Here are 68 books that One fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
Long Way Down does an incredible job of telling such a contained story, telling everything within the span of a single elevator ride.
Reynolds uses the elevator trip to make the protagonist encounter ghosts of multiple dead people in his community, all connected to his murdered brother, and question if vengeance is the right answer to his grief. This is a well-deserved classic, and a must-read for all novel-in-verse fans!
“An intense snapshot of the chain reaction caused by pulling a trigger.” —Booklist (starred review) “Astonishing.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “A tour de force.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
A Newbery Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Honor Book A Printz Honor Book A Time Best YA Book of All Time (2021) A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner for Young Adult Literature Longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner of the Walter Dean Myers Award An Edgar Award Winner for Best Young Adult Fiction Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner An Entertainment Weekly Best YA Book of…
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…
I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
Lawless Spaces uses the novel in verse form to capture multiple voices over several generations, voices of women who all carry the same trauma of being sexualized as women in a patriarchal world.
The verse allows readers to see the patterns between characters in a really compelling way, and think about what has and hasn’t changed in our world regarding how women are viewed.
Perfect for fans of Deb Caletti, this “powerful, absorbing, and beautiful” (Booklist) coming-of-age novel in verse follows a teen girl who connects with the women of her maternal line through their journals and comes to better understand her fraught relationship with her mother.
Mimi’s relationship with her mother has always been difficult. But lately, her mother has been acting more withdrawn than usual, leaving Mimi to navigate the tricky world of turning sixteen alone. What she doesn’t expect is her mother’s advice to start journaling—just like all the woman in her family before her. It’s a tradition, she says. Expected.…
I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
This book tells a beautiful and compelling story about a village girl coming to the city for her education.
We as readers feel the stakes so clearly, and are pulled into Kavi’s journey of reconciling with her identity away from home and the assumptions she makes about others. This story has great nuance and it’s so satisfying to see Kavi grow as a character. Her story challenges readers to think about the assumptions they make about others in their own lives.
Caught between two worlds—a poverty-stricken village and a fancy big-city school—a young Sri Lankan girl must decide who she really is and where she really belongs.
1998, Colombo. The Sri Lankan Civil War is raging, but everyday life must go on. At Kavi’s school, her friends talk about the weekly Top 40, the Backstreet Boys, Shahrukh Khan, Leo & Kate… and who died—or didn’t—in the latest bombing. But Kavi is afraid of something even scarier than war. She fears that if her friends discover her secret—that she is not who she is pretending to be—they’ll stop talking to her.
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…
I have always straddled between the worlds of fiction and poetry. I received my MFA in poetry in 2016, but during my time in the program, I was often told my poems were too narrative. Sometimes in my fiction workshops in undergrad, I was told my stories were too poetic. So when I finally jumped into the world of verse, I really fell in love with the intersection of poetry and story. Finally, there was a medium that felt “just right!” There are so many fantastic novels in verse out there—with so many more to come—but I hope you’ll enjoy these five favorites of mine!
The book uses verse to create a modern-day fairy tale, mixing magic with contemporary Prague. This makes magic feel so close and tangible for us as readers.
Because of this, we believe our protagonist Ilana and sympathise with her as she makes friends with the ghost of a Jewish boy from decades ago, and fights the hold of the strange and charismatic Wasserman, who has the ability to make the memory of children disappear.
Despite its magical appearance, this story still tackles compelling real-world issues of racism, war, and diaspora in a compelling way.
A brilliantly original tale for fans of The Bear and the Nightingale and The Hazel Wood about embracing your power, facing your monsters, and loving deeply enough to transcend a century.
Inspired by the author's experiences restoring Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe.
"A must-read for lost souls everywhere." —Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review
Magic will burn you up.
Sent to stay with her aunt in Prague and witness the humble life of an artist, Ilana Lopez—a biracial Jewish girl—finds herself torn between her dream of becoming a violinist and her immigrant parents’ desire for her to pursue a more stable career.…
I’m an avid reader of speculative fiction: fantasy, science fiction, horror, “what-if” stories of our world with a twist... you name it, I’m in. But what really sells a spec-fic story for me is the characters that populate the world – the relationships that form the heart of the otherworldly story – and I’ve always found sisterhood, in particular, extremely compelling. I’ve actually written two speculative books featuring sisters myself, and have another sisters-driven adventure coming out next year! I’m also one of three sisters, and growing up, these relationships served as the basis of so many memories, as well as informed so much of who I am.
This slim novel is actually the second in McGuire’s Wayward Children series, which I wholeheartedly recommend in its entirety. The premise: a school for teenagers who once found secret, magical doors to other worlds when they were younger—and who, for various reasons, are sent back from those worlds to ours again. I particularly loved Jack, the burgeoning mad scientist sister in Down Among the Sticks and Bones, as well as her complicated relationship with her sister, Jill. I’m also a big fan of unique worlds and high-concept premises, and McGuire’s series absolutely checks both of those boxes!
Winner: 2022 Hugo Award for Best Series Winner: 2018 Alex Award Winner: 2018 ALA RUSA Fantasy Award
Seanan McGuire returns to her popular Wayward Children series with Down Among the Sticks and Bones―a truly standalone story suitable for adult and young adult readers of urban fantasy, and the follow-up to the Alex, Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award-winning, World Fantasy Award finalist, Tiptree Honor List book Every Heart a Doorway
Twin sisters Jack and Jill were seventeen when they found their way home and were packed off to Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children.
I was a Navy Brat for most of my childhood, moving from place to place every couple of years. It was hard, but my mom somehow always created a community around us of people that I could almost call my aunts and uncles. As an adult, I’ve also found people that I love like family, and created my own little group with my own people. It’s something that I write about in every single book I pen and I’m sure it will continue because I love when people find their people. It’s my favorite.
This is a book that has stuck with me for over five years now.
The book is the first in the Frontier Magic Trilogy, and it’s fantastic. I loved the world-building, the twist on how magic worked and was taught. I also loved how her biological family thought she was a jinx, but her teachers and friends really believed in her and her magic.
Amanda Ronconi reads the books, too, so I highly recommend listening if you are into audiobooks.
Eff was born a thirteenth child. Her twin brother, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son. This means he's supposed to possess amazing talent - and she's supposed to bring only bad things to her family and her town. Undeterred, her family moves to the frontier, where her father will be a professor of magic at a school perilously close to the magical divide that separates settlers from the beasts of the wild. With wit and wonder, Patricia Wrede creates an alternative history of westward expansion that will delight fans of both J. K. Rowling and Laura Ingalls…
I’m the child of immigrants and grew up imagining a second self—me, if my parents had never left India. Then, when I became a writer, doubles kept showing up in odd ways in my work. In my first play, House of Sacred Cows, I had identical twins played, farcically, by the same actor. My latest novel features two South Asian women: one, slightly wimpy, married to an unsympathetic guy called Mac, and another, in a permanent state of outrage, married to a nice man called Mat. My current project is a novel about mixed-race twins born in India but separated at birth.
I read this gorgeous, fanciful book in the days after my second child was born, confined to bed with the baby but exploring the imagined city of Entralla with twins Alva and Irva Dapp. This novel is a municipal guidebook, illustrated with photos of a model of Entralla, created by Carey, who is also a visual artist.
The fiction is that Irva built this model: wanting to know her city but terrified to leave the house, she instead constructs a miniature of it based on reports from her twin sister. I love miniatures and models, so the idea of a replica of a city in a novel about twins was irresistible, apart from Carey’s delicious prose.
The city of Entralla - along with Gondal, Brobdingnag and the Emerald City - is not somewhere you are likely to have visited. Only one guidebook to the place exists, despite its historic landmarks and the considerable civic pride of its inhabitants.
Alva and Irva are identical twin sisters, and Entralla is their home. By nature, Alva is an explorer, and longs to travel the world. Irva is a recluse, for whom every step outside the house is an ordeal. But the twins belong together and cannot survive without each other. It is when Irva refuses to leave the house…
I am an award-winning author who grew up in a family of painters, poets, sculptors, and novelists; people who designed their lives around, and dedicated their lives to, artistic expression. I knew I wanted to be a writer at age three when I began dictating a poem every day to my mom. I first fell in love with Jane Austen as a student at Oxford, where I read my favorite of her novels, Persuasion.
I loved reading this book to my kids, who were immediately drawn into the heartbreaking story of Judith, a girl with Down Syndrome, who was separated from her twin sister, Joyce, and institutionalized for many years. This separation led to great pain for both sisters, until decades later, when Joyce brought Judith home, and enrolled her in an art program for differently-abled people. Slowly, Judith flourished, going on to become an artist of renown, with work displayed in museums and galleries around the world.
This tremendous story, of the bond between sisters, the therapeutic value of the creative process, and the potential for creating meaning and joy through artistic expression, helped my very young children develop empathy for and a deeper understanding of differently-abled people.
A moving and powerful introduction to the life and art of renowned artist, Judith Scott, as told by her twin sister, Joyce Scott and illustrated by Caldecott Honor artist, Melissa Sweet.
Judith Scott was born with Down syndrome. She was deaf, and never learned to speak. She was also a talented artist. Judith was institutionalized until her sister Joyce reunited with her and enrolled her in an art class. Judith went on to become an artist of renown with her work displayed in museums and galleries around the world.
Poignantly told by Joyce Scott in collaboration with Brie Spangler and…
All my life I’ve been pushing against limits. Being the oldest of five children born to a farm couple who became mill workers, I was frequently reminded by family that “people like us” did not need much education, didn’t get the good jobs, and shouldn’t “rise above themselves.” Being a girl, I had additional limits. Naturally, when I learned to read, I was drawn to books in which characters broke through unfair restraints to have adventures and accomplish great deeds. I wanted to be one of those people. By the time I came of age, I knew I had a shot at becoming the heroine of my own story!
This book is for any girl, like me, who grew up with a sister she envied. I loved seeing Louise come to terms with her own worth and her own beauty. I felt that I was fighting her battles with her. In the end we both made peace with our sisters and gained confidence in our own merits.
Katherine Paterson's remarkable Newbery Medal-winning classic about a painful sibling rivalry, and one sister’s struggle to make her own way, is an honest and daring portrayal of adolescence and coming of age.
A strong choice for independent reading, both for summer reading and homeschooling, as well as in the classroom, Jacob Have I Loved has been lauded as a cornerstone young adult novel and was ranked among the all-time best children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal.
"Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated . . ." With her grandmother's taunt, Louise knew that she,…
As a female grown up in a working-class neighborhood in East Naples (Italy), and as an academic researching political ecologies in Italy, Brazil, and the USA, I am especially interested in how sex/gender, class/work, and race/coloniality are intersected in people’s lives, and especially in how this shapes their perceptions and experiences of environmental problems. This approach has led me to look for the connections between labor and the environment both within and beyond waged/industrial work and formal trade unions, including the unpaid housework and subsistence production done in working-class, peasant, Black, and Indigenous communities and the social movements that represent them.
This is a novel that I have read again over the years, gifted to my loved ones, and recommended to my friends. Set in Kerala (India) between the early 1960s and early 1990s, the book tells the story of the ill-fated love between an upper caste woman and a lower caste man, set against the grain of parallel stories and events involving other members of the two characters' families and village.
What struck me was the profound humanity with which the motivations and worldviews of all characters are depicted and the author's ability to illustrate the chain of suffering that connects them as related to larger social schemes–such as post-colonial relations between the British and the Indian branch of the family.
'They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much.'
This is the story of Rahel and Estha, twins growing up among the banana vats and peppercorns of their blind grandmother's factory, and amid scenes of political turbulence in Kerala. Armed only with the innocence of youth, they fashion a childhood in the shade of the wreck that is their family: their lonely, lovely mother, their beloved Uncle Chacko (pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher) and their sworn enemy, Baby Kochamma (ex-nun,…
