6 Books to Read if You Loved Everything, Everything

Given that most of the action in Nicola Yoon’s gorgeous, format-tweaking debut Everything, Everything takes place in just a few rooms, in the house heroine Madeline’s disease (TK) has confined her to for her entire life, it’s remarkable how big the book feels. That’s one of Yoon’s great gifts as an author: she takes small, intimate love stories and makes them feel huge and weighty. It’s no wonder Hollywood quickly came calling, with a film adaptation (in theaters now) starring Amandla Stenberg and Nick Robinson.
Whether you’ve been a fan of Everything, Everything since its 2015 release or have recently discovered Yoon’s writing through the movie adaptation, you’re probably in need of more beautiful books loaded with heart and narrative magic. Here are some books to read next.

The Sun is Also A Star, by Nicola Yoon
Let’s start with the obvious here. The answer to Yoon withdrawal may be another dose of Yoon (but be warned: side effects include crying at your job and believing in love). Full disclosure: I actually loved this book more than Everything, Everything! Yoon’s writing is at its best in this story of girl meets boy on the same day girl is supposed to be deported from the country. It’s expansive yet intimate, and while the book often follows side characters on lovely little tangents, the story remains close to its two charming leads.

The Serpent King, by Jeff Zentner
Along with the love story at the center of the novel, Everything, Everything is about how parents’ pain gets passed to their children. The Serpent King explores this idea through three characters who feel as trapped in their Tennessee town as Madeline does in her hermetically sealed home. A love story, and a story about family, The Serpent King is a full of idiosyncratic characters and beautiful imagery.

The Game of Love and Death, by Martha Brockenbrough
Although YA is becoming increasingly diverse, the landscape is still largely white, and finding a book with a female protagonist of color is still harder than it should be. One of the great things about Everything, Everything is that it features a mixed-race female character with complexity and agency in a book that isn’t about race. Brockenbrough creates another wonderful heroine with Flora, an airplane pilot and singer in the 1930s. While race is more of a factor in this book than in Yoon’s, it’s a realistic texture in a larger story about a high-stakes betting game between Love and Death, in which they manipulate a young couple to their own ends. It’s romantic, sometimes painful, and, like Everything, Everything, is ultimately about how love is a choice we make, over and over again.

If I Stay, by Gayle Forman
Everything, Everything is about Madeline taking agency over her life, and making her own choices about the pain she’s willing to risk for love and the chance to live. If I Stay takes these themes to a dramatic extreme with the story of Mia, a talented musician who ends up in a coma after a car accident that kills her entire family. Looking back on what she’s lost, and forward to what she has to live for, Mia has to decide if she wants to stay or move on.

I’ll Give You the Sun, by Jandy Nelson
Another book that takes place in a very small, specific world (in this case, small-town California) that nevertheless feels huge. As in her first book, The Sky is Everywhere, Nelson injects her writing with gorgeous imagery and slight magical realism that makes all the emotions feel big, bigger, enormous. It is also, like Everything, Everything, a book about the transforming nature of grief, telling the story of twins who change dramatically after the death of their mother.

Places No One Knows, by Brenna Yovanoff
One of the most delicious romances I’ve read in the past few years. I’ve rarely been so completely committed to two characters getting together as I have Marshall and Waverly. I devoured the book in a day. Neither of the two lovers here are as essentially good as the two in Yoon’s book—Marshall is soft and damaged, Waverly is hard and brittle—but like the characters in Everything, Everything, they give each other new life. I loved it. You will, too.