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🧲 Books like this

Columbine

Dave Cullen · 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
❤️

We Need to Talk About Kevin

Lionel Shriver · 424 pages

The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry. "Eva never really wanted to be a mother -- and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with mar

Mass ShootingIntenseChild Death DepictedTragic
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In Cold Blood

Truman Capote · 343 pages

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

True CrimeCriminal ProfilingInvestigative JournalismBleak
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Nineteen Minutes

Jodi Picoult · 586 pages

The startling and poignant story of the aftermath of a tragic high school shooting, from the bestselling author of My Sister's Keeper and The Pact.'Picoult makes us ponder the ambiguous relationships between love and lying, legality and morality; the strange ways repressed memories leak into the present.' Los Angeles TimesIntricately textured and rich with psychological and social insight, Jodi Pi

Mass ShootingTragicBullyingTeenagers
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Lord of the Flies

William Golding · 243 pages

Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize–winning British author William Golding. The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to govern themselves. Themes include the tension between groupthink and individuality, between rational and emotional reactions, and between morality and immorality. The novel has been generally well r

Child Death DepictedBullyingTragicIntense
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Newtown: An American Tragedy

Matthew Lysiak · 264 pages

"In the vein of Dave Cullen's Columbine, the first comprehensive account of the Sandy Hook tragedy--with exclusive new reporting that chronicles the horrific events of December 14, 2012, including new insight into the dark mind of gunman Adam Lanza. Twenty-six people dead; twenty of them schoolchildren between the ages of six and seven. The world mourned the devastating shooting at Sandy Hook elem

Mass ShootingTrue CrimeChild Death DepictedInvestigative Journalism
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Give a Boy a Gun

Todd Strasser · 184 pages

A young adult novel that reads like a journalist's notebook as she struggles to understand what happened at a school dance when two of the students confronted the others with guns and bombs.

Mass ShootingIntenseTeenagersBleak
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The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town

John Grisham · 360 pages

John Grisham's first work of nonfiction, an exploration of small town justice gone terribly awry, is his most extraordinary legal thriller yet. In the major league draft of 1971, the first player chosen from the State of Oklahoma was Ron Williamson. When he signed with the Oakland A's, he said goodbye to his hometown of Ada and left to pursue his dreams of big league glory. Six years later he was

True CrimeInvestigative JournalismIntenseBleak
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Hate List

Jennifer Brown · 408 pages

Five months ago, Valerie Leftman's boyfriend, Nick, opened fire on their school cafeteria. Shot trying to stop him, Valerie inadvertently saved the life of a classmate, but was implicated in the shootings because of the list she helped create. A list of people and things she and Nick hated. The list he used to pick his targets.Now, after a summer of seclusion, Val is forced to confront her guil

Mass ShootingTeenagersBullyingEmotional
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Child Death DepictedIntenseTragicTeenagers
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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.

IntenseTeenagersTragicBleak
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The Jungle

Upton Sinclair · 342 pages

Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c

Child Death DepictedIntenseTragicInvestigative Journalism
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House of Sand and Fog

Andre Dubus III · 365 pages

IntenseChild Death DepictedBleakTragic
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One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

Asne Seierstad · 530 pages

"On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside the Norwegian prime minister's office in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the wooded island of Utøya, where he killed sixty-nine more, most of them teenage members of the country's governing Labour Party. In [this book], the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and i

Mass ShootingTrue CrimeInvestigative JournalismDark
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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

IntenseBullyingTragicBleak
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Hunger

Michael Grant

It's been three months since everyone under the age of fifteen became trapped in the bubble known as the FAYZ.Three months since all the adults disappeared.Gone. Food ran out weeks ago. Everyone is starving, but no one wants to figure out a solution. And each day, more and more kids are evolving, developing supernatural abilities that set them apart from the kids without powers.Tension rises and

Child Death DepictedBullyingIntenseTeenagers
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This Is Where It Ends

Marieke Nijkamp · 304 pages

Everyone has a reason to fear the boy with the gun. 10:00 a.m. The principal of Opportunity, Alabama's high school finishes her speech, welcoming the entire student body to a new semester and encouraging them to excel and achieve. 10:02 a.m. The students get up to leave the auditorium for their next class. 10:03 The auditorium doors won't open. 10:05 Someone starts shooting. Tol

Mass ShootingIntenseTeenagersEmotional
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True CrimeChild Death DepictedInvestigative JournalismTeenagers
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A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages

IntenseTragicBleakDark
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True CrimeIntenseBleakInvestigative Journalism
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Thirteen Reasons Why

Jay Asher · 288 pages

Clay Jenkins returns home from school to find a mysterious box with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers 13 cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier.On tape, Hannah explains that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he'll find out how he made the list.Through

BleakTeenagersTragicBullying
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Project X

Jim Shepard · 169 pages

Below the sign welcoming the new eighth-grade class to school is one that promises to leave no child unsuccessful and a handout that offers eight ways of being smart. For Edwin Hanratty, at times as hilarious as he is miserable, this is part of what makes junior high pretty much a relentless nightmare. And so, with Flake, his only friend, he contends with clique upon clique--the jocks who pummel t

Mass ShootingBullyingTeenagersBleak
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Schindler's List

Thomas Keneally · 429 pages

In the shadow of Auschwitz, a flamboyant German industrialist grew into a living legend to the Jews of Cracow. He was a womaniser, a heavy drinker and a bon viveur, but to them he became a saviour. This is the extraordinary story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to protect Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland and who was transformed by the war into a man with a mission, a compassionate angel of mer

Child Death DepictedIntenseBleakTragic
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Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 448 pages

> With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor fu

Child Death DepictedIntenseBleakTragic
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Investigative JournalismTragicIntenseBleak

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