Books like Kacen Callender

Bug’s beloved uncle has died, and something strange is stirring in the old house they shared. Like King, Bug must learn that grief can obscure other truths about the self—and that identity sometimes becomes legible only when we stop forcing it into familiar shapes.

Lukoff writes the supernatural with beautiful restraint: the haunting is eerie, but the deepest suspense lies in Bug’s dawning self-understanding. A Newbery Honor book and Stonewall Award winner, this is perhaps the closest emotional companion to King and the Dragonflies: tender, uncanny, and quietly transformative.

After her former best friend dies by drowning, Suzy becomes convinced that a rare jellyfish must be responsible. Her theory is part investigation, part refuge—a way to impose meaning on a loss too senseless to accept. Readers who understood why King needs to see Khalid in a dragonfly will immediately understand Suzy.

Benjamin’s National Book Award finalist is especially moving about the untidy moral texture of grief: love complicated by anger, guilt, estrangement, and words left unsaid. Its luminous excursions into marine science never feel decorative; they show a lonely mind searching the natural world for proof that the unbearable can be explained. It is a devastating, generous novel about returning to life without betraying the dead.

Jam lives in Lucille, a city whose adults proudly claim that monsters no longer exist. Then a strange creature emerges from one of her mother’s paintings and declares that a monster is hiding nearby. Jam must decide whether safety comes from trusting the world she has inherited or from believing what others refuse to see.

This acclaimed National Book Award finalist shares King and the Dragonflies’ moral courage around concealed harm: both novels respect children enough to show that love, family, and community do not automatically make people safe. Emezi’s prose is spare and jewel-bright, and Jam—Black, trans, observant, and deeply loved—is unforgettable. Pet reads like a fable, but its questions about belief, silence, and protecting vulnerable people linger with the force of myth.