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🧲 Books like this

We Were Never Here

Jennifer Gilmore · 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
❤️

Before I Die

Jenny Downham · 332 pages

A terminally ill teenaged girl makes and carries out a list of things to do before she dies.

Chronic IllnessHospitalYoung AdultContemporary Fiction
❤️

Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling

Lucy Frank · 272 pages

This novel-in-verse—at once literary and emotionally gripping—follows the unfolding friendship between two very different teenage girls who share a hospital room and an illness. Chess, the narrator, is sick, but with what exactly, she isn’t sure. And to make matters worse, she must share a hospital room with Shannon, her polar opposite. Where Chess is polite, Shannon is rude. Where Chess tolera

Chronic IllnessHospitalYoung AdultEmotional
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Six Months to Live

Lurlene McDaniel · 144 pages

Chronic IllnessHospitalYoung AdultTeen Protagonist
❤️

Faceless

Alyssa B. Sheinmel · 370 pages

While on a run one day, Maise gets into a terrible accident. A hot-burning electrical fire consumes her, destroying her face. Where her nose, cheeks, and chin used to be, now there is . . . nothing.

Chronic IllnessHospitalYoung AdultTeen Protagonist
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A Matter of Heart

Amy Fellner Dominy · 313 pages

Sixteen-year-old Abby Lipman is on track to win the state swim championships and qualify for the Olympic trials when a fainting incident at a swim meet leads to the diagnosis of a deadly heart condition. Now Abby is forced to discover who she is without the one thing that's defined her entire life.

Chronic IllnessYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistContemporary Fiction
❤️

Change of Heart

Shari Maurer · 224 pages

When sixteen-year-old Emmi Miller learns she will die without a heart transplant, she becomes aware of all she has been taking for granted, from her parents' love to her soccer ability, but gains strength from new friend Abe.

Chronic IllnessYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistContemporary Fiction
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Send Me a Sign

Tiffany Schmidt · 400 pages

Superstitious before being diagnosed with leukemia, high school senior Mia becomes irrationally dependent on horoscopes, good luck charms, and the like when her life shifts from cheerleading and parties to chemotherapy and platelets, while her parents obsess and lifelong friend Gyver worries.

Chronic IllnessYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistContemporary Fiction
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Everything, Everything

Nicola Yoon · 320 pages

The story of a teenage girl who's literally allergic to the outside world. When a new family moves in next door, she begins a complicated romance that challenges everything she's ever known. The narrative unfolds via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations, and more.

Chronic IllnessYoung AdultContemporary FictionEmotional
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The Fault in Our Stars

John Green · 318 pages

Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her final chapter inscribed upon diagnosis. But when a gorgeous plot twist named Augustus Waters suddenly appears at Cancer Kid Support Group, Hazel's story is about to be completely rewritten.

Chronic IllnessYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistContemporary Fiction
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My Sister's Keeper

Jodi Picoult · 432 pages

With her penetrating insight into the hearts and minds of real people, Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper examines what it means to be a good parent, a good sister, a good person, and what happens when emotions meet with scientific advances. ***Now a major film.*** Anna is not sick, but she might as well be. By age thirteen, she has undergone countless surgeries, transfusions and shots so that

Chronic IllnessHospitalContemporary FictionTeen Protagonist
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We Were Liars

E. Lockhart · 240 pages

A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four friends -- the Liars -- whose friendship turns destructive. A revolution. An accident. A secret. Lies upon lies. True love. The truth. Spending the summers on her family's private island off the coast of Massachusetts with her cousins and a special boy named Gat, teenaged

Chronic IllnessYoung AdultEmotionalTeen Protagonist
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Forever Changes

Brendan Halpin

Although encouraged to apply to colleges, Brianna Pelletier, a mathematically-gifted high school senior with cystic fibrosis, dwells on her mortality and the unfairness of life.

Chronic IllnessYoung AdultEmotionalContemporary Fiction
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Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio

Peg Kehret · 179 pages

Chronic IllnessHospitalTeen ProtagonistEmotional
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A Walk to Remember

Nicholas Sparks · 240 pages

There was a time when the world was sweeter....when the women in Beaufort, North Carolina, wore dresses, and the men donned hats.... Every April, when the wind smells of both the sea and lilacs, Landon Carter remembers 1958, his last year at Beaufort High. Landon had dated a girl or two, and even once sworn that he'd been in love. Certainly the last person he thought he'd fall for was Jamie, the s

Chronic IllnessContemporary FictionYoung AdultTeen Protagonist
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The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko

Scott Stambach · 336 pages

"The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko is comic and staggeringly tragic, often both in a single sentence ... A grittier, Eastern European, more grown-up The Fault in Our Stars."--Eowyn Ivey, author of The Snow Child. Seventeen-year-old Ivan Isaenko is a life-long resident of the Mazyr Hospital for Gravely Ill Children in Belarus. Born deformed, yet mentally keen with a frighteningly sharp wit, strong

Chronic IllnessHospitalTeen ProtagonistEmotional
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Sean Griswold's Head

Lindsey Leavitt · 290 pages

After discovering that her father has multiple sclerosis, fifteen-year-old Payton begins counselling sessions at school, which lead her to become interested in a boy in her biology class, have a falling out with her best friend, develop an interest in bike riding, and eventually allow her to come to terms with life's uncertainties.

Chronic IllnessYoung AdultContemporary FictionTeen Protagonist
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Second Hand Heart

Catherine Ryan Hyde

Chronic IllnessHospitalContemporary FictionEmotional
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It's Kind of a Funny Story

Ned Vizzini · 444 pages

A humorous account of a New York City teenager's battle with depression and his time spent in a psychiatric hospital.

HospitalYoung AdultEmotionalContemporary Fiction
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Zac and Mia

A.J. Betts · 304 pages

The last person Zac expects in the room next door is a girl like Mia, angry and feisty with questionable taste in music. In the real world, he wouldn't-couldn't-be friends with her. In hospital different rules apply, and what begins as a knock on the wall leads to a note-then a friendship neither of them sees coming. You need courage to be in hospital; different courage to be back in the real w

Chronic IllnessHospitalYoung AdultEmotional
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If I Stay

Gayle Forman · 272 pages

*Just listen, Adam says with a voice that sounds like shrapnel. I open my eyes wide now. I sit up as much as I can. And I listen. Stay, he says.* Choices. Seventeen-year-old Mia is faced with some tough ones: Stay true to her first love—music—even if it means losing her boyfriend and leaving her family and friends behind? Then one February morning Mia goes for a drive with her family, an

HospitalYoung AdultContemporary FictionTeen Protagonist
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The Children Act

Ian McEwan · 224 pages

London High Court Judge Fiona Maye presides over a sensitive case involving a family of Jehovah's Witnesses who won't allow their seventeen-year-old son to get a lifesaving blood transfusion because it conflicts with their religious beliefs. Meanwhile, Fiona's husband, Jack, has just left home, and she begins to feel the pressures of both resolving the case and saving her crumbling marriage.

Chronic IllnessHospitalEmotionalContemporary Fiction
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Between Here and Forever

Elizabeth Scott · 250 pages

When her older, "perfect" sister Tess has a car accident that puts her in a coma, seventeen-year-old Abby, who has always felt unseen in Tess's shadow, plans to bring her back with the help of Eli, a gorgeous boy she has met at the hospital, but her plans go awry when she learns some secrets about both Tess and Eli, enabling her to make some decisions about her own life.

HospitalYoung AdultEmotionalTeen Protagonist
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Call Me Crazy

Quinn Loftis · 344 pages

After a devastating turn of events, seventeen year old Tally Baker is admitted to Mercy Psychiatric Facility where she is diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. She has come to a place where she honestly believes that her life is over. Her mind tells her that she will never smile or laugh again, that she will never be normal again. It is in this unlikely place that she meets two people, different in eve

HospitalYoung AdultContemporary FictionEmotional
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Falling For You

Lisa Schroeder

Very good friends, her poetry notebooks, and a mysterious "ninja of nice" give seventeen-year-old Rae the strength to face her mother's neglect, her stepfather's increasing abuse, and a new boyfriend's obsessiveness.

HospitalYoung AdultTeen ProtagonistEmotional
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