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

Freaks: Alive, on the Inside!

Annette Curtis Klause · 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
❤️

Ghost Boy

Iain Lawrence · 326 pages

Unhappy in a home seemingly devoid of love, a fourteen-year-old albino boy who thinks of himself as Harold the Ghost runs away to join the circus, where he works with the elephants and searches for a sense of who he is.

Traveling CircusYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
❤️

Freeks

Amanda Hocking · 387 pages

Mara Beznik, who travels with Gideon Davorin's Traveling Carnival, longs for an ordinary life where no one has the ability to levitate or predict the future. When the show stops in Caudry and she meets gorgeous local Gabe, she finally gets her chance. But before long, Mara realizes there's a dark presence lurking in the town, and that she has only a week to harness a power she didn't know she had

Traveling CircusYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
❤️
Traveling CircusYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistMale Lead
❤️

Nothing to Lose

Alex Flinn · 277 pages

A year after running away with a traveling carnival to escape his unbearable home life, sixteen-year-old Michael returns to Miami, Florida, to find that his mother is going on trial for the murder of his abusive stepfather.

Traveling CircusYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistMale Lead
❤️

The Boundless

Kenneth Oppel · 332 pages

Aboard "The Boundless," the greatest train ever built, on its maiden voyage across Canada, teenaged Will enlists the aid of a traveling circus to save the train from villains.

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistYoung AdultMale Lead
❤️

The Kite Rider

Geraldine McCaughrean · 304 pages

In thirteenth-century China, after trying to save his widowed mother from a horrendous second marriage, twelve-year-old Haoyou has life-changing adventures when he takes to the sky as a circus kite rider and ends up meeting the great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistHistorical FictionMale Lead
❤️

Circus Galacticus

Deva Fagan · 304 pages

Trix's life in boarding school as an orphan charity case has been hard, but when an alluring young Ringmaster invites her, a gymnast, to join Circus Galacticus she gainss an entire universe of deadly enemies and potential friends, along with a chance to unravel secrets of her own past.

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistYoung AdultAdventure
❤️

That Time I Joined the Circus

J.J. Howard

After her father's sudden death and a break-up with her best friends, seventeen-year-old Lexi has no choice but to leave New York City seeking her long-absent mother, rumored to be in Florida with a traveling circus, where she just may discover her destiny.

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistYoung Adult
❤️

Girl on a Wire

Gwenda Bond · 372 pages

"Sixteen-year-old Jules Maroni's dream is to follow in her father's footsteps as a high-wire walker. When her family is offered a prestigious role in the new Cirque American, it seems that Jules and the Amazing Maronis will finally get the spotlight they deserve. But the presence of the Flying Garcias may derail her plans. For decades, the two rival families have avoided each other as sworn enemie

Traveling CircusYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistRomance
❤️

Daughter of the Burning City

Amanda Foody · 304 pages

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistYoung Adult
❤️

The Diamond Thief

Sharon Gosling · 305 pages

No one performs on the circus trapeze like 16-year-old Rémy Brunel. But Rémy also leads another life, prowling through the backstreets of Victorian London as a jewel thief. When she is forced to steal one of the world's most valuable diamonds, she uncovers a world of treachery and fiendish plots.

Traveling CircusYoung AdultHistorical FictionRomance
🙂

Tiger's Curse

Colleen Houck · 456 pages

The last thing teenager Kelsey Hayes thought she'd be doing over the summer was meeting Ren, a mysterious white tiger and cursed Indian prince! When she learns she alone can break the Tiger's curse, Kelsey's life is turned upside-down. The unlikely duo journeys halfway around the world to piece together an Indian prophecy, find a way to free the man trapped by a centuries-old spell, and discover t

Traveling CircusYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistAdventure
🙂

Wonder Show

Hannah Barnaby

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, step inside Mosco's Traveling Wonder Show, a menagerie of human curiosities and misfits guaranteed to astound and amaze! But perhaps the strangest act of Mosco's display is Portia Remini, a normal among the freaks, on the run from McGreavy's Home for Wayward Girls, where Mister watches and waits. He said he would always find Portia, that she could never leave

Traveling CircusYoung AdultHistorical Fiction
🙂

The Orphan's Tale

Pam Jenoff · 363 pages

Sixteen-year-old Noa, forced to give up her baby fathered by a Nazi soldier, snatches a child from a boxcar containing Jewish infants bound for a concentration camp and takes refuge with a traveling circus, where Astrid, a Jewish aerialist, becomes her mentor.

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistHistorical Fiction
🙂
Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistMale Lead
🙂

The Truth

Zizou Corder · 272 pages

Charlie Ashanti, the hero of LIONBOY, speaks cat - the language of all cats wild and domestic alike. His unusual talent helps him on his quest to find his kidnapped parents who have discovered a cure for asthma. The local cats of his home town (a futuristic London) start him on his search to solve the mystery of his missing parents, which leads him across the channel on board a circus ship bound f

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistMale LeadAdventure
🙂

The Dreaming Jewels

Theodore Sturgeon · 186 pages

Horty is an abused adopted boy who runs away and joins the circus. Now imagine this trope as written by one of the finest and most humane creators of tales about humanity - even when crystalline alien life forms and circus freaks can shame you into feeling like there needs to more love in the world.

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistMale Lead
🙂

Full Tilt

Neal Shusterman · 204 pages

Blake has always been a kid that skirted adventure, but his brother has always had an adreniline high. When he receives an invitation to a mysterious, legandary carnival, Blake doesn't want to go, but he follows his brother along with two of his friends. All of the rides take a sinister, deadly turn. If you don't make it through all of the needed rides before sunrise, you are stuck in the ride

Traveling CircusYoung AdultMale Lead
🙂

The Weight of Feathers

Anna-Marie McLemore · 314 pages

Lace Paloma and Cluck Corbeau, from feuding families of traveling performers, fall in love.

Traveling CircusYoung AdultMale LeadRomance
🙂

Steadfast

Mercedes Lackey

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionMale LeadRomance
🙂

The Secret of the Crooked Cat

William Arden · 182 pages

Using a clue provided by an unusual stuffed cat, three young detectives investigate the mysterious troubles of an accident-prone carnival.

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistMale LeadAdventure
🙂

Twilight Eyes

Dean Koontz · 471 pages

Sought by police for murder, slim Mackenzie, a young man both blessed and cursed by "twilight eyes," stalks the diabolical "Others," who feed their twisted needs with human suffering.

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistMale LeadRomance
🙂

Wild Boy

Rob Lloyd Jones · 295 pages

Wild Boy becomes a sideshow freak. Isolated from other children and abused by the cruel master who bought him, Wild Boy becomes an avid observer, developing Sherlock Holmes-like deductive skills. Although he is tormented and insulted, kicked and spat at, his quick mind takes in everything he sees. When a murder occurs at the fair, Wild Boy is accused. Can he use his powers of deduction to save him

Traveling CircusHistorical FictionMale LeadAdventure
🙂

Mr Nobody's Eyes

Michael Morpurgo · 170 pages

Follows the adventures of an extraordinary pair on the run: an escaped circus monkey and an ostracized young English boy named Harry.

Traveling CircusTeen ProtagonistMale Lead

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.