Crushingly Romantic

Alina Starkov has never felt like she belonged. Orphaned and adopted by a duke, Alina meets an equally parentless boy named Mal. The two are inseparable, referred to by the duke's servants as melenchki, little ghosts, as they giggle  throughout the vast house. Of course, such things cannot always stay the same.

Shadow and Bone, by Leigh Bardugo, is set in an alternate version of pre-revolution Russia. In this nation, known as Ravka, the new world is starting to infringe on the old. It used to be the Grisha who maintained order. The Grisha are powerful beings who can manipulate living things, the elements, and metals as if using magic. New weaponry and a multiple-front war are changing all of that though.

Darcy Jones has been bouncing from foster home to foster home around Chicago for most of her short life. She remembers nothing from her early childhood. She has finally managed to spend more than a year with a foster parent and finally has some friends at her high school.

Little does Darcy know that there is an alternate world just like this one as well as an alternate Chicago. But in that world, the Great Chicago Fire never happened. In that world, The Shadow Society remains a deadly threat.

When a mysterious new boy at school, Conn McCrea, captures Darcy’s attention... her heart soon follows. She is about to find out though that Conn is from that alternate world, and so is she.

What's wrong with this story:

A father tells the authorities his daughter can do impossible things AND the authorities believe him. 
A soon-to-be bride promises to give her future baby away to a TROLL. 
Said bride agrees to marry the man who's threatened to kill her if she can't keep doing the impossible. 
What would a troll do with a baby anyhow, and why would he give her all that spun gold for a tiny ring? 
Why doesn't the heroine do ANYTHING to get herself out of this predicament?!

This old fairy tale is such a ridiculous story that the author wanted to fix it. So Vivian Vande Velde set out to do so six different ways in The Rumpelstiltskin Problem. The characters never come out the same in these retellings. The troll in "A Fairy Tale in Bad Taste" has gruesome appetites. "Straw Into Gold" has our beauty and her father resorting to an elaborate con game to keep from starving to death in the days before Social Security or insurance.

In Every Day, David Levithan creatively reinvents the familiar saga of star-crossed romance. The relationship at the novel's core is predictably fraught with tension and angst, but a significant twist transforms the entire scenario: one of the participants isn't actually a physical person, but exists as an intangible entity that inhabits a different body each day. 

The entity known as A has no gender or corporeal presence, nor can it control which body it will occupy next. There are several restrictions that govern A's movements, however. A is never in the same body twice, inhabits hosts that match A's own age, and lingers in a geographical area as long as there are eligible bodies for it to occupy.  

Ryan Dooley has always been in trouble. Victim Rights, by Norah McClintock, tells of his journey from one side of the law to the other. Dooley, as he prefers to be called, had a hard life growing up. He was forced to try to care for his mother, all the while taking care of himself because no one else was able to take care of him. However, when his ex-cop uncle found him in a juvenile detention center, he offers him an ultimatum. If Dooley will stay out of trouble, his uncle will provide for him until he turns eighteen in a couple months.

Kenneth Oppel introduces us to young Victor Frankenstein in his new book, This Dark Endeavor: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein. Victor is sixteen years old and very curious about alchemy. He lives with his twin brother Konrad and his cousin Elizabeth. They are victims of typical teen curiosity and idle times. As they explore their extensive chateau in Geneva, they discover the previously unknown Dark Library. Clearly, this is a forbidden area to explore. They discover books about alchemy and ancient remedies. Their foray into the off-limits room is discovered by Victor and Konrad's father. He is incensed and instructs them to never go into the room again and to certainly never explore the writings.

This readalike is in response to a patron's Book Match request. Interested in your own personalized reading  recommendations from our librarians? Then, fill out the Request a Book Match form, and one of our librarians will send you an email with hand-picked  titles. See more Book Matches!

Forever by Judy Blume

Awkward, sweet, passionate, innocent, secretive . . . Do you remember your first time?Katherine and Michael won't ever forget theirs. They were seniors in high school. Totally crazy for each other, they thought they had foundthe one. It was first love, and it was perfect: long talks on the phone, ski trips, and double dates when they simply couldn't wait to be alone.But was Katherine and Michael's relationship the love of a lifetime, or merely the beginning of a lifetime of love?

If you like Forever by Judy Blume you might like these titles:

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson

When Ginny receives thirteen little blue envelopes and instructions to buy a plane ticket to London, she knows something exciting is going to happen. What Ginny doesn't know is that she will have the adventure of her life and it will change her in more ways than one. Life and love are waiting for her across the Atlantic, and the thirteen little blue envelopes are the key to finding them in this funny, romantic, heartbreaking novel.
 

Angus, Thongs and Full-fontal Snogging: Confessions of Georgia Nicolson by Louise Rennison

It is a funny story of a year in the life of a fourteen-year-old British girl who tries to reduce the size of her nose, stop her mad cat from terrorizing the neighborhood animals and win the love of a handsome hunk named Robbie.

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins
When Anna's romance-novelist father sends her to an elite American boarding school in Paris for her senior year of high school, she reluctantly goes, and meets an amazing boy who becomes her best friend, in spite of the fact that they both want something more.

Bitter Melon by Cara Chow
With the encouragement of one of her teachers, a Chinese American high school senior asserts herself against her demanding, old-school mother and carves out an identity for herself in late 1980s San Francisco.

Do you remember Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet? Well, perhaps that storyline is not true, and Juliet did not kill herself. Perhaps Romeo Montague killed Juliet Capulet.  It was he, her soul mate and new husband, who committed a terrible crime. Romeo gave up Juliet to the hands of the Mercenaries, demons who seek to destroy love and separate soul mates. Juliet Immortal, a fantasy by Stacey Jay, retells the story of what happened between Shakespeare’s famous lovers.

Juliet has spent seven hundred years working for the Ambassadors of Light after Nurse, her Ambassador guide, saved her soul on the night Romeo killed her. At that moment, Juliet pledged allegiance to the Ambassadors’ cause, which is to bring soul mates together and make sure that their love blooms. She now spends much of her time in a dark mist, from which she is only taken out by the Ambassadors of Light to return to Earth, shift into a borrowed body, and assist soul mates. However, Romeo is working against her, and his allegiance to the Mercenaries makes Romeo and Juliet immortal enemies.

The Summer I Learned to Fly by Dana Reinhardt is a coming-of-age story in which Drew, the female protagonist, matures into a teenager experiencing both a new love and parental disputes. Drew is a thirteen-year-old girl who spends most of her time with her mother at their cheese shop, unlike most of the girls at her school who spend most of their time angry with their mothers and completely boy-crazy. This makes her less popular with others at her school. Her life basically revolves around the cheese shop where her friend Suwuzie, a middle-aged woman going through a divorce, and Nick, her crush who is a surfer turned pasta maker, work for her mom. School is about to end and she intends to spend the entire summer at the cheese shop.

This readalike is in response to a patron's book-match request. If you would like personalized reading  recommendations, fill out the book-match form and a librarian will email suggested titles to you. See our other Book Matches.

Vampire Kisses by Ellen Schreiber
Sixteen-year-old Raven, an outcast who always wears black and hopes to become a vampire some day, falls in love with the mysterious new boy in town, eager to find out if he can make her dreams come true.

Be sure to check out the other seven books in the series and the Manga version!

Here are some other YA Fiction books about not-quite-human beings, also with an element of romance:

Betwixt by Tara Bray Smith
Three alienated teenagers are drawn to a strange outdoor concert in the woods outside of Seattle, where they discover that they possess magical powers and that their destinies are intertwined.

Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause
Having fallen for a human boy, a beautiful teenage werewolf must battle both her packmates and the fear of the townspeople to decide where she belongs and with whom.

By These Ten Bones by Clare B. Dunkle
After a mysterious young wood carver with a horrifying secret arrives in her small Scottish town, Maddie gains his trust--and his heart--and seeks a way to save both him and her townspeople from an ancient evil.

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray
After the suspicious death of her mother in 1895, sixteen-year-old Gemma returns to England, after many years in India, to attend a finishing school where she becomes aware of her magical powers and ability to see into the spirit world. If you like this one, it's the first in a trilogy: #2 is Rebel Angels and #3 is The Sweet Far Thing.