Books Like The Perks of Being a Wallflower: 10 Tender Coming-of-Age Reads to Devour Next

Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a book people hand to each other rather than merely recommend. Charlie, a shy, watchful fifteen-year-old starting high school, writes letters to a friend he has never met, and through them we watch him get adopted by two magnetic older students, discover mixtapes and midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, fall in love, and learn, slowly and with a lot of help, to participate in his own life. It is confessional, quiet and sad-hopeful, and it takes trauma and mental health seriously without ever being heavy-handed. Nothing much happens; everything happens.

If you have just finished it and want that feeling again, you are probably after one of these things: an intimate first-person or letter-writing voice, an outsider who watches from the edge and is drawn in by older, braver friends, mental health and grief handled with honesty and humour, music as a lifeline, and the tunnel-song sense of being infinite for a minute. Here are ten novels for teens, and for the adults who were teens when Perks found them, that keep that promise.

What to read after The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Looking for Alaska by John Green

Miles Halter, who collects famous last words and is tired of his safe life at home, leaves for boarding school in search of what François Rabelais called the Great Perhaps, and is pulled into the orbit of Alaska Young and her friends. Same confessional voice, same pranks, cigarettes and late-night talk, and the same sense of loving people who are more damaged than they look. It is the book readers name first, every single time, when they compare notes on Perks; a touch more plot-driven, and it will get you in a slightly different place.

It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini

Fifteen-year-old Craig, buckling under the pressure of an elite New York school, checks himself into a psychiatric ward and finds, among the other patients, an unlikely family. Depression is handled with the same honesty and gentle humour that Perks manages, and it is usually the second title out of readers' mouths after Alaska. Highly readable and, against the odds, upbeat.