6 YA Books that Explore Unconventional Family Ties

All Our Pretty Songs, by Sarah McCarry
From the very first lines, you know this isn’t a book about girls who grew up with traditional families: “Aurora and I live in a world without fathers. Hers is dead and mine was gone before I was born.” Technically the main characters of All Our Pretty Songs—Aurora and her best friend, a narrator who remains nameless—aren’t sisters. But these two friends have grown up together, and their bond is as close, and occasionally as twisted, as that between the closest of sisters. Their mothers used to be best friends, too, until one decided to leave their hard-partying lifestyle behind to raise her daughter soberly. At 17, Aurora and the narrator have had very different upbringings—Aurora is charismatic, troubled and beautiful, and the narrator is dark and watchful—yet remain as close as ever. But can their bond survive when a mysterious musician named Jack comes between them?

Love Letters to the Dead, by Ava Dellaira
Laurel’s sister May died young, so when the new assignment in Laurel’s English class is to write a letter to a dead person, Laurel chooses someone else who died young: Kurt Cobain, May’s favorite musician. The entire novel is a series of letters from Laurel to people who died too soon, people like Amy Winehouse, Janis Joplin, and even Amelia Earhart. In her letters, Laurel reveals what it’s like to navigate life without her beloved sister. She writes about high school and friends, about her fragile family life and falling in love for the first time. But all along, you know the person she’s really talking to, the person she’s really trying to understand, the person for whom she has a million unanswered questions, is her sister, May. It’s only when Laurel confronts the truth about what happened when May wasn’t looking out for her that Laurel can begin to come to terms with her sister’s death, and accept her sister as the amazing but imperfect person she was.

Everything, Everything, by Nicola Yoon
In this moving bestseller, Madeline Whittier suffers from SCID, severe combined immunodeficiency, more commonly called “bubble baby disease.” Which means that she can’t go outside—no school, no movies, no walks down the driveway to pick up the day’s mail. Maddy doesn’t have any friends. Sure, there’s the nurse who takes care of her and loves her dearly. There are the teachers she communicates with over email and during the rare in-person visit. And now, there’s the boy who just moved in next door, who she can’t stop staring at. But really, Maddy just has her mom, a doctor who has devoted much of her life to Maddy’s care. They play invented games to which only they know the rules—like phonetic Scrabble and honor Pictionary—and curl up to watch movies together. But even the closest of moms and daughters don’t get along all the time. Soon, Maddy is keeping secrets from her mother for the first time in her life—secrets about the boy across the street, and what she has started to do and plan when her mother isn’t around. Secrets that could cause the bubble in which Maddy has lived most of her life to finally burst.

Imaginary Girls, by Nova Ren Suma
Chloe has always lived in the shadow of her big sister, Ruby. Everyone—including Chloe—thinks Ruby is charismatic and magnetic. The sisters are inseparable until the night Chloe lets Ruby convince her to swim across the reservoir, over the flooded town of Olive. But Chloe makes a dark discovery in the water: the dead body of her classmate, London Hayes. Afterward, she’s sent away to recover, but can still feel the tug of Ruby calling her home. When she finally returns two years later, she has begun to wonder what kind of secrets Ruby might be keeping. The novel uses magical realism and the straight-up supernatural to talk about the complicated and endlessly complex bonds that keep sisters together.

The Sky is Everywhere, by Jandy Nelson
Lennie’s family life is far from conventional. Her mother left when she was just an infant, and her eccentric grandmother raised Lennie and her big sister, Bailey, with some help from their uncle Big (who also happens to be the town lothario). But when Bailey dies suddenly, Lennie is completely lost; she’s never lived without her attention-grabbing big sister, and now she has to learn how. She isn’t prepared for her feelings about the perfect boy who just showed up at school, and she’s even less prepared for the sudden pull she feels toward Bailey’s fiancé, who seems like the only person with whom she can truly share her grief. Suddenly, she’s giving more thought to the mother who abandoned her, and Gram’s explanation of the “restless gene” that runs in their family just isn’t enough to explain her mother’s absence. The Sky is Everywhere is a beautiful reminder that family ties don’t always break for those who are left behind.

How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff
This astonishing novel begins when 15-year-old Daisy travels from Manhattan to the English countryside to visit an aunt and the cousins she has never met. Soon after Daisy arrives, her aunt leaves for a business trip—and the day after that, London is attacked by a mysterious enemy. Daisy’s alone on the farm with her cousins, with no grown-ups to charge, no power, and dwindling resources. But as much as How I Live Now is a survival story, it’s also the story of what happens when a family sticks together, how the bonds we make with the people we love become powerful enough to get us through even the most extreme circumstances.