Brilliant Coming-of-Age Novels for Fans of Judy Blume
I remember exactly how old I was when I read Judy Blume‘s novels for the first time. Her coming-of-age books, including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. and Forever, now adapted into a TV series, touch on all of the themes of young adulthood. Between first loves, first heartbreak, and the serious work of fine-tuning one’s identity — intertwined with unavoidable issues like class divides, tragedy, and inherited family secrets — these stories of self-discovery are packed with emotional heft and nostalgic highs and lows. Here, I’ve rounded up a few coming-of-age novels that will make you feel nostalgic for Judy Blume’s books. While they span identities, eras, and circumstances, each protagonist can agree on one thing: growing up is hard to do.
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Add to BookshelfWhat the Fireflies Knew
by Kai Harris
An ode to Black girlhood and adolescence as seen through KB’s eyes, What the Fireflies Knew follows KB after her father dies of an overdose, and the debts incurred from his addiction cause the loss of the family home in Detroit. Soon thereafter, KB and her teenage sister, Nia, are sent by their overwhelmed mother to live with their estranged grandfather in Lansing, Michigan. Over the course of a single sweltering summer, KB attempts to navigate a world that has turned upside down. A dazzling and moving novel about family, identity, and race, What the Fireflies Knew poignantly reveals that heartbreaking but necessary component of growing up — the realization that loved ones can be flawed and that the perfect family we all dream of looks different up close.
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$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Open, Heaven
by Seán Hewitt
Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives. James — a sheltered, shy 16-year-old — is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents, Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him.
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$28.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Red at the Bone
by Jacqueline Woodson
As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of 16-year-old Melody’s coming-of-age ceremony in her grandparents’ Brooklyn brownstone. Years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody’s mother, for her own ceremony, a celebration that ultimately never took place. Unfurling the history of Melody’s family, reaching back to the Tulsa race massacre in 1921, to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they’ve paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. Red at the Bone looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives, even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.
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$17.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Come and Get It: A GMA Book Club Pick
by Kiley Reid
It’s 2017 at the University of Arkansas, and Millie Cousins — a super-senior resident assistant at Belgrade Dormitory — just wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a writer and visiting professor itching for her next big topic, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity for them to help each other further their own interests, Millie naturally jumps at the chance. Sharp and intimate, Come and Get It, the new thought-provoking, singular novel by the bestselling and critically acclaimed author Kiley Reid, explores the choices we make, particularly for the things that can and cannot be paid for.
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$19.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Catalina
by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world that has no place for the undocumented; her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. Brash and daring, part campus novel, part hagiography, part pop song, Catalina is unlike any coming-of-age novel you’ve ever read — and Catalina, bright and tragic, circled by a nimbus of chaotic energy, driven by a wild heart, is a character you will never forget.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Sag Harbor
by Colson Whitehead
If you’re working through Colson Whitehead’s backlist, move this nostalgic novel-in-stories to the top of your list. During the summer of 1985, 15-year-old Benji Cooper leaves his mostly white Manhattan prep school behind for the familiar haven of Sag Harbor, a Hamptons community of Black families. With three months to reinvent himself, Benji does his utmost — getting a job scooping ice cream, attempting to change his name to Ben, ditching his bicycle for his older friend’s car — and generally dwelling in the consciousness of a bright, irreverent teen.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The Star Side of Bird Hill
by Naomi Jackson
Prepare to be won over by the young sisters of Naomi Jackson’s debut. When their mother can no longer care for them, 10-year-old Phaedra and 16-year-old Dionne are sent from Brooklyn to Barbados to live with their grandmother. While Dionne experiences first love and pines for home, Phaedra familiarizes herself with Bird Hill, where her family has lived for generations, and learns more about her mother every day. When their absentee father appears to take them home, Phaedra and Dionne will have to reconsider what home means to them.
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$22.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Rubyfruit Jungle
by Rita Mae Brown
If you haven’t read Rita Mae Brown’s groundbreaking coming-of-age novel that’s been changing lives since it published in 1973 (Gloria Steinem’s words!), it’s time to treat yourself. It centers on the singular Molly Bolt, a spirited and uncompromising girl who grows up in a poor adoptive family in the South. As Molly discovers her love of women and rejects the repressive norms of heteronormativity, she carves a path for herself in the world and finds her own happy ending.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Fruit of the Drunken Tree
by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Inspired by the author’s own childhood during Escobar-era Colombia, Fruit of the Drunken Tree follows 7-year-old Chula — who’s only known life in Bogota behind her gated community — and a young woman named Petrona, brought from the guerilla slums to serve as a live-in maid for Chula’s family. As Chula observes the mysterious maid, Petrona struggles between the pull of first love and her family’s needs — while simultaneously, the country-wide conflict rapidly escalates. A dazzling force of a novel that rewrites history from marginalized perspectives.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Sam: A Read with Jenna Pick
by Allegra Goodman
This tender novel opens when Sam is seven years old. Her father isn’t around much, her mother struggles to make ends meet, and she doesn’t fit in with the other girls at school. Sam doesn’t care about popularity. All she wants to do is climb — trees, buildings, anything. By high school, she’s channeled this passion into rock climbing, metaphorically trying and failing to lift herself up out of the low-wage muck of the working class that keeps trying to suck her back in. It’s an honest and raw look at the evolution from girl to young woman — in turns heartbreaking and hopeful.
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Before We Were Free
by Julia Alvarez
Álvarez’s poignant novel tells the story of a young girl named Anita de la Torre, eleven years old at the book’s outset, and growing up during the political unrest of the Dominican Republic in 1960. Anita’s concerns are both natural for a girl that age (puberty, boys, planning her 12th birthday party with excited anticipation) and much more mature (assassination plots for dictator El Jefe, code words, and missing family members). Anita is on the cusp of adulthood and the events swirling around her force her to grow up overnight.
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$11.99Buy from Other Retailers:
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Geek Love
by Katherine Dunn
Most kids in middle school think they’re freaks, but the kids of the Binewski family actually are. Told from the point of view of Olympia Binewski, we learn that her mother and father have bred their children to be human oddities: there’s Arturo the Aquaboy, who has flippers for limbs, Iphy and Elly, the uber-flexible Siamese twins, Olympia, or Oly, is an albino hunchback, and Chick has telekinetic abilities. Together, they travel the country in a van, creating their own circus of sorts and sibling rivalry of the highest order ensues.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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13
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Go Tell It on the Mountain
by James Baldwin
James Baldwin’s semi-autobiographical novel tells the story of one day in the life of 14-year-old John Grimes, the stepson of a fire-breathing and abusive Pentecostal preacher in Harlem during the Depression. Despite its confines of a 24-hour period, the novel is expansive in its detailing of racism, identity, religion, and sexuality.
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$16.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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Prep
by Curtis Sittenfeld
Midwesterner Lee Fiora gets a big wake-up call when she arrives at Ault, a prestigious private boarding school in Massachusetts. Being a scholarship student unaccustomed to the preppy handbook the other students seem to live by, Lee instantly feels that she doesn’t measure up — in athletics, academics, or extracurricular activities. Her insecurities dictate her actions as she tries and fails to blend in with all the other students. A critique of the classism and privilege at Ault elevates this novel to more than just a fish-out-of-water story.
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$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
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The House on Mango Street
by Sandra Cisneros
The House on Mango Street details a year in the life of Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl in Chicago, as she enters adolescence and deals with events that shape her formative years in untold ways. From struggling with her family’s poverty to feeling “othered” due to her Mexican American background to being sexually assaulted, Esperanza is confronted by all the ways life is unfair to women and especially to women of color.
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$30.00Buy from Other Retailers:
