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

🧲 Books like this

Gem & Dixie

Sara Zarr · 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
❤️

Dreamland

Sarah Dessen · 256 pages

Rogerson Biscoe, with his green eyes and dark curly hair, is absolutely seductive. Before long, sixteen-year-old Caitlin finds herself under his spell. And when he starts to abuse her, she finds she's in too deep to get herself out...

NeglectSistersSubstance AbuseYoung Adult
❤️

The Silver Star

Jeannette Walls · 304 pages

Two motherless sisters--Bean and Liz--are shuttled to Virginia, where their Uncle Tinsley lives in the decaying mansion that's been in their family for generations. When school starts in the fall, Bean easily adjusts and makes friends, and Liz becomes increasingly withdrawn. Then something happens to Liz and Bean is left to challenge the injustice of the adult world.

NeglectSistersTeen ProtagonistEmotional
❤️

If You Find Me

Emily Murdoch · 290 pages

"She leaves us sittin' there, with the late-afternoon sun dapplin' the forest floor as if it's any other day. I watch her reach into the bin by the foldin' table, then walk back over. She hands me two of the shiny black garbage bags folded up like Mama's letter. I slip out from under Jenessa, balance her on the tree, and proceed to shake each bag into its full size. We all stop and watch the birds

NeglectSistersTeen ProtagonistYoung Adult
❤️

Love Letters to the Dead

Ava Dellaira · 327 pages

When Laurel starts writing letters to dead people for a school assignment, she begins to spill about her sister's mysterious death, her mother's departure from the family, her new friends, and her first love.

SistersSubstance AbuseYoung AdultTeen Protagonist
❤️

Barely Breathing

Rebecca Donovan · 592 pages

NeglectTeen ProtagonistSubstance AbuseYoung Adult
❤️

Long Bright River

Liz Moore · 473 pages

A female cop begins to fear for her addicted sister. A serial murder is targeting homeless female prostitutes. Can Mickey find her sister before the killer does ?

NeglectSistersSubstance AbuseEmotional
❤️

Identical

Ellen Hopkins · 624 pages

Do twins begin in the womb? Or in a better place? Kaeleigh and Raeanne are identical down to the dimple. As daughters of a district-court judge father and a politician mother, they are an all-American family—on the surface. Behind the facade each sister has her own dark secret, and that's where their differences begin. For Kaeleigh, she's the misplaced focus of Daddy's love, intended for a

SistersSubstance AbuseYoung AdultTeen Protagonist
❤️
NeglectSubstance AbuseTeen ProtagonistYoung Adult
🙂

Ordinary Beauty

Laura Wiess · 290 pages

After suffering years of neglect, Sayre Bellavia wonders if her addict mother, who is now lying near death in a hospital, ever loved her.

NeglectSubstance AbuseTeen ProtagonistYoung Adult
🙂

We Begin at the End

Chris Whitaker · 400 pages

There are two kinds of families: the ones we are born into and the ones we create. Walk has never left the coastal California town where he grew up. He may have become the chief of police, but he’s still trying to heal the old wound of having given the testimony that sent his best friend, Vincent King, to prison decades before. Now, thirty years later, Vincent is being released. Duchess is a

NeglectSubstance AbuseTeen ProtagonistContemporary Fiction
🙂

My Life Next Door

Huntley Fitzpatrick · 432 pages

When Samantha, the seventeen-year-old daugher of a wealthy, perfectionistic, Republican state senator, falls in love with the boy next door, whose family is large, boisterous, and just making ends meet, she discovers a different way to live, but when her mother is involved in a hit-and-run accident Sam must make some difficult choices.

SistersTeen ProtagonistSubstance AbuseYoung Adult
🙂

Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver · 560 pages

"Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose." Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in hi

NeglectTeen ProtagonistSubstance AbuseContemporary Fiction
🙂

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

NeglectTeen ProtagonistSubstance AbuseContemporary Fiction
🙂

The Liars' Club

Mary Karr · 320 pages

The Texas refinery town of Leechfield, perched on the swampy rim of the Gulf, is famous for mosquitoes and the manufacture of Agent Orange - a place where the only bookstores are religious ones and the restaurants serve only fried food. A handful of the Leechfield oil workers gather regularly at the American Legion Bar to drink salted beer and spin long, improbable tales. They're the Liars' Club.

NeglectSistersSubstance AbuseEmotional
🙂

Don't You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey

Margaret Peterson Haddix · 125 pages

Mrs. Dunphrey agrees not to read the private entries written in her students' English journals, thus Tish Bonner finds herself pouring her emotions into her book in an effort to relieve the pressures in her life that she feels she cannot discuss with anyone.

NeglectYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistEmotional
🙂

Ellen Foster

Kaye Gibbons · 126 pages

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

NeglectSubstance AbuseTeen ProtagonistEmotional
🙂

Don't Fail Me Now

Una LaMarche · 288 pages

Michelle and her little siblings Cass and Denny are African-American and living on the poverty line in urban Baltimore, struggling to keep it together with their mom in jail and only Michelle s part-time job at the Taco Bell to sustain them. Leah and her stepbrother Tim are white and middle class from suburban Maryland, with few worries beyond winning lacrosse games and getting college application

Teen ProtagonistYoung AdultEmotionalContemporary Fiction
🙂

Forbidden

Tabitha Suzuma · 448 pages

NeglectSubstance AbuseYoung AdultEmotional
🙂

Apple and Rain

Sarah Crossan · 344 pages

SistersTeen ProtagonistYoung AdultEmotional
🙂

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

Substance AbuseYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Monday's Not Coming

Tiffany D. Jackson · 448 pages

NeglectTeen ProtagonistYoung AdultEmotional
🙂

Because I Am Furniture

Thalia Chaltas

The youngest of three siblings, fourteen-year-old Anke feels both relieved and neglected that her father abuses her brother and sister but ignores her, but when she catches him with one of her friends, she finally becomes angry enough to take action.

NeglectSistersTeen ProtagonistYoung Adult
🙂

Pushing the Limits

Katie McGarry · 409 pages

Rendered a subject of gossip after a traumatic night that left her with terrible scars on her arms, Echo is dumped by her boyfriend and bonds with bad-boy Noah, whose tough attitude hides an understanding nature and difficult secrets.

NeglectYoung AdultSubstance AbuseEmotional
🙂

One Crazy Summer

Rita Williams-Garcia · 232 pages

Eleven-year-old Delphine has it together. Even though her mother, Cecile, abandoned her and her younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, seven years ago. Even though her father and Big Ma will send them from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to stay with Cecile for the summer. And even though Delphine will have to take care of her sisters, as usual, and learn the truth about the missing pieces of the pas

NeglectSistersTeen ProtagonistAbsent Parent

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.