Here are 87 books that Swimming in a Sea of Stars fans have personally recommended if you like
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CDC statistics say that more teens and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, flu, and chronic lung disease COMBINED. Each day in the US, there are an average of 5,400 suicide attempts by teens in grades 7-12. These statistics are frightening, and yet, as a high school teacher, I knew lecturing my students that suicide is NEVER the answer to problems wouldn't work. They'd have to see it for themselves. So that's what I tried to do as a writer. The poems in ANNA are short but penetrating, and combined with Anna's note at the book's end, I hope the point is made.
This book shows that depression is real. We need to pay attention to others and let them know they are not alone. I think this message is so important. It cannot be overstated. I loved the way the two girls in this book helped each other through Emily Dickinson.
Though some readers thought it was a little two coincidental that both girls have the same English class, have the same initials, and both like Emily Dickinson, I didn’t find that a problem. I also thought it hooked readers to know that one of the girls is considering suicide, but we don’t know which one.
13 Reasons Why meets the poetry of Emily Dickinson in this gripping debut novel perfect for fans of Sara Zarr or Jennifer Brown.
A Goth girl with an attitude problem, Elizabeth Davis must learn to control her anger before it destroys her. Emily Delgado appears to be a smart, sweet girl, with a normal life, but as depression clutches at her, she struggles to feel normal. Both girls are in Ms. Diaz's English class, where they connect to the words of Emily Dickinson. Both are hovering on the edge of an emotional precipice. One of them will attempt suicide. And…
I’m a professor and YA author. Books helped me navigate the difficult choices I faced growing up. I gravitated to characters that I could picture myself befriending and looking up to because they had the bravery and strength that I wanted to have. As an author, I believe we need more stories about people who leave a positive mark on the world. I try to write characters that I can both relate to and would want to be friends with: characters who, in facing difficulty, discover the strength of their humanity because they have a light and goodness that shines somewhere deep inside.
This is a story told from dual perspectives. Our male protagonist is Theodore Finch. He’s a rebel type, funny, and spontaneous. He goes after Violet Markey—our female first-person perspective—after discovering that she, too, is grappling with demons from her past. What I love about this book is how alive Theodore is as he walks the tightrope of death. While tragedy abounds in this story, you can sense a shaky joy in Theodore. His punk, fun-chasing exterior hides a vulnerable soul in search of love.
I knew a lot of teen boys like him when I was in high school. Jennifer Niven did a remarkable job capturing the raw energy that Theodore zaps into the lives of those around him. Sometimes, there are people like Theodore who crash through our lives—people with a magic to them—that we wish we could hold onto.
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.
When my father died in 1998, bladder cancer, I was 41 years old and privileged to be his primary caregiver for five weeks. My first major loss and it was as though a mack truck had been driven through my chest. Ten years later, my mother died, after nine years of dementia, which is like losing someone twice. That was a more ravaging grief. Twelve years later, my nephew died, a month away from his 36th birthday. And in 2022, one close friend of mine took his own life and another died of cancer at age 57. Grief is the subject I gravitate toward in the books I read and the essays I write.
It is fair to say that this is my favorite memoir I’ve ever read. I’m shocked it didn’t make bestseller lists when it came out. Finneran is a poet, who through the language, attention to detail, and strategic pacing of key scenes, makes readers see and feel what she wants us to see and feel. This book offered me, as a teacher of college writing, numerous perfect examples of how scenes can be developed to drop readers into a moment, to transport them. Finneran focuses the memoir on how her brother’s suicide affected her whole, big, Catholic family. The Tender Land, a Family Love Story is a portrait of a family who has lost something huge. Devastating content aside, this is a memoir that you will delight in, sentence by sentence, for its language. Highly recommend this remarkable book.
An extraordinary memoir of a family haunted by tragedy: “I’ve read very few contemporary novels that can rival Finneran’s nonfiction.” —Jonathan Franzen
A superb portrait of family life, this “absorbing and thoughtful” memoir is a love story unlike any other (Library Journal). The Finnerans—Irish Catholic parents with five children in St. Louis—are a seemingly unexceptional family whose lives are upended by a catastrophic event: the suicide of the author’s fifteen-year-old younger brother after being publicly humiliated in junior high school.
A gentle, handsome boy, Sean Finneran was a straight-A student and gifted athlete, especially treasured by every member of his…
My father died by suicide when I was thirteen. Because my family never spoke about the issues leading up to and resulting from this devastating event, we suffered a great deal. I have a deep love for books that expose just how dark, and troubled the teen existence can be. Authors who are brave enough to tackle such topics feed my bravery. The more stories we have on the topics of suicide, mental health, and trauma the broader the conversation and the more those who feel as though no one could possibly understand what they are going through feel seen.
I was drawn to this book by the title and the super-intriguing cover.
Something about the linen’s organic nature mixed with the haphazard cross-stitching spoke to me.
Warga captures the depths of depression with her writing to the point where I could feel the sadness and internal struggle of Aysel, the book’s sixteen-year-old main character.
How vividly wonderful is this line: … feels like my skin is too thin, like everyone can see right inside me, can see my empty and dark insides.
The concept of Aysel creating a suicide pact with Roman really hit home. I’ve experienced multiple deaths by suicide, including two school friends who went through with their pact.
This story helped shed light on what clinical depression looks like from the inside, which can be vastly different and seemingly in conflict with the seemingly “I’m okay” exterior.
A brilliant and heartbreaking novel perfect for fans of Thirteen Reasons Why.
Aysel and Roman are practically strangers, but they've been drawn into an unthinkable partnership. In a month's time, they plan to commit suicide - together.
Aysel knows why she wants to die: being the daughter of a murderer doesn't equal normal, well-adjusted teenager. But she can't figure out why handsome, popular Roman wants to end it all....and why he's even more determined than she is.
With the deadline getting closer, something starts to grow between Aysel and Roman - a feeling she never thought she would experience. It…
Reading and writing about family dynamics, particularly Black families, has always appealed to me. Particularly when it comes to the generation gap between parents and their children that causes them to see the same world through different lenses. Who we choose to see as our true family, the ones who define the place we call home, may or may not be defined by blood. I am fortunate not to have personally experienced most of the drama and trauma found in novels that I am drawn to, and in stories I have felt compelled to write. Otherwise, I would have turned to memoir writing rather than fiction.
Brit Bennett writes with a steady hand as she immerses us into the minds and lives of three people. Nadia and Aubrey are haunted to womanhood by maternal abandonment. They are friends as well as rivals for the affection of the same man. Luke would have made a mother out of Nadia had they chosen to parent, and he eventually makes a wife and mother of Aubrey. His mother is the first lady of the church that plays a prominent role in their lives. The mothers in Bennett's exceptional novel are hurt and betrayed by callous men and by each other. I rooted for each of them to persevere, but like many of my favorite novels, this is not a happily ever after for everyone type of story.
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Half.
The Mothers is a dazzling debut about young love, a big secret in a small community and the moments that haunt us most.
All good secrets have a taste before you tell them, and if we'd taken a moment to swish this one around our mouths, we might have noticed the sourness of an unripe secret, plucked too soon, stolen and passed around before its season.
It's the last season of high school life for Nadia Turner, a rebellious, grief-stricken, seventeen-year-old beauty. Mourning her own mother's recent suicide, she takes…
As a troubled teen who wasn’t raised in a traditional family environment, I had always gravitated toward books with transformative characters—underdogs who were lost or lost their way by accident and on purpose.
The genre never mattered to me as much as my ability to relate to struggling protagonists who needed to escape their situation or environment, regardless of what they had to do, right or wrong. Love them or loathe them, I learned something from each of them. I hope you enjoy their journeys as much as I have.
The story of Clay Jensen is both beautiful and repelling in that it forced me to consider the unseen impact my insecurities and actions may have had on others when I was a teen. I couldn’t imagine being a shy, bright, and likable California high school student unexpectedly thrust into the center of a girl’s suicide by being named one of the contributors to her death. But that’s the point. Neither can Clay.
In his case, the only way to discover why he was included is to listen to a set of thirteen tapes made by the victim. These tapes take him on a journey of personal growth and transformation despite his only having the loosest of connections to her. In doing so, he takes us right along with him, considering how our briefest interactions could have profoundly impacted someone else.
THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
Featuring cover art from the Netflix original series, with exclusive interviews and photos inside! "Eerie, beautiful, and devastating." --Chicago Tribune "A stealthy hit with staying power. . . . thriller-like pacing." --The New York Times "Thirteen Reasons Why will leave you with chills long after you have finished reading." --Amber Gibson, NPR's "All Things Considered"
You can't stop the future. You can't rewind the past. The only way to learn the secret . . . is to press play. Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his…
CDC statistics say that more teens and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, flu, and chronic lung disease COMBINED. Each day in the US, there are an average of 5,400 suicide attempts by teens in grades 7-12. These statistics are frightening, and yet, as a high school teacher, I knew lecturing my students that suicide is NEVER the answer to problems wouldn't work. They'd have to see it for themselves. So that's what I tried to do as a writer. The poems in ANNA are short but penetrating, and combined with Anna's note at the book's end, I hope the point is made.
I think that every teen in school today has experienced a lockdown, hopefully just as a drill, but as school shootings continue, it’s a worry for every day of school. That’s why I think teens are so horrified as Emily Bean, the main character, sees her boyfriend bring a gun to school and kill himself.
I believe that reading about the depths of Emily’s agony reveals how devasting suicide can be for those who have had to live through its aftermath. In my author visits, I have met a number of those left behind by suicide, and I think it’s so important that this book ends with some hope for them.
A Michael L. Printz Honor Award Winner in the vein of This is Where It Ends
“A gentle, lyrical story of incomprehensible sorrow faced with quiet courage.”—ELIZABETH WEIN, New York Times bestselling author
“Hubbard treats tragedy and new beginnings with a skilled, delicate hand.”—JOHN COREY WHALEY, author of Where Things Come Back, winner of the Michael L. Printz Award
Senior Paul Wagoner walks into his school with a stolen gun, threatens his girlfriend, Emily Beam, and then takes his own life. Soon after, angry and guilt-ridden Emily is sent to a boarding school in Amherst, Massachusetts, where two quirky fellow…
CDC statistics say that more teens and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, flu, and chronic lung disease COMBINED. Each day in the US, there are an average of 5,400 suicide attempts by teens in grades 7-12. These statistics are frightening, and yet, as a high school teacher, I knew lecturing my students that suicide is NEVER the answer to problems wouldn't work. They'd have to see it for themselves. So that's what I tried to do as a writer. The poems in ANNA are short but penetrating, and combined with Anna's note at the book's end, I hope the point is made.
I loved the message of this book of self-love and finding your own way to shine. Elise says, “I was born to be unpopular. There was no other way it could have gone.” I think that unfortunately, a lot of teens feel this way, but that doesn’t mean that life is over.
It doesn’t mean that high school will last forever, although it may feel that way at times. I think depressed teens who read this may not totally identify with Elise’s way of finding her own better life, but they will be left with the idea that there is hope.
Making friends has never been Elise Dembowski's strong suit. All throughout her life, she's been the butt of every joke and the outsider in every conversation. When a final attempt at popularity fails, Elise nearly gives up. Then she stumbles upon a warehouse party where she meets Vicky, a girl in a band who accepts her; Char, a cute, yet mysterious disc jockey; Pippa, a carefree spirit from England; and most importantly, a love for DJing. Told in a refreshingly genuine and laugh-out-loud funny voice, Leila Sales' THIS SONG WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE is an exuberant novel about identity, friendship,…
My imagination knows little bounds. Yes, I was that weird kid who could entertain herself in the backyard with just a couple of sticks. I have since learned that language is what we use to build and make sense of our own realities. As a young woman, it is my hope to expand the feminine imagination – how we perceive femininity and the diversity of its voice. As a writer and human in general, my interest lies in how writing can care for human experience with honesty, humor, and empathy. And bonus points if something magical or mysterious happens along the way.
Another great handling of mental health, femininity, and adolescence is Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future by A.S. King. Her mother’s suicide has left the protagonist with some pretty big questions about her own nature and destiny. And when she gets the unprompted, magical power of seeing visions of both infinite past and future, things only get more complicated. Despite the ambitious bite of dark weight, the novel’s voice remains witty, casual, and auspicious. It’s a glimpse into the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship, especially when it's cut dismally short.
When Glory O'Brien is transformed by a power to see a person's infinite past and future, she's bombarded with visions of a terrifying world: a second civil war breaks out, and girls vanish daily. And even though Glory may not see a future for herself, she'll do anything to make sure this one doesn't come to pass.
