Crushingly Romantic

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.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, here is Cupid, by Julius Lester.  In this retelling from Greek mythology, we are introduced to Psyche.  She is the daughter of a king and so beautiful that every time she walks outside people stopped and stared.  They even stopped working.  In fact, it was getting so bad that it was affecting the infrastructure of her community--and not in a good way.  Her father, the king, felt  it was in the best interest of his kingdom and his subjects to restrict  Psyche from her daily walks.  He decreed that she could only walk outside the castle gates once a month.

Word quickly reached Mount Olympus about the young beauty and the effect she was having on the other humans.  Venus, the goddess of love, was not pleased at all when she learned of this young woman, She viewed her as a threat and decided to dispatch her son, Cupid, to do away with her.  Never one to disappont his mother, Cupid quickly plans how he will get rid of this pesky human.  However, when Cupid lays his eyes on Psyche, he is immediately stunned by her beauty, and he falls in love with her himself.  He vows that she will become his wife, but he is reluctant to let his mother in on his little plan as she is a formidable force with which to be reckoned. 

 What if Jane Eyre fell in love with a rock star? This is what happens in April Lindner’s Jane, a modernization of Charlotte Brontë’s classic work. The result is a hot retelling that teens will relate to in a heartbeat. Rock star with a wild past? Check. Teen girl with a family who doesn’t understand her? Check. Passionate, roller coaster love story? All right!