Books like Adib Khorram

In an Oklahoma classroom, an Iranian refugee named Khosrou—called Daniel by classmates who find even his name inconvenient—tries to tell a story large enough to contain his family, Persian history, humiliation, exile, and wonder.

Like Khorram, Nayeri understands that belonging is not achieved by choosing one culture over another. His hero’s inheritance is simultaneously glorious, painful, funny, and difficult to communicate. The novel moves with a storyteller’s exuberance between schoolyard cruelty and jewel-bright memories, making dignity itself feel adventurous. Winner of the Printz Medal, it is formally daring but immediately lovable: a book for anyone who treasured Darius’s discovery that the parts of himself others belittle may be sources of strength.

Ari is an angry, solitary Mexican American teenager; Dante is openhearted, curious, and seemingly unafraid of tenderness. When they meet at a swimming pool, their friendship begins to challenge everything Ari has learned about what boys should reveal.

Sáenz’s spare, luminous prose gives silence enormous weight: fathers struggle to speak, sons misread them, and affection appears in gestures long before anyone can name it. Readers who loved the quiet emotional force of Darius and Sohrab’s friendship will recognize the same radical proposition here—that friendship between boys can transform how they inhabit their families and themselves. A Printz Honor and Stonewall Award winner, it has become beloved because its gentleness never feels slight; missing it means missing one of YA’s defining portraits of vulnerable boyhood.

After his mother dies, Matt takes an after-school job at a funeral home. Surrounded by other people’s mourning, he begins noticing the strange shapes grief takes—and how rarely it resembles the neat consolations people offer.

Jason Reynolds writes with deceptive simplicity: a joke, an awkward conversation, or a shared meal can suddenly expose an entire submerged emotional life. Matt’s pain is neither sensationalized nor turned into an inspirational obstacle course, just as Darius’s depression is never treated as a defect awaiting a tidy cure. This Coretta Scott King Honor novel offers something uncommon: a tender, unsentimental account of a boy learning that receiving care requires its own kind of courage. Its warmth arrives honestly, which makes every glimmer of it matter.