YA

What to Read Next if You Loved If I Stay

If I Stay recommended reads
You cried when you read the book, you cried double when you saw the movie, and now you’re all cried out and in need of a seriously good follow-up read (and a glass of water). Gayle Forman’s elegiac heartbreaker If I Stay finds teenaged Mia on the precipice between death and life, after the rest of her family has been killed in the car crash that left her in a coma. Now she must choose: oblivion, or all the sorrows and joys of staying in her life on earth—and choosing life comes with the added sweetness of a boy, a dreamy rocker named Adam who is the yin to Mia’s classically trained cellist yang. After you’ve read and loved it, here’s what to try next:
If you need more Mia and Adam like you need air…read Where She Went
At the end of If I Stay, (highlight white area to show spoiler) Mia chooses life, rededicating herself to her art. In follow-up Where She Went, she and Adam reunite in New York City three years later, where Mia’s Juilliard successes are shadowed by her painful past, and now-successful rocker Adam’s still not over the girl who was his muse. This is a cathartic after love story, that may or may not end in a new beginning for two relatably imperfect characters.
If you loved the opposites attract love story…read The Raven Cycle
It’s disdain at first sight when Blue meets Gansey, a polished future president type who comes swaggering into the restaurant where she works and pisses her off posthaste. Blue is prickly and hotheaded, the daughter of an unconventional psychic mother who raises her among an extended family of clairvoyant women in a house that doubles as their workplace. But the things is, she’s seen Gansey before, in a vision that leads her to believe against all odds that he’s meant to be her first love, and over the course of two books (The Raven Boys and The Dream Thieves), they warily circle each other and try to deny their growing attraction. We’re fangirling hard for the release of trilogy ender Blue Lily, Lily Blue, out October 21.
If you want another meditation on life and death…read Falling Into Place
Zowie. Falling Into Place takes bullying and grief and best friendship and parent-child relations and the struggle to be cool and how far people go to fit in and suicide and loss and redemption and SHAKES IT ALL UP LIKE A SNOW GLOBE, giving us a gorgeous, breathlessly written story about the day queen bee high schooler Liz Emerson decides to die, and all the days that lead up to it and come after, and all the lives she touched for better or worse. Read it and weep.
If you’re looking for another tearjerker…read Noggin
This book about a dying boy whose head is removed from his body, cryogenically frozen, then sutured to a donor body five years later extends far beyond the boundaries of speculative fiction. It’s about what it’s like to drop out of your life for five years, and come back feeling exactly the same—only to find that the world has moved on without you. It’s about the secrets people keep, out of fear or love, about the kind of relationships that can overcome age difference and near-death, and the disorienting blend of compassion and selfishness that true love inspires. Argh, read it! You’ll cry your eyes out (I did).
If you loved the window onto a wonderful family…read My Life Next Door
Dissatisfied with her own family—one older sister and a striving single mother—Samantha has long been fascinated by the big, messy, ebullient family next door: two parents, eight kids, and a bursting house that can barely contain them. Her chilly mother finds the riotous Garretts distasteful and forbids her children to mix with them, but Samantha can’t look away. And then one night, 17-year-old Jase Garrett catches her peeking. Just as her mother’s new boyfriend is making her home life unbearable, Samantha finds her escape in Jase. As the two fall for each other, you’ll fall for the wonderful Garretts—and have your heart wrung out by what Samantha and Jase have to face on their way to a happy ending.
If you loved its artistic heroine…read I’ll Give You the Sun
Jude is a teenaged sculptor whose work always fall apart in the kiln. It’s not her fault, it’s her mother’s unsettled ghost.  Three years after losing her mother in a car wreck, Jude and her once-close twin brother, Noah, are practically strangers, and her bold, brave self is whittled down almost to nothing. It takes the appearance of a boy as messed up as she is and a legendary artist with his own losses to mourn for Jude to find her way back to her brother, the memory of her mother, and herself. This beautiful book will make you feel lucky to be alive. If it also makes you feel like punching the air and running down the street hollering, just go with it.
What YA cry-reads do you love?