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🧲 Books like this

The Bone Dragon

Alexia Casale · 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
❤️

Phantom Limb

Lucinda Berry · 258 pages

Emily and Elizabeth spend their childhood locked in a bedroom and terrorized by a mother who drinks too much and disappears for days. The identical twins are rescued by a family determined to be their saviors. But there’s some horrors love can’t erase… Elizabeth wakes in a hospital, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak. The last thing she remembers is finding Emily’s body in their bat

Childhood TraumaAdoptionDarkUnreliable Narrator
❤️

The Face on the Milk Carton

Caroline B. Cooney · 188 pages

After recognizing the photo of the little girl listed as missing on the milk carton, 15-year-old Janie Johnson’s life is forever changed as she struggles to balance loyalty with doing what is right.

AdoptionChildhood TraumaYoung AdultDark
❤️

Breathe My Name

R.A. Nelson · 320 pages

AdoptionChildhood TraumaYoung AdultFemale Lead
❤️

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

Childhood TraumaYoung AdultDarkUnreliable Narrator
❤️

Leftovers

Laura Wiess · 276 pages

"Forgiveness is far off for teenagers Blair and Ardith, best friends and accomplices in a terrible crime. At the home of the only adult they trust, a police officer, the girls confess every horrifying detail. But it becomes clear the act wasn't out of malice or revenge, but born of fierce loyalty and unimaginable desperation. Written off by abusive parents and mocked and shunned by their classmate

Childhood TraumaYoung AdultChild AbuseDark
❤️

Finding Sky

Joss Stirling · 400 pages

AdoptionChildhood TraumaYoung AdultFemale Lead
❤️

Three Little Words: A Memoir

Ashley Rhodes-Courter · 320 pages

Ashley spent nine years in foster care after being taken away from her mother. She endured many caseworkers, moving from school to school and manipulative, humiliating and abusive treatment from one foster family. See how she survives and eventually thrives against the odds.

AdoptionChildhood TraumaChild AbuseFemale Lead
❤️

The Love That Split the World

Emily Henry · 403 pages

At the beginning of her last summer in Kentucky before leaving for college, Natalie is once again visited by the apparition she calls "Grandmother" and meets a new boy, Beau, who changes her life.

AdoptionMagical RealismYoung AdultFemale Lead
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Orphan Train

Christina Baker Kline · 400 pages

Close to aging out of the foster care system, Molly Ayer takes a position helping an elderly woman named Vivian and discovers that they are more alike than different as she helps Vivian solve a mystery from her past. When 17-year-old Molly Ayer is sent to perform community service at elderly Vivian Daly's home in order to avoid juvenile hall, she discovers the two are very much alike, despite the

AdoptionChildhood TraumaChild AbuseFemale Lead
❤️

Strange Sally Diamond

Liz Nugent · 384 pages

AdoptionChildhood TraumaDarkChild Abuse
❤️

Raised by Wolves

Jennifer Lynn Barnes

A girl raised by werewolves must face the horrors of her past to uncover the dark secrets that the pack has worked so hard to hide.

Childhood TraumaYoung AdultDarkChild Abuse
🙂

Hopeless

Colleen Hoover · 416 pages

Sky, a senior in high school, meets Dean Holder, a guy with a promiscuous reputation that rivals her own. From their very first encounter, he terrifies and captivates her. Something about him sparks memories of her deeply troubled past, a time she's tried so hard to bury. Though Sky is determined to stay far away from him, his unwavering pursuit and enigmatic smile break down her defences and the

Childhood TraumaDarkYoung AdultChild Abuse
🙂

Try

Dennis Cooper · 199 pages

**From Goodreads:** Ziggy is the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers, from whose obsessive attentions he flees into the weird world of his uncle, an amoral man who makes violent pornography. As scenes of fierce sex and sadistic oppression take place around him, Ziggy falls improbably in love -- with his best friend, a junkie. Dennis Cooper, author of the gay horror classic Fris

Childhood TraumaAdoptionDarkChild Abuse
🙂

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson · 240 pages

Memories of the author about her difficult childhood as the adopted daughter of an English mother with strong religious convictions, and her subsequent search for her biological mother.

Childhood TraumaAdoptionChild AbuseFemale Lead
🙂

The Onion Girl

Charles de Lint · 512 pages

Magical RealismChildhood TraumaChild AbuseFemale Lead
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Beloved

Toni Morrison · 288 pages

Toni Morrison--author of Song of Solomon and Tar Baby--is a writer of remarkable powers: her novels, brilliantly acclaimed for their passion, their dazzling language and their lyric and emotional force, combine the unassailable truths of experience and emotion with the vision of legend and imagination. It is the story--set in post-Civil War Ohio--of Sethe, an escaped slave who has risked death in

Childhood TraumaMagical RealismChild AbuseDark
🙂

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · 736 pages

AdoptionChildhood TraumaDarkChild Abuse
🙂

Jesus Land: A Memoir

Julia Scheeres · 384 pages

"Sibling bond is at the core of Jesus Land, Scheeres’s gritty, heart-wrenching memoir...A lesser writer would have buckled under the weight of this story...A page turner...Heart-stopping and enraging...There is much praise, these days, for the detached, quietly elegant narrative. But there is little mention of the power a well-tended rage can bring to a good story...Focused, justified and without

AdoptionChildhood TraumaChild AbuseFemale Lead
🙂

The Young Elites

Marie Lu · 392 pages

I am tired of being used, hurt, and cast aside. Adelina Amouteru is a survivor of the blood fever. A decade ago, the deadly illness swept through her nation. Most of the infected perished, while many of the children who survived were left with strange markings. Adelina’s black hair turned silver, her lashes went pale, and now she has only a jagged scar where her left eye once was. Her cruel fat

Childhood TraumaYoung AdultDarkRevenge Plot
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Live Through This

Mindi Scott · 304 pages

From the outside, fifteen-year-old Coley Sterling's life seems imperfect but normal, but for years she has buried her shame and guilt over a relationship that crossed the line and now that she has a chance at having a real boyfriend, Reece, the lies begin to unravel.

Childhood TraumaYoung AdultDarkFemale Lead
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Touching Snow

M. Sindy Felin · 237 pages

After her stepfather is arrested for child abuse, thirteen-year-old Karina's home life improves but while the severity of her older sister's injuries and the urging of her younger sister, their uncle, and a friend tempt her to testify against him, her mother and other well-meaning adults pursuade her to claim responsibility.

Childhood TraumaYoung AdultDarkChild Abuse
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The Lost Boy

Dave Pelzer · 272 pages

Imagine a young boy who has never had a home. His only possessions are the old torn clothes he carries in a paper bag. His only world is isolation and fear. Although this young boy has been rescued from his alcoholic mother, the real hurt is just beginning-he has no place to call *home*. This is the first paragraph on the back of the book. While I feel it sums up the book pretty well, I think some

Childhood TraumaAdoptionDarkChild Abuse
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Butterfly

V.C. Andrews · 170 pages

All she wanted was to be someone's little girl... Fate made her a lonely orphan, yearning for the embrace of a real family and a loving home. But a golden chance at a new life may not be enough to escape the dark secrets of her past...

AdoptionYoung AdultChild AbuseDark
🙂

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.

Childhood TraumaAdoptionChild AbuseFemale Lead

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