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🧲 Books like this

Candy

Kevin Brooks · 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
❤️

Solo

Kwame Alexander, Mary Rand Hess · 461 pages

Seventeen-year-old Blade, who endeavors to resolve painful issues from his past to navigate the challenges of his former rockstar father's addictions, scathing tabloid rumors, and a protected secret that threatens his own identity.

AddictionMusicianSubstance AbuseFirst Love
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The Spectacular Now

Tim Tharp

In the last months of high school, charismatic eighteen-year-old Sutter Keely lives in the present, staying drunk or high most of the time, but that could change when starts working to boost the self-confidence of a classmate, Aimee.

AddictionSubstance AbuseFirst LoveYoung Adult
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Freefall

Mindi Scott · 315 pages

A bass guitar player in a teen rock band deals with alcoholism, his best friend's death, and first love.

AddictionSubstance AbuseMusicianYoung Adult
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Run the Game

Jason Myers · 518 pages

A cocaine-addicted teenaged guitarist in a rock band falls dangerously in love with a fourteen-year-old prostitute.

AddictionSubstance AbuseMusicianYoung Adult
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Crank

Ellen Hopkins · 537 pages

Kristina is the perfect daughter: gifted high school junior, quiet, never any trouble. Then she meets the monster: crank. And what begins as a wild ride turns into a struggle for her mind, her soul---her life.

AddictionSubstance AbuseFirst LoveContemporary Fiction
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Virtuosity

Jessica Martinez · 294 pages

Just before the most important violin competition of her career, seventeen-year-old prodigy Carmen faces critical decisions about her anti-anxiety drug addiction, her controlling mother, and a potential romance with her most talented rival.

AddictionSubstance AbuseMusicianYoung Adult
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On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong · 256 pages

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once

AddictionFirst LoveSubstance AbuseFirst Person Narrator
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The Impossible Knife of Memory

Laurie Halse Anderson · 391 pages

For the past five years Hayley Kincain and her father, Andy, have been on the road, never staying long in one place as he struggles to escape the demons that have tortured him since his return from Iraq. Now they are back in town where he grew up so Hayley can go to a proper school. Perhaps, for the first time, Hayley can have a normal life, put aside her own painful memories, even have a relation

AddictionSubstance AbuseFirst LoveYoung Adult
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Ballads of Suburbia

Stephanie Kuehnert

Ballads are the kind of songs that Kara McNaughton likes best. Not the clichéd ones where a diva hits her dramatic high note or a rock band tones it down a couple of notches for the ladies, but the true ballads: the punk rocker or the country crooner reminding their listeners of the numerous ways to screw things up. In high school, Kara helped maintain the "Stories of Suburbia" notebook, which con

AddictionSubstance AbuseYoung AdultContemporary Fiction
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You'd Be Mine

Erin Hahn · 304 pages

MusicianFirst LoveAddictionSubstance Abuse
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Beautiful

Amy Reed · 240 pages

AddictionSubstance AbuseYoung AdultFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Where All Light Tends to Go

David Joy · 289 pages

"Set in North Carolina's Appalachian Mountains, eighteen-year-old Jacob McNeely is torn between appeasing his meth-dealing kingpin father and leaving the mountains forever with the girl he loves"--

Substance AbuseFirst LoveAddictionFirst Person Narrator
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Harmonic Feedback

Tara Kelly

First LoveMusicianSubstance AbuseContemporary Fiction
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Kill Your Friends

John Niven · 323 pages

A dark, satirical and hysterically funny evisceration of the record business, a place populated by frauds, charlatans and bluffers, where ambition is a higher currency than talent, and where it seems anything can be achieved - as long as you want it badly enough.

Substance AbuseMusicianLondonFirst Person Narrator
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Go Ask Alice

Anonymous · 185 pages

You Can't Ask Alice Anything Anymore But you can do something. Read her diary. Strong, painfully honest, nakedly candid. The actual story of a desperate girl on drugs and on the run who almost made it. --back cover

AddictionSubstance AbuseYoung AdultFirst Person Narrator
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The Girl on the Train

Paula Hawkins · 336 pages

A debut psychological thriller that will forever change the way you look at other people's lives. Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning. Every day she rattles down the track, flashes past a stretch of cozy suburban homes, and stops at the signal that allows her to daily watch the same couple breakfasting on their deck. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. “Jess and Jason

AddictionSubstance AbuseLondonFirst Person Narrator
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The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt · 817 pages

"The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind....Donna Tartt has delivered an extraordinary work of fiction."--Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review Composed with the skills of a master, The Goldfinch is a haunted odyssey through present day America and a drama of enthra

AddictionSubstance AbuseContemporary FictionDark
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Bottled Up

Jaye Murray · 222 pages

Pips desperate to escape his lifehes been skipping classes, drinking, getting high. Anything and everything to avoid his smug teachers, his sweet but needy little brother, his difficult home life. Now hes been busted by Principal Giraldi and given an ultimatum: either he shows up for all his classes and sees a counselor after school, or hes expelled. Pips freaked out; not because he might get kick

AddictionSubstance AbuseYoung AdultContemporary Fiction
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Scar Tissue

Anthony Kiedis · 465 pages

Scar Tissue is Anthony Kiedis's searingly honest memoir of a life spent in the fast lane. In 1983, four self-described "knuckleheads" burst out of the mosh-pitted mosaic of the neo-punk rock scene in L.A. with their own unique brand of cosmic hardcore mayhem funk. Over twenty years later, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, against all odds, have become one of the most successful bands in the world. Though

AddictionSubstance AbuseMusicianFirst Person Narrator
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Choke

Chuck Palahniuk · 304 pages

Victor Mancini, a medical-school dropout, is an antihero for our deranged times. Needing to pay elder care for his mother, Victor has devised an ingenious scam: he pretends to choke on pieces of food while dining in upscale restaurants. He then allows himself to be "saved" by fellow patrons who, feeling responsible for Victor's life, go on to send checks to support him. When he's not pulling this

AddictionSubstance AbuseFirst Person NarratorContemporary Fiction
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10 Things I Can See from Here

Carrie Mac · 320 pages

Maeve, who lives in Seattle and suffers severe anxiety is sent to Vancouver to live with her dad after her mom must leave for a job off the continent. Adjusting to her new situation with her dad and step family is tough until she meets another girl with whom she falls in love and "comes out" openly in a gay relationship and finds solace.

AddictionFirst LoveSubstance AbuseYoung Adult
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Stephen Chbosky · 216 pages

Charlie writes letters to an unknown mail recipient, detailing his struggles with high school, family, and finding his place in the world. Full of beautiful quotes and written with such sincerity, this is a book that makes the reader reflect on their purpose in life, while simultaneously reminding us about the power music, friendships, and "feeling infinite" can have on our life. Read this book.

First LoveSubstance AbuseYoung AdultFirst Person Narrator
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Nina is Not OK

Shappi Khorsandi

Nina does not have a drinking problem. She likes a drink, sure. But what 17-year-old doesn't? Nina's mum isn't so sure. But she's busy with her new husband and five year old Katie. And Nina's almost an adult after all. And if Nina sometimes wakes up with little memory of what happened the night before, then her friends are all too happy to fill in the blanks. Nina's drunken exploits are the stuff

AddictionSubstance AbuseLondonYoung Adult
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Less Than Zero

Bret Easton Ellis · 208 pages

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money a place devoid of feeling or hope. Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless

AddictionSubstance AbuseContemporary FictionDark




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