The most recommended books about teenage boys

Escaping his abusive home life in upstate New York, fourteen-year-old, Chappie—called Bone after his tattoo—falls in with an assortment of drug dealers and Rastafarians. Angry and hard, Bone is also resilient and proves to have the biggest heart with a soft spot for others who have been dealt a terrible hand by life. In Rule of the Bone, Russell Banks masterfully explores the themes of class and race and the lives of the forgotten in rural America. Chappie has a lot to say about everything, and you may not like how he says it, but he is more often right than wrong.  

In So Long, See You Tomorrow, an adult narrator looks back at childhood and the lingering effects of childhood loss and displacement. He recalls his mother’s death, his father’s remarriage, and moving from a beloved home. The author also tells a parallel story of the scandal that befell his friend Cletus: his father shot his mother’s lover, and then drowned himself. For the narrator, his lost boyhood home is recalled like a dream of paradise lost, a mirage of another life: “I dream about it, the proportions are so satisfying to the eye and the rooms so bright, so charming and full of character that I feel I must somehow give up my present life and go live in that house: that nothing else will make me happy.” This novel about haunting memories of a lost place and past will haunt the reader. This was one of my father’s… show more.

Set in Southeast Alaska, Jimmy Bluefeather honestly depicts both environmental and generational change.

A Tlingit-Norwegian canoe carver anticipates the end of his life while his grandson struggles with his own future and a whale biologist resists authority in favor of moral action. Heacox grounds his beautifully-written story in considerable research as well as with respect for cultural beliefs and practices.

The canoe carver in particular is well-drawn and memorable, with toughness, resilience, and humor earned from living close to the Earth and its waters, in a place of stories. A canoe journey carries the story into a wild landscape, questions about conflicts between economic development and the preservation of lands and cultural values, and understandings of human frailty and strength. 

To me, this book brilliantly and unapologetically explores one of the darkest and most taboo areas of human psychology: a mother’s fear and hatred of her own child.

I don’t have children of my own (through choice), but my mother and sister both struggled in their roles as parents, so this theme has always been very personal. We Need To Talk About Kevin bravely spoke the “unspeakable,” bringing into the light thoughts, feelings, and experiences that I had perhaps never been fully able to articulate for myself.

In turn, Shriver’s book paved the way for me to explore similar themes in my own writing, particularly in my second novel.

Stephen King is a master storyteller. I’ve always loved his work, and this was no exception. It was another of those books that kept me reading a long past bedtime.

It’s a simple story: a teenage boy helps a grumpy old man out and is rewarded with lots more work and an epic adventure to save a dog. I must stress that the dog is a very good girl. The old man and the teen both have varying levels of goodness, depending on circumstance.

I don’t want to give too much away, but I love the world-building in this story and the amazing people the boy encounters on his journey.

Deposing Nathan was everything I'd dreamed it would be—deep, torturous, intense, and beautiful. Zack Smedley’s poignant and relevant storytelling hooked me from the first line to the unexpected twist and through the surprising ending. In this powerful story, Nate has been called to deliver a sworn statement against his ex-boyfriend Cam. What first seemed like a simple premise brought me back to my days of questioning sexuality, religion, family expectations, and familial commitment, and it unearthed memories of the struggles of finding myself as a teenager and navigating complex emotions. 

Bad boy, Tim, has struggled with drinking and now is a member of AA and is trying to start his life over. He and my character, Christopher, could attend AA meetings together and I am always happy to find a young adult character who is a reformed bad boy and trying to stay sober with AA and this story does not disappoint. 

Very few books have left such a searing image in my mind as Iain Banks did with one particular scene in his disturbing novel, The Wasp Factory.

The story is told first-person through an increasingly unreliable narrator who lets us in on his private rituals, unsettling relationship with his father, and anxieties about his escaped mental patient brother.

This is a novel that takes its time easing you into the narrator’s world, and by the time you reach the climax, the culminating effect of budding dread and pure shock is enough to haunt anyone for a lifetime.

Death in Spring is a tiny book containing a bigger, more intricate world than many a doorstopper, for all that the whole story set in a small, nameless hamlet.

Life there too is made of strange, violent rituals, only not the ones we know. We follow a boy growing up and learning them, and being scarred by these mysteries—what do they fill the mouths of the dead with, before they are killed and put into a tree forever? (It’s cement.)

Rodoreda wrote in Catalan, and Tennent’s translation is fluid and beautiful.

Perfection is a rare thing; if you want to see what that looks like, here you go.   

This whimsical and wonderful book is a modern classic of gay literature, one of the first upbeat gay novels with a happy ending, no less. It imagines a delightful, offbeat world where two boys can walk down the street hand in hand and no one cares; where the homecoming queen is the cross-dressing captain of the football team; where – well, you get the picture. It’s an offbeat and, well, sanguine one. I love the innocence and generous-spirited nature of the book that sets it apart and delights readers while demonstrating that love is sometimes not smooth but always comes right in the end. Who could ask for anything better?   

How could you not love a book written by a mother-daughter combo? It’s impossible.

Though the books in this series (My Body, My Self for Boys/Girls; What’s Happening to My Body for Girls/Boys) are getting a little old copyright-date-wise, they are packed with detailed information that I go back to over and over again, each time I pull together material for a puberty class.

Though they were written at a time before gender-inclusive language hit the scene, they cover the topics youth are most curious about; and provide checklists, games, inquiries, and other interactive activities for readers to work through. 

Having grown up gay in a small town in the South, this resonated with me as an out gay man in a big city in my twenties, because it got everything about being gay in a small Southern town right: the tone, the emotion, the terror, and most of all, it got how there are more of us in those small Southern towns than we realize at the time, and how leaving for bigger, “better” places isn’t always the answer. 

I was 12 or 13 when I first read The Catcher in the Rye and I was gobsmacked.

It’s a work of fiction but it was obviously autobiographical because it was so intimately detailed and genuinely rendered. It was like eavesdropping on someone’s psychiatric sessions, the narrative of a patient who holds nothing back from his doctor.

In Holden’s voice I heard so much of myself including a contempt for phoniness as well as a reluctance to enter adulthood. Holden doesn’t hold back on embarrassing details: an encounter with a prostitute and her pimp that goes wrong, and just before his breakdown, he lets you know he suffers from the most unpleasant of intestinal disorders.

The honesty of this book makes it both deeply sad and terribly funny and let me know someone else was like me. 

Many of us writers are subject to the terrible cliché of substance abuse, none so much as Charles Bukowski. Having dabbled in the debauched myself, Ham on Rye sadly reflects what life could be like if the idiocy of adolescence continues into adulthood. This book is hilarious, vulgar, shocking, and oddly insightful. Not only is this my favourite Bukowski book, but it’s the book that introduced me to his work and changed my writing forever.

Another great thriller by Follett, what I found different and interesting for this book was the setting, Nazi-occupied Denmark during World War 2. The mixing of fictional and historical events is well accomplished. Typical of Follett, the novel presents intertwining stories in an adept way that builds tension throughout. It is very well researched and the places really come to life. I loved the abundance of technical details that don’t feel overwhelming, though. With memorable, strong characters, all determined to reach their goals, the writer did a great job in placing them into a well portrayed, true-life context. I loved the spinning swirl of actions that accompany the reader until the very end.

Barrowcliffe is a humorist, but reading his autobiographical account of playing D&D in the United Kingdom in the 1970s, you realize humor is a way of coping with tragedy. 

This book contains fascinating descriptions of the early history of D&D outside of the United States. Barrowcliffe is also adept at articulating what exactly is so compelling and fascinating about D&D. Most importantly, this book portrays the brutal culture of toxic masculinity that often existed around this game in its first decades. 

Gen Z players may be shocked by Barrowcliffe’s account of how players treated one another.

This book, the first in the rollicking The Tales of the Otori series, has been called “Shogun meets The Lord of the Rings.” The first book centers on a young man with some special abilities who is groomed to become an assassin due to one special talent — the ability to walk silently across a special floor composed of boards that chitter like birds when stepped on, which warlords sleep in the middle of as an alarm system. The series is one of the most gripping, wildly entertaining, and moving fantasies I’ve ever read. It is proof that it is possible for an artist to come to understand a culture deeply enough to honor its spirit, even if they weren’t born into that culture.

For my money, Stern is the South’s premiere literary comic writer. In this one, he is a Southern Philip Roth with an I.B. Singer twist. A teenage boy discovers a frozen rabbi in the Kelvinator inside his parent’s Memphis basement. The rabbi’s been frozen for one hundred years. Bernie thaws him and what ensues covers a universe of incident: teenage hope and angst, Talmudic wisdom, kabbalistic film-flammery, the seduction of all of Memphis, from lowlifes to elite, by a rabbi (who can fly) selling himself as the font of all magic and knowledge. Stern obviously loves his Memphis and his Jews. At the same time he skewers them with the sleekest wit. Even Israel gets a gratuitous knock. It was the only thing I did not like in the book but it was fleeting, so I got over it. Such is the power of genius.

Families come in all shapes and sizes, and it's crucial for children to see a variety of experiences in literature.

Hey, Kiddo portrays the author's upbringing with his grandparents due to his absent father and mother's substance abuse. The book offers child-friendly talking points on the challenging topic of addiction. It captures the complexities of growing up and family life amidst life-changing events.

I confess to a huge writer crush on Sjon. I immediately fell head over heels for his vibrant, visceral prose in this magical moving story set in Reykjavik in 1918 (the same year I set my novella Lightning). There is nothing comparable to this author’s dreamy style (after discovering him I read his entire catalogue) and the journey of young queer Manni Steinn is unforgettable. I have to admit: I went so far as to reach out to the author on social media the year we were both nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and ask him to coffee. I did not expect an answer, but he wrote me saying he was not attending the NYC event but thanked me for the offer! Brilliant and approachable!