Books like What to Say Next

I was wrung out after finishing this book and immediately looked around for someone else who’d read it. I needed a shoulder to cry on. If Endless Love is about lives undone by teenagers driven insane by love and lust, then this book is its counterpoint: two teenage outsiders whose love and understanding help them survive.

There’s awfulness in Eleanor’s life, but there’s also exchanging comics and listening to Joy Division with Park on a shared walkman on the school bus. I loved these characters completely and rooted for them with everything I had. 

The narrator of We Are Okay was like a siren for me. Jorjeana Marie’s voice holds the pain of the main character Marin like a tiny secret clutched in her fist and hidden from view. You want to see it so badly, but you only get glimpses as she unfolds one finger at a time.

I love the delicate unraveling of this tragic story and how Marin’s loneliness gets under your skin, so you really feel it and feel for her. Like in What to Say Next, a death is a catalyst, but how the death is used in the two stories is entirely different. As an author, I enjoy studying these plot points to see how each author uses them to mold their style and voice. 

This story surprised me. I didn’t expect what this book had to offer. You get a lot of the story and the main character Ingrid’s voice through letters that she writes to her mom.

What I like most is that it appears to be a typical young adult contemporary story, but you know it’s not, and when you get to the end you know why. 

Humor. Sometimes I need some humor. I read a lot of heavy stories about young adults trudging through an unfair world that beats them down for 300 pages or intricate fantasy worlds with oppressed creatures and evil beings. So reading an uplifting, fun story between more daunting stories can be just what I need.

#famous is a breath of fresh air. And I admit I swooned over the love interest, Kyle. He is just so likeable.

I adored this book from the moment I read the first page of the first graphic novel! I fell in love with Nick and Charlie and related so hard to the struggles that they were going through, even though I’m older than they are. It brought me back to how I felt in high school.

Charlie’s eating disorder, especially, really struck a nerve, and I thought it was handled with such beautiful rawness. Note: I read it before watching the TV show, which I also love. 

This book was ahead of its time. This YA novel was written in 1978 but I found it on a shelf in my local library in 1992 when I was a queer preteen. An elliptical narrative about the burgeoning romantic relationship between two teenage girls, the novel captures a nameless yearning I understood without knowing why. Though the narrative felt to me illicit, it wasn’t prurient but rather deeply felt and authentic to the experience of a teenager coming to understand her sexuality as it crystalizes around one compelling friend.

What makes this novel so compelling to me is how it captures the exuberance and intensity of teen friendships. That intensity has really revved for seventeen-year-old Andrea now that she’s realized she’s in love with her best friend Hailee. Unfortunately, she’s certain—partly because of her cerebral palsy—that Hailee couldn’t possibly feel the same.

Despite these doubts, Andrea has confidence and sass, which makes her a great model for readers with disabilities. That, along with her loyal, affectionate friend group, are my favorite aspects of the book. Andrea’s friends adore her, even as she makes a mess of things in an attempt to fall out of love. Also, they treat her disability matter-of-factly, as does the author. Andrea’s C.P. is real and present but never takes over the story.

The book follows the story of Astrid, a closeted lesbian living in a small town.

Originally from New York City, she feels a disconnect between herself and the people around her, even her best friends. The only people she can be open with are the passengers of the planes that fly above her house. She imagines their lives and sends out her deepest thoughts to them.

The whimsical premise is what originally drew me to the story, but what I ended up loving about it was the complexities of Astrid’s relationships with her friends and family. Her parents, being active in New York in the arts scene, would likely be supportive of her identity, but she feels so disconnected from them that she doesn’t want to open up.

Both of Astrid’s friends are queer; despite this, Astrid feels incapable of telling them her deepest secret. Astrid also has a girlfriend… show more.

I couldn’t compile a list of books without including Judy Blume. In the forty years since I read my first Blume novel, a lot of things have changed, and—many have stayed the same.
Forever, first published in the mid-70s, is mildly erotic—and raw, and sensuous, and tender, and all the things that love and sex are. The sensual scenes are peppered in with great dialogue between the characters.

I especially love this book because no matter how many experiences I’ve had, I can still find a small piece of myself in protagonist Katherine—first sex, first love, first breakup, first death, and the many “firsts” that I’ve carried through my own life (divorce, pandemic, post-divorce love).

Forever may not always last, but it never fails to define chunks of our lives—always. 

I love anything Sherlock Holmes. So a YA teen detective story with the present-day descendants of Sherlock Holmes with mysterious deaths to solve? The title alone got me, then when I read the blurb, I was on it. Sherlock Holmes’ great great great granddaughter, Charlotte Holmes, already a brilliant sleuth consulting with Scotland Yard and Jamie Watson, the great great great grandson of John Watson are in America where they have ended up in the same boarding school. When a student dies under mysterious circumstances, Jamie and Charlotte’s paths cross, throwing them together, and they can only trust each other in a world where the enemy lurks very close… If I was a fish and you wanted to catch me, put this book on a hook and dangle it.