100 books like We Are Okay

First off, it’s set in the 80s. This is my generation. No smartphones. No social media. Just pure teenage angst.

Mostly, I love the back-and-forth conversation and inner thoughts of Eleanor and Park. Rowell nails the authenticity of teens. Their strange humor and insecurities. I want to throw my arms around them and shelter them from the cruel bullies haunting them.

Rowell sucks you into their lives, and it feels so real and raw that you remember the wonder and horror of your own teenage years. The dialogue is rich in its realness, and the tender little moments between Eleanor and Park are precious.

What kept me glued to this story was the touching portrayal of David. He’s on the autism spectrum. How people view him versus how he views the world captured my heart.

What To Say Next is told from dual perspectives. The other main character Kit is just as interesting even though, stereotypically, she’d be considered your average, popular, high school student. Buxbaum removes this stereotypical surface and reveals a strong, engaging character with a goal.

The characters pulled me into this story. Their genuineness is written with such honesty that you root for them in every good and bad moment, adoring even their less desirable personality traits because that’s what makes them relatable. 

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.

This book, a retelling of “Cinderella,” is widely considered to be a foundational queer retelling, and I wholeheartedly agree with that assessment.

It was the first queer retelling I ever read and continues to be a favorite. It inspired me to write my own queer retellings and is a fine example of a novel that didn’t need sweeping battles and world-ending threats to be compelling.

I found Ash’s journey through grief and her path to love to be strong in their own ways. Quietly powerful stories like Ash are what I most enjoy, though they are a rarity, especially in YA, where things tend to be very high stakes.

It might tempt someone to choose a book in Noyes’ Ask, Tell series, but Alone is my recommendation.

A romance with such a lonesome title might not appear swoon-worthy on the surface, but dig a little deeper, and witness the burgeoning romance between Celeste and Olivia develop in such beautiful fashion in their isolated cocoon–until all goes wrong.

Still, the loving way they interact, learn about each other, and then yearn for each other had my heart skipping beats until the end. Noyes has a way of writing characters with whom it’s easy to fall in love.

I am a sucker for any and all sapphic romance but throw in two main characters that are individually powerful before they find love...and I’m done. Stars Collide got to me, folks, and not just for its portrayal of strong female leads.

This book sticks with me because of its thoughtful description of an older woman discovering her sexuality. It challenges the idea that all people are able to define their orientation early in life and allows older people to question their sexuality, despite any past romantic relationships (even, gasp, the infallible institution of marriage!). 

I felt a kinship at Schulz’s expression of dislike for the “well-intentioned” euphemisms for dying.

Her visual explanations of what well-wishers really feel and the almost cinematic movement through her experience in losing her father reveal a skilled writer. I’m drawn more to fine writing than trodding through a stranger’s personal journey. The confusion of grief is shared in a scholarly manner including literary references that show loss is a time-worn path.

The self-assignment as torch bearer for our focus of grief is another mantle I recognized. I have found that the legacy of the one we’ve lost becomes a painful need. As with Schulz, keeping the flame burning relieves the ache until the ache burns out in its time. An uplift from the loss is Schulz’s “finding” of love. Hope pushes through the sorrow.

In contrast to stereotypes about lesbians that framed them as bra-burning, men-hating, hairy-legged feminists, Lauren Gutterman evocatively shows how the emergence of post-World War II lesbian desire took place at the center of American life, in the suburbs, often in marriages to men and heterosexual families with children. Married women rejected divorce or labelling themselves as lesbians even while they had affairs with their female neighbors. Her Neighbor’s Wife offers an extraordinary new interpretation of how post-World War II American marriages could accommodate women’s relationships with other women.

Anna Birch’s I Kissed Alice is an enemies-to-lovers story about two gifted artists, Rhodes and Iliana, at a school for the arts who despise each other in person but fall hard for each other’s online fanfiction personas. Rhodes’s depression and anxiety consume her in the race to win a prestigious scholarship and navigate a complicated dynamic with her alcoholic mother. I found Rhodes’s on-page therapy sessions incredibly refreshing and relatable, something I don’t see enough of in YA fiction. The characters in this story are unlikeable and flawed—extremely so—but for that reason, my heart clenched often at their actions, assumptions, and reactions. Bonus points for the beautiful fanfiction graphics illustrated by Victoria Ying.