this book are worth the price of admission, and the suspense is high throughout.

Thirteen-year-old Clare is a doctor’s daughter whose mom died last year. She joins her dad for two months in a jungly rural district deep in Malawi, where he works for a medical charity and she attends a local school. Claire is deep in her grief—but in Mzanga Village Primary she makes deep connections, then has to confront heartbreak all over again. It’s funny and inspiring to witness the ways the village kids cope with privations and challenges far beyond any Clare has ever known. Burg’s characters rise easily from her pages to life; and her novel pries open our hearts, even just a little, right along with Clare’s.

In this novel by a Palestinian-American poet, Liyana is an observant teenager whose family suddenly relocates from the U.S. to a tense, polarized, injustice-ridden Jerusalem. Habibi gives us Jerusalem and its surroundings from the Palestinian side, bringing to life the community and its traditions, frustrations, and shattering losses. Then the novel introduces a young Israeli to whom Liyana is strongly drawn—and things get complicated, as it seems they inevitably do in this place of complexities that are both age-old and ever-present. As Liyana and Omer grow close, the story opens into one that’s broader, deeper, and honestly challenging. The only real answer, Habibi seems to insist, is our own humanity.

30,000 children some of whom were as young as six were orphaned and displaced from their homes when their villages were attacked in the Civil War. They met and banded together to trek across Sudan to Ethiopia and Kenya, looking for a new home. This was a journey of almost 1,000 miles. Thousands died on the way, but over 3,000 survived and many were resettled in America. I learned what can happen to children when their village is attacked and their parents killed. It's a fascinating story of perseverance and the importance of hope.

Filmmaker Rithy Panh does not like the word trauma. He prefers to describe the after-effects of what happened to his Cambodian family as “an unending desolation.” Ever since the Khmer Rouge were driven from power in 1979 and he survived as a teenager, he has not stopped thinking about his family and trying to understand Comrade Duch, a man Rithy regards as “The Commandant of the Killing Fields." Mao and Stalin, Nazism and the Nurenberg Trials, and The Hague all hover at the edges of Rithy’s consciousness. He describes dispossession; dehumanization beginning with the annulment of names; demonization of education and traditional notions of culture; deportation;  slow starvation; corruption; terror; torture and language itself. Rithy Panh is a documentary filmmaker and reading The Elimination is an act of witness by both writer and reader. 

A more recently released historical fiction account of a young girl’s loyalty and daring decisions on a North Sea island off the coast of Norway is The Klipfish Code. Published two years before my own book, I had not read it until a reviewer compared my debut book to this suspenseful story. I read it immediately, humbled by the comparison. Twelve-year-old Marit is living with her grandpa, who she resents for not actively protesting the German occupiers of their island. She’s outspoken, angry, and eager to support the resistance, despite his cautions and concerns. I was intrigued by this transition period in German policy. They traded propaganda and persuasion for coercion, including arresting one in ten teachers across the country, sending them to labor camps to make them agree to teach Nazi lies within the classroom. The terror of this little-known action compounds Marit’s struggle to decipher a code,… show more.

Thinking about camps and incarceration brings me to Voices from the ‘Jungle’: Stories from the Calais Refugee Camp. I choose this book because it offers insights into the lives and aspirations of refugees who congregated in the refugee camp in the coastal town of Calais in northern France. As such, it is an antidote to much contemporary reportage of refugees as a faceless and anonymous mass. Their vivid first-person accounts testify to the violence and persecution from which they escaped, whether in Afghanistan, Eritrea, Sudan, or Syria, and their subsequent adventures and odysseys, including endless waiting for official decisions or for the opportunity to make their way to the UK to join family or friends. The camp and its residents have been much photographed, but most of these images give little idea of the extent to which the “jungle” became a vibrant community; juxtaposing images and words, as in… show more.

A more specialized account focused on the role of women, who made up the vast majority of refugees, in petitioning government for civilian protection and assistance before and after the crisis, and their unique experiences on the road. Dombrowski Risser finds that women initiated an expansion of universal human rights in wartime to include refugees' rights. Her insightful and masterfully informed analysis of primary source materials—women's letters to government officials—brings them to life, adding illuminating, and heartrending, substance and texture.

In Calais, France, on Europe’s northern edge, migrants from across the Middle East and Africa settled, hopeful that they would eventually make it across the English Channel.

While they waited, they built lives, relationships, and the ramshackle edifices that poverty permits—the ingredients of communities. Only to be attacked, sometimes by neighbors, other times by police. In this graphic novel, Evans brings Europe’s refugees to life in their humor, hope, and despair.