8 YA Books to Read While You Wait for a New Season of The Good Place

Lumberjanes, by Noelle Stevenson
Much of what makes The Good Place work is how well its band of misfits works together—even when they’re actually making each other miserable. The Lumberjanes graphic novels also succeed because of the dynamics of their central five characters. Jo, April, Mal, Molly, and Ripley are all very different campers at Miss Quinzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady Types, but their friendship (to the max!) helps hold together stories that often involve yetis, three-eyed wolves, time travel, and all kinds of unpleasantness under the lake.

My So-Called Bollywood Life, by Nisha Sharma
Chidi and Eleanor? Tahani and Jason? Jason and Janet? Janet and Derek? The Good Place is all about complicated and, let’s say, unexpected romance, while also toying around with the idea of soulmates. In Sharma’s romcom send-up, Winnie Mehta is quite sure she has found the predestined love of her life. Raj meets all the qualifications outlined by her resident psychic, so it’s particularly vexing when she discovers him hooking up with another classmate. Winnie’s camaraderie with film geek Dev further complicates matters, posing the question of whether fate has anything to do with happy endings after all.

The Afterlife of Holly Chase, by Cynthia Hand
Holly Chase is a match for the stubborn complexity of Eleanor Shellstrop, flaw for flaw. And things work out about as well for Holly as they have for Eleanor, after she’s visited by three Christmas ghosts who warned her to change her selfish ways. Unlike Ebenezer Scrooge of old, however, Holly didn’t listen. Now that she’s dead, she’s been drafted into the secretive Project Scrooge, working (begrudgingly) as the latest in a long line of Ghosts of Christmas Past. But like a deus ex Chidi, someone is about to make Holly’s afterlife a lot more interesting.

Trouble Is a Friend of Mine, by Stephanie Tromly
In their various schemes to get into the actual Good Place, Eleanor and crew have come up with a few zany plans, some more successful than others. Their antics pair nicely with the screwball humor of reluctant sleuth Zoe Webster and menace-to-high-school-society Philip Digby. Zoe and Digby make for a perfect mismatched pair as they investigate the disappearance of a classmate, as well as the mystery of Digby’s sister’s disappearance eight years ago. Genuine capers ensue, with a few literal and figurative explosions to boot.

It’s a Wonderful Death, by Sarah J. Schmitt
You wouldn’t exactly call the afterlife in The Good Place “fun,” but there certainly are some wacky dealings going on among the Good Place, the Bad Place, and Michael’s neighborhood. RJ runs into similar bureaucratic struggles and otherworldly hijinks when she’s collected by mistake by a Grim Reaper. Sending RJ back to the land of the living isn’t so easy, given the great lengths it would take to return her—time, space, and all that. So, RJ, not an overly compassionate person on earth, must face an angelic tribunal to plead her case, and avoid getting sucked into pearly-gate politics while she’s at it.

The 39 Deaths of Adam Strand, by Gregory Galloway
If what you enjoy most about The Good Place is how it mixes funny and dark, you’ll love the black humor of Adam Strand. Adam has tried to kill himself 39 times, through a variety of means. Each time, however, he wakes up, unharmed, in a sort of Groundhog’s Day twist. Adam’s desire to die, however, finally runs up against a dawning realization that his death (whether it sticks or not) might affect those around him more than he ever considered.

Going Bovine, by Libba Bray
Good and Bad Janet are odd enough supernatural helpers, but sixteen-year-old Cameron, in the throes of mad cow disease, has an even more bizarre set of accomplices. Punk angel Dulcie sends Cameron on a quest for a cure, a journey he undertakes with the help of a hypochondriac gamer dwarf and a sentient, more-than-what-it-appears-to-be garden gnome. Whether the quest is real or a hallucination matters less than how genuinely entertaining it is.

The Last Days of California, by Mary Miller
For Tahani and Eleanor, there’s a straight line from their troubled family dynamics to their postmortem predicament. Jess, the protagonist of The Last Days of California, can appreciate the struggle to overcome problematic parental situations. She and her older sister, Elise, are on a family road trip—to the apocalypse. As her family travels cross-country in expectation of the Rapture, Jess processes a number of things: her feelings toward her parents’ belief system, her sister’s secret pregnancy and freewheeling approach to roadside hookups, and her own burgeoning teenage self-awareness. Poignant and funny, just like The Good Place.