AmongReaders.com
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Bear

William Faulkner · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Orchard Keeper

Cormac McCarthy · 246 pages

*The Orchard Keeper* tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy's father.

ForestAmerican SouthComing of AgeDense Prose
❤️

Siddhartha

Hermann Hesse · 130 pages

Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha after he traveled to India in the 1910s. It tells the story of a young boy who travels the country in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the time of Guatama Buddha. It is a compact, lyrical work, which reads like an allegory about the finding of wisdom.

Rite of PassageComing of AgeAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Red Badge of Courage

Stephen Crane · 175 pages

The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle. Overcome with shame, he longs for a wound, a "red badge of courage," to counteract his cowardice. When his regiment once again faces the enemy, Henry acts as standar

Rite of PassageComing of AgeClassicsDense Prose
❤️

Youth

Joseph Conrad · 30 pages

Rite of PassageAtmosphericComing of AgeClassics
❤️

Bridge to Terabithia

Katherine Paterson · 144 pages

The life of a ten-year-old boy in rural Virginia expands when he becomes friends with a newcomer who subsequently meets an untimely death trying to reach their hideaway, Terabithia, during a storm.

Rite of PassageForestClassicsComing of Age
❤️

Hatchet

Gary Paulsen · 192 pages

Brian Robison, a teenage boy struggling through his parents divorce, is flying up north to stay with his dad for the summer. However, his plane crashes and he is forced to survive the Canadian wilderness. Now living in a world completely opposite of his own, he is now able to discover himself in this forsaken and misunderstood beautiful world. The story is continued in "The River" "Brian's Wint

Rite of PassageForestComing of AgeAtmospheric
❤️

Bless Me, Ultima

Rudolfo Anaya · 252 pages

Ultima, a curandera, one who cures with herbs and magic, comes to Antonio Marez's New Mexico family when he is six years old, and she helps him discover himself in the magical secrets of the pagan past.

Rite of PassageComing of AgeAtmosphericClassics
❤️

The Jungle Books

Rudyard Kipling · 334 pages

Among the best loved of all children's classics, Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book is set among a community of animals in the jungles of India, where Kipling was born and grew up. Three of the stories feature the adventures of an abandoned "man cub," a boy named Mowgli, who is raised by wolves in the jungle. Other well-known stories in the collection include "Rikki-Tikki-Tavi," the tale of a heroi

Rite of PassageForestComing of AgeClassics
🙂

A Painted House

John Grisham · 465 pages

Using his own childhood for inspiration (and leaving the lawyers behind), bestselling author John Grisham sets A Painted House in 1950s rural Arkansas. During harvest time, together with hired Mexicans and hill people, seven-year-old Luke Chandler picks cotton on his family's rented 80 acres. But racial tension, a forbidden love affair, and murder cause Luke to grow up before he's ready.

Rite of PassageAmerican SouthLiterary FictionComing of Age
🙂

Warrior Scarlet

Rosemary Sutcliff · 207 pages

In Bronze Age Britain, Drem must overcome the disability of a crippled arm in order to pass his tribe's test of manhood and become a warrior.

Rite of PassageAtmosphericComing of AgeClassics
🙂

The Hill of Dreams

Arthur Machen · 162 pages

Lucian Taylor is damned, either through contact with an erotically pagan faerie world or through something degenerate in his own nature. He thinks of the damning thing inside him as a faun. He becomes a writer, and when he moves to London he becomes trapped by the increasing reality of the dark imaginings of this creature within him, which become increasingly real. The portrait of a doomed artist:

Dense ProseAtmosphericComing of AgeClassics
🙂

The Chosen

Chaim Potok · 284 pages

It's about two jewish boys from different jewish sects with very differing doctrine. The kids meet in the unlikely circumstance of a baseball game, and a terrible accident, that leads them to be lifelong friends

Rite of PassageClassicsLiterary FictionDense Prose
🙂

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain · 253 pages

Rite of PassageAmerican SouthComing of AgeClassics
🙂

A Wizard of Earthsea

Ursula K. Le Guin · 198 pages

The first novel of Ursula K. Le Guin's must-read Earthsea Cycle. "The magic of Earthsea is primal; the lessons of Earthsea remain as potent, as wise, and as necessary as anyone could dream." (Neil Gaiman) Ged was the greatest sorcerer in Earthsea, but in his youth he was the reckless Sparrowhawk. In his hunger for power and knowledge, he tampered with long-held secrets and loosed a terrible sha

Rite of PassageAtmosphericClassicsComing of Age
🙂

A Monster Calls

Patrick Ness · 224 pages

A brilliant, graphic novel written by young but promising Patrick Ness. This is the story about 13 year old Conor and his mother who is dying of cancer. Conor has to face the cruelty of real life and learn to let his close and dearest go. When no human can help him Monster appears...

Rite of PassageAtmosphericForestComing of Age
🙂

Song of Solomon

Toni Morrison · 338 pages

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s ori

American SouthDense ProseComing of AgeClassics
🙂

Bambi

Felix Salten · 220 pages

Since it first appeared over forty years ago, Bambi has been a classic, a wise and humane idyll of life and death in the woods, beloved by readers of all ages. This unforgettable tale of a young fawn opens when Bambi takes his first trembling steps in the hidden forest glade. But soon, filled with boundless curiosity and the thrill of discovery, he is playing in the sunlit meadow and meeting his

ForestRite of PassageComing of AgeClassics
🙂

The Round House

Louise Erdrich · 352 pages

A young man is upended after a violent attack on his mother, which leaves his family in turmoil. Well-written page turner that is hard to put down!

Rite of PassageAtmosphericLiterary FictionComing of Age
🙂

The Cat's Table

Michael Ondaatje · 296 pages

In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. At mealtimes he is seated at the "cat's table"--as far from the Captain's Table as can be--with a ragtag group of "insignificant" adults and two other boys, Cassius and Ramadhin. As the ship makes its way across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, into the Mediterranean, the boys tumble from one adventure

Rite of PassageAtmosphericLiterary FictionComing of Age
🙂

Dubliners

James Joyce · 226 pages

James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else, including two entire stories. Although only 24 when he signed his first publishing contract for the book, Joyce already knew its worth: to alter it in any way would 'retard the course of civilisation

Coming of AgeDense ProseAtmosphericClassics
🙂

A Sudden Light

Garth Stein · 396 pages

"When a boy tries to save his parents' marriage, he uncovers a legacy of family secrets in a coming-of-age ghost story by the author of the internationally bestselling phenomenon, The Art of Racing in the Rain. In the summer of 1990, fourteen-year-old Trevor Riddell gets his first glimpse of Riddell House. Built from the spoils of a massive timber fortune, the legendary family mansion is construct

ForestComing of AgeAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Storyteller

Mario Vargas Llosa

ForestDense ProseAtmosphericLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Lost Steps

Alejo Carpentier · 278 pages

"Translated into twenty languages and published in more than fourteen Spanish editions, The Lost Steps, originally published in 1953, is Alejo Carpentier's most heralded novel. A composer, fleeing an empty existence in New York City, takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization - the upper reaches of a great South American river.

ForestDense ProseClassicsLiterary Fiction
🙂

A Separate Peace

John Knowles · 196 pages

Gene Forrester looks back fifteen years to a World War II year in which he and his best friend were roommates in a New hampshire boarding school.

Rite of PassageClassicsLiterary FictionComing of Age
📖 New 2026 Kindles just released. See them on Amazon ↗