Books like The Thing About Jellyfish
You’ll want stories that treat curiosity not as an escape from sorrow, but as a brave way of approaching it. These three understand how facts, stories, and friendship can help a young person face what cannot be neatly explained.
If you liked The Thing About Jellyfish, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Thing About Jellyfish, and we tell you exactly what.
Lucy, the daughter of a late shark biologist, understands the world through drawing and observation. When a great white appears off the Massachusetts coast, her mother’s unfinished research begins pulling her toward questions her grieving family has avoided.
Like Ali Benjamin, Allen makes scientific attention feel emotionally charged: naming, sketching, and studying become ways to remain connected to someone absent. The marine life is rendered with genuine wonder, but the novel’s real power lies in its tender recognition that knowledge cannot prevent loss—though it can give loss a shape. This is perhaps the closest companion to The Thing About Jellyfish in spirit, yet Lucy’s warm friendship and artistic eye give it a beauty entirely its own.
Natalie’s botanist mother is suffering from depression, and no one will explain why the person who taught Natalie to see miracles in the natural world can barely leave her bedroom. Natalie responds by entering an egg-drop competition, hoping its prize money can fund a journey to see a rare orchid—and somehow restore her mother.
The scientific method structures the novel without simplifying its emotions. Natalie forms hypotheses, tests solutions, and gradually encounters the painful difference between fixing an object and loving a person. Her project partners bring humor and friction, so the book never becomes solemn or clinical. Tae Keller, who later won the Newbery Medal, writes with unusual generosity about anger, helplessness, and hope; Suzy’s readers will recognize another unforgettable girl trying to reason her way toward compassion.
Every night, Conor is visited by a towering monster who promises to tell him three stories—and then demands that Conor tell the fourth. Meanwhile, Conor’s mother is seriously ill, his classmates either avoid or torment him, and the truth he most fears waits beneath his anger.
Where The Thing About Jellyfish uses science to approach grief, A Monster Calls uses myth. Both novels understand that a grieving child can hold contradictory feelings without being cruel or broken. Ness’s prose is spare and piercing, while Jim Kay’s shadowy illustrations make the monster feel elemental. Winner of both the Carnegie Medal and the Kate Greenaway Medal, it has earned its modern-classic reputation by offering no easy consolation—only the rarer comfort of being completely understood.