Books like A Monster Calls
It feels like being led through a nightmare by the gentlest possible hand: frightening, beautiful, fiercely compassionate, and unwilling to soften the truth simply because the person facing it is young.
If you liked A Monster Calls, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with A Monster Calls, and we tell you exactly what.
Almond’s strange, spare novel has the same gift for making the supernatural feel less like an escape from suffering than a way of touching what ordinary language cannot reach. While Michael’s baby sister lies dangerously ill, he discovers an inexplicable, winged being in a ruined garage. What follows remains wonderfully resistant to tidy interpretation.
Winner of both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children’s Book Award, Skellig is lyrical without becoming sentimental. Like Ness, Almond trusts silence, uncertainty, and startling physical detail. Its creature may be angel, animal, invalid, or something beyond all three—and that mystery gives the story its haunting power.
If what devastated you in A Monster Calls was its honesty about grief—especially the anger, shame, resentment, and even relief that can accompany love—read this. Ten-year-old Jamie’s family has been fractured by his sister’s death, but he does not mourn in the manner the adults around him expect. He is funny, observant, confused, and painfully loyal.
Pitcher uses no fantasy at all, yet Jamie’s voice performs a similar miracle: it makes unbearable emotions approachable without making them smaller. The Branford Boase Award–winning novel is sharp about prejudice and damaged parents, but never reduces anyone to a lesson. Its warmth is hard-earned, which makes it linger.
Lindgren begins by allowing a frightened child to speak openly about death, then carries him into a tale of brotherly devotion, tyranny, dragons, courage, and sacrifice. The fantasy has the clear shapes of legend, but beneath them are difficult questions: What does bravery mean when you are terrified? What can love ask of us? How do stories help us face what cannot be avoided?
A lasting classic by the creator of Pippi Longstocking, The Brothers Lionheart has inspired intense devotion—and occasional controversy—because it refuses comforting evasions. Like A Monster Calls, it respects young readers enough to bring them close to darkness while insisting that tenderness can survive there.