The most recommended bullying books

If there’s a theme with my favorite fiction books, it’s that I tend to read them in one sitting. I read Hawk Mountain while waiting for and then on an airplane, and I cried, to the alarm of my seat partner.

Not for the faint of heart, this is an incredible little novel that examines cycles of abuse, what repression does to someone over time, and how it bleeds out and affects everyone around them. This horror story about a man, his son, and the thoughts he won’t let himself think until he’s confronted with a boy from his past is just incredible.

If you’re averse to gore, pass this one by, but if you have the stomach for it, this book is a moving portrayal of one very stunted man having the worst possible reaction to what could have been a late-in-life gay awakening.

This might be one of my favourite books of all time.

Riley’s prose is exquisite – pared back, yet lyrical – and her dialogue is unmatched. Neve has married Edwyn, an older and more financially stable man. As Neve thinks about all the decisions and circumstances that led to her marriage – including trying to escape her bully of a father and her intense and naïve mother – Riley deftly and subtly details cycles of abuse and neglect.

Edwyn has terrible moods, which Neve excuses, and for which she blames herself. Riley truly understands and captures the psychology of loving and making excuses for an abusive partner or family member. 

Daisy Johnson is a force of her own. I’ve read all three of her books and was the most taken with her more recent novel, Sisters. This has a moody, gothic feel to it. Very well narrated by one of the two sisters, and is the ultimate story about disappearance, and the traumatic effect it can have on a loved one. Brutal, surreal, and with a setting as real as its characters: a crumbling moldy cottage, near the shore, that lives and breathes with the characters. And includes a twist you won’t see coming.

When I Hit You is a shattering and visceral account of a woman’s short-lived but harrowing abusive marriage, her family’s determination that she stay in that marriage, and her family’s way of understanding her ordeal once she has escaped.

Kandasamy writes with brutal detail of the husband’s total control of the narrator, who tries again and again to understand her experiences – and escape from them – through her writing. It is a powerful novel about resilience, courage, and determination, which, despite its subject matter, avoids sensationalism.

Columbine is a masterful piece of reportage from a journalist who covered from the start what is now perceived almost as a tragic prototype of mass school shootings in the US. Through meticulous, painstaking research—and with a compassionate and keenly observant voice that I especially admired—Cullen unspools the consequential misperceptions about the Columbine shooters that have distorted popular understandings of the “school shooter” ever since through repetition and media simplification.

What’s new and surprising here, and that remains relevant years after the book’s first publication, is that Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylon Klebold weren’t victims of bullying, socially alienated by marauding gangs of “cool” kids and jocks, or radicalized by Goth culture. They had friends, jobs, and, perhaps most frightening of all, seemed largely to be average high school students, not appreciably different from our own children, who in fact did more bullying than they were bullied. “So we’re… show more.

As soon as I saw the cover, I fell in love with this book. The illustrations are fabulous, and the storyline is in sync with my anti-bullying books. Poor Molly Lou is – shall we say… unattractive? – and picked on at school. But Molly Lou is a confident young girl with good self-esteem instilled from her grandmother, so the bully doesn’t stand a chance! A wonderful story about a clever girl fighting back without physically fighting.

Lonely Castle in the Mirror is a wonderful puzzle of a story that explores mental health in youth and how a gentle hand can help someone grow beyond their fears.

It tells the story of a girl name Kokoro, who is too afraid to go to school due to bullying. Then, she discovers a castle through her bedroom mirror run by a girl in a wolf mask. While in the castle, she and six other students have a chance to search for a key that will grant their wish. But only one can have their wish granted.

A touching story of full of sympathy and warmth, it shows how much one can gain by reaching out to others. 

I loved this middle-grade novel because it reminded me of all the scary stories I binge-read as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s. There’s a summer camp with a dark secret, mean girls, and a possible ghost.

This book is very fun and left me feeling so nostalgic. I also related a lot to the protagonist, who, as a young girl, tries so hard to make friends but has such trouble with it. 

This book inspired me to start working on a ghost story of my own!

There are countless amazing insights from Influence Is Your Superpower, by Yale’s Zoe Chance.

Three that stick with me the most for applying these insights at work are: 1) Zoe’s Magic Question of “What would it take?” This little question is so powerful in coming up with innovative solutions that increase buy-in from the person you are asking (and Zoe of course explains why in the book). 2) people are more likely to say yes to you than you may think, so simply asking is important to increasing your influence. 3) saying “no” is key to success (and isn’t as hard as it seems).

She encourages a 24-hours of “no” challenge that can help anyone get more comfortable with saying no. 

This is a perfectly charming story about a boy who is way into ballet and baseball, written in the 1970s, but which still holds up today. And no one ever makes fun of him. Max is not necessarily Queer, but I consider it in the canon of kid’s books that address gender identity.