What to Read Next if You Loved Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl

If you loved the look at the creative process of an author, read Afterworlds, by Scott Westerfeld
If this book doesn’t make you want to do National Novel Writing Month, nothing will. Darcy Patel is a teen who defers college and moves to New York City after the paranormal novel she writes in a single month is sold in a massive two-book deal. She works on her follow-up, meets her author idols, freaks out about edits, and falls in love with fellow YA novelist Imogen, who is willing to climb into car trunks and play with matches to infuse realism into her debut novel about an arsonist. Echoing Fangirl‘s inclusion of sections from the fictional Simon Snow series and Cath’s fanfic, Darcy’s story alternates with chapters of her novel, about a girl whose brush with death during a terrorist attack leads her to a meet-cute with a hot Hindu death god.

If you loved the feeling of falling into TWO fictional worlds, one realistic and one fantastical, read The Raven Cycle, by Maggie Stiefvater
Stiefvater’s addictive, surreal tetralogy, starting with The Raven Boys, is about the tiny town of Henrietta, Virginia. It’s also about Cabeswater, where trees breathe and a dead king sleeps and nothing is as it seems. Blue Sargent is the nonmagical daughter of an extended family of female psychics, and all-American boy Gansey is the lead of the Raven Boys, a quartet of private-school students looking for the resting place of deathless Welsh King Glendower, who will grant a wish to whoever wakes him. Stiefvater moves effortlessly between the mundane (but never that mundane) and the utterly magical, creating worlds where the boundaries between possible and im- are permeable, and all too easy to step over.

If you loved the snarky lead, read Anatomy of a Misfit, by Andrea Portes
Anika is self-proclaimed “spider stew,” a prickly girl with a misleadingly pretty face who sees herself as a shrapnel bomb just waiting to go off. She’s hilarious and just the right amount of mean, as she sabotages her terrible boss, juggles multiple love interests, and finally works up the courage to overthrow her evil “best friend” and queen bee. Woven through her journey is a series of pulse-pounding flash-forwards to a night where everything changes for her and the boy who loves her best…but I can’t say more for fear of spoilers.

If you loved the adorable, more-experienced-than-our-heroine love interest, read Sloppy Firsts, by Megan McCafferty
Oh, Marcus Flutie. Marcus Flutie. Marcus Flutie! He’s the dreadlocked, pot-smoking, heartbreaking older boy who our funny, caustic, inappropriately named heroine, Jessica Darling, just can’t get out of her head. In the first two books of the Jessica Darling series, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, the two circle each other, hurt each other, confuse and confound and mesmerize each other…and when they finally get together, you’ll squee at ear-piercing volumes and reread it twice. Marcus Flutie!

If you loved the sister drama, read We Are the Goldens, by Dana Reinhardt
Written in the form of a love letter from Nell Golden to her beautiful, reckless older sister, Layla, We Are the Goldens captures all the heady power of being made a glamorous elder sibling’s confidante. It charts the painful choice Nell must make—to keep her sister’s secrets or save her from herself—while also telling her own romantic coming of age, filled with first love and first heartbreak. Layla spins even further out of orbit than Cath’s sister, Wren, and Nell finds herself feeling just as left behind as Cath does.