84 books like This Song Will Save Your Life

One book that I really recommend reading is the novel The Midnights by Sarah Nicole Smetana. The main character, Susannah, is a seventeen-year-old girl who plays a mean guitar like her former rock star father whose attention she craves very much. She is driven with passion to pursue her dream even after her father suddenly dies unexpectedly, and must uproot to a new city where she eagerly takes on the challenge. The story is an emotionally charged coming-of-age novel involving loss, creativity, and feeling confident in your voice, while feeling confident in your choices to define who you are. 

I was dying to read this book because I'd heard it was structured after Beethoven's Kreutzer Sonata for violin and piano, and even though it's not a piece I'm intimately familiar with I could almost hear the music as I read. Even though it's billed as a love story, it's not so much a typical romance as it is an ode to following your passions, listening to your heart, and falling in love with New York City...for the first time, or all over again. As a longtime New Yorker I found myself rediscovering the city through Dominique's eyes, and I even learned some cool NYC facts I'd never heard before (not going to spoil anything, but I listen to the subway in a whole new way now)! Highly recommended for anyone who loves music, New York, or lyrical writing about flawed but shimmering characters.

Noteworthy is a pitch-perfect novel set in the elite a capella group of a selective performing arts boarding school. Undistinguished Alto 2 Jordan Sun disguises herself as a guy to land a spot in the all-male Sharpshooters a capella group, only to realize she has to keep up the act for the remainder of her Junior and Senior years. Hijinks ensue as Jordan finds herself questioning her identity, her sexuality, and her place in the world. The writing in this book is crisp and funny, and I enjoyed learning a bit about how a capella works. Most of all, I enjoyed watching Jordan become more sure of herself even as her ruse starts to wear thin. This is a light-hearted read with some heavier discussions of race, class, gender, and sexuality deftly woven throughout. If you like voice-driven music books as much as I do, add Noteworthy to your list. 

I’ve covered rock, classical, a capella, and new wave in my list, so I thought I’d round it out with sugar-sweet pop. Kill the Boy Band is a darkly hilarious journey into fangirl obsession filled with quirky characters and sitcom situations that are as fun to read as they are improbable. The boy band in question is The Ruperts, a quartet of British heart-throbs with an eerie resemblance to One Direction. When four superfans score a room in the hotel where The Ruperts are staying, they hatch a plan that goes awry fast, leaving the band with one fewer Ruperts and the girls with a…very incriminating situation.

I loved this book for so many reasons, but my favorite was the deep dive into superfan culture. A lot of the book is spent questioning the nature of this culture, but in a way that's genuinely soul-searching and not condescending—the narrator… show more.

This book has had many mixed reviews, but in my opinion, it is an excellent story for adults of teens and mature teens to read.

Hannah, a teenage girl, commits suicide. She leaves her classmate a package with a cassette tape in it, explaining the 13 reasons why she decided to end her life. This novel demonstrates the cruelties of teen life, from rumors, to reputations, to rape. It shows the reader: “in the end, everything matters.”

Hopefully, people who read this book will better understand how much their actions affect one another, and they’ll think twice before causing even the littlest amount of harm to someone else. We all need to have more empathy for one another, because this world is cruel enough as it is. 

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.

Why are more of Kerstin’s rom-com novels not available in English? That’s what I want to know.

This really is hilarious from start to finish, as we follow the hapless adventures of romance writer Gerri. While she tries to cope with losing her job, feeling forever single and even suicidal, her mother, father, and siblings only want to know when is she going to meet someone, preferably a professor, and settle down.

It’s the bizarre family dinners that capture the perfect madness that get-togethers with your parents and grown-up siblings can produce. And it takes an extremely talented writer to create an attempted (maybe that should be interrupted) suicide scene that is at once truly touching and hilarious.

A joyful read, particularly if, like me, you have some German relatives!

No Longer Human spans an entire human life in all its nuances and difficulties.

In some of the more difficult periods of my life, I’ve remembered my experience of No Longer Human and its intricacies in depicting the swarm of political ideology and manipulation of difficult relationships.

It’s a work that beckons you to live your life to your ends and fear only your loss of control over your narrative.

This book is a complex mystery revolving around a boy accused of a terrible crime, a boy who is currently unable to speak. It is solvable, as the protagonist is the detective character, though not every detail may be known until the explanation. What I love about this book are the difficult issues handled well for young readers, the excellent friendship between the protagonist and his sister, and the wisdom about interpersonal relationships and emotions that carries this novel into depths not usually seen in a young reader’s mystery. One observation about shame and anger continues to ring in my mind, reminding me that emotions seen on the surface often have deeper roots.

Impossible to fathom how Carson McCullers could have distilled such wisdom into her soul by age twenty-three, and then produced this book. The passions and losses, violence and ambition, guilts and loves, of her cast of small-town 1930s Americana characters, wander across the pages like spectres disrupted by a shifting wind. 

The lost, struggling to hear each other's songs above their own pain, but continuing to try through the long night, no matter the chance of success. 

I first bought a copy of this in Sandusky, Ohio, in 1993, on a day off from working at Cedar Point Amusement Park, entranced as I read the first pages standing up in a mall bookshop, the after-echoes of rumbling roller-coasters pummelling my ears and spirit.