89 Books Like The Map of Tiny Perfect Things

I fell in love with Jennifer Donelly’s writing when I discovered her historical romance trilogy The Tea Rose, and then devoured her YA novel A Northern Light. So when I found out she had published a YA book with history, young love, and a ghost mystery, I was all in!

In this story, the past and the present are once again woven together, adding fascinating and horrific details of the French Revolution as the main character navigates her new and strange life in Paris. The Catacombs beneath the city play a role in the plot, and it was this setting that made me determined to visit this creepy location myself one day—which I did!

The labyrinth of man-made tunnels wind their way into an underground maze that is filled with the relocated human bones of over 6 million bodies, which line the walls in macabre designs. Exploring the “Land of… show more.

It may be obvious by now that I’m drawn to stories about complex characters, stories that aren’t afraid to be both humorous and gut wrenching.

Fourteen-year-old Nephele is another protagonist whose voice is immediately endearing, refreshing, and compelling. She’s an outsider, a brilliant math and science nerd who struggles to adjust socially to high school.

She invents a time travel app in order to relive her freshman year and do it right—but instead she becomes stuck in a time loop for ten years, encountering characters and surprises that help her to overcome her loneliness and find herself.

I love it that this book celebrates a smart, quirky character as she learns to look more deeply into her life and navigate her world. 

I’m cheating a little here, since protagonist Ailey Benjamin Lane is not quite a teenager—he’s only eleven.

But I love how this book celebrates dance—Ailey is a tap dancer with big dreams whose grandfather had similar, though thwarted, talents and dreams. And I love the window into Black history in 1930s Harlem when, feeling discouraged, Ailey puts on what turn out to be a pair of magical shoes and is transported to the past, where he meets his twelve-year-old grandfather.

Ailey is faced with the classic time traveler dilemma of wanting to help his grandfather overcome his fears while avoiding changing the past so much that it will affect Ailey’s own future.

I learned from this book—and since I was writing about gymnastics, time travel, and the fraught history of adoption politics, I found this book a wonderful model for evoking a passion, a culture, and a history.

This book was released a couple of days before my list was due, but I was captivated by the description of it as “Back to the Future meets Joy Luck Club.” And Throwback engaged me immediately.

I sped through the story of Samantha Kang who, unable to connect to her mom and worried about her grandmother’s health, finds herself thrown back from 2025 to 1995. There, she gets to know her teenage mom and her grandmother in a whole new way.

The contrasts between the post-pandemic gender-fluid TikTok generation and the regressive attitudes of the analog 1990s are brilliantly highlighted, Sam’s social-media savvy voice pitch-perfect, her observations about race, class, gender, pop culture, and being the child and grandchild of immigrants incisive and provocative, humorous and relatable.

I was glad I waited for this novel before I completed my list!

I love books with lots of twists and turns, I love realistic, near-future science fiction, and I love books with a beating, emotional heart at the center of even the wildest and action-packed storyline. 

This book is a twisty-turny, mind-bending look at time travel where the science actually makes sense but doesn’t take a back seat to the propulsive narrative. Blake Crouch is a master of the modern thriller with a tech-heavy edge, while keeping a truly beating heart at the center of each story.  

What would you do if you could go back and inhabit your 10-year-old-self with your adult mind? What would you do differently? What would you try to keep the same? Who would you save? In a more finite version of living-life-over-again, Micajah Fenton goes from being a suicidal octogenarian, to a time-traveler with the aid of an otherworldly spacecraft that lands on his property.

This book is full of rich and beautiful character moments in the bayou of mid-century Louisiana, and the Silicon Valley of the 1980s, that juxtaposes nicely against the hard sci-fi premise of UFOs and AI holograms. A Gift of Time was just that; a gift, one that brought a tear to my eye on more than one page.

Reconnect is an off-the-books company that will use time travel to rescue people from the moments before their untimely deaths, or place willing customers in the past—for a fee, of course. But when a rescue mission goes badly, Reconnect agents Mark and Seth find themselves stuck in the past with the FBI in hot pursuit. What's more, their own company is looking to cover up their mistake by taking their lives.

This is a really fun graphic novel in the genre of time travel + crime thriller, by creators that have gone on to much success in the comics industry. They also happen to be friends of mine!

Perhaps the most kindred title to my own book, Here and Now and Then is the story of Kin Stewart, and time-traveling spy from the year 2142, who becomes stranded in the 1990s after a botched mission. Having assimilated to life in the past, even marrying and starting a family, Kin's got a bad bout of brain fog and amnesia resulting from the ordeal, (time travel is hard!). And then, his rescue team shows up 18 years too late. They bring with them the revelation that Kin has only been gone for 2 weeks relative to their time.

While admittedly full of some heavy-handed “this author clearly loves Star Trek and soccer” dialogue in the beginning, once this book finds its feet, it really takes off and is a fun romp, with a cool look into the author's speculative future.

This book isn’t just my favorite time-travel novel—it’s my favorite book, period.

If Back to the Future is the gold standard for time travel storytelling, Replay is its literary counterpart. (And the two were released just six months apart!)

Grimwood takes the classic time loop premise and twists it into a moving, mind-bending exploration of identity, regret, and second chances.

Ever since my first read, I’ve spent many sleepless nights spiraling through my own infinite “what ifs”—imagining how I might change my own life if given the chance to relive it, how far future knowledge could take me, and whether it would indeed make me happier. It’s a risky mental game, but Grimwood plays it masterfully in this brilliant, still-underrated gem.

I loved this book because it has mathematics to the nth degree! Some of it in the form of inside jokes like “easy to use partial differential equations” that made me laugh out loud. Some of it, such as “equations that had sadness as a constant,” are in a “techno-poetic” style that I strive to achieve in my own writing. But this “meta-science fiction” novel is also filled with musings on writing and creativity. The self-referential recursion of a book within a book within a book makes the paradoxes of time travel even more interesting. The “reality portions” in which the main character pursues his quest to “find his father” are as deep and well done a theme as any I have read in sci-fi.