Books like All the Bright Places
What should you read after Jennifer Niven’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Jennifer Niven
- 2015
- 401 pages
- Young adult contemporary
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after All the Bright Places
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchThe Fault in Our Stars
John Green
Two clever teenagers in love, one of them running out of time, cracking jokes right to the end. The book Niven's readers name next more often than any other.
- Two damaged kids who find each other
- An ending that hurts
- Notes, lists and quotations
- Physical illness, not mental
Best for the alternating voicesEleanor & Park
Rainbow Rowell
Two misfits trading chapters, the narration warming up as their home lives get worse. The same structure, aimed at a smaller and quieter kind of hurt.
- Alternating first-person chapters
- Two damaged kids who find each other
- An ending that hurts
- Abuse and class, not illness
Best for the illness itselfIt's Kind of a Funny Story
Ned Vizzini
Vizzini checked himself into a psychiatric ward and then wrote a comedy about a fifteen-year-old doing the same. Finch's side of the book, treated properly.
- Mental illness treated as illness
- A boy who is counting his awake days
- Two damaged kids who find each other
- Much lighter ending
Worth a look — with a warningThirteen Reasons Why
Jay Asher
The suicide has already happened and the whole book is the explanation, delivered on tapes. Powerful, and the most argued-over title on this list for good reason.
- An ending that hurts
- Grief you haven't dealt with
- Mental illness treated as illness
- Frames a death as revenge
Great matchEverything, Everything
Nicola Yoon
Yoon shares Niven's fondness for a boy who arrives like weather, plus charts, emails and drawings breaking up the text. Considerably kinder in the last act.
- Notes, lists and quotations
- Two damaged kids who find each other
- An ending that hurts
- Physical illness, not mental
Best if you want more NivenHolding Up the Universe
Jennifer Niven
Niven doing it again with two new outsiders: one who cannot recognise faces, one the whole school stares at. Same voice, considerably less devastating.
- Alternating first-person chapters
- Two damaged kids who find each other
- An ending that hurts
- Much less emotionally severe
Great matchBefore I Fall
Lauren Oliver
A mean girl relives her last day seven times and slowly works out what she owes people. The same question about whether a teenager's death could have gone differently.
- An ending that hurts
- Grief you haven't dealt with
- Mental illness treated as illness
- Built on a time loop
Best for the afterLooking for Alaska
John Green
Green splits his book at the moment of loss and gives the second half to what survivors do with the guilt. Exactly the question Violet is left holding.
- Grief you haven't dealt with
- An ending that hurts
- Alternating first-person chapters
- Boarding school, not small-town Indiana
Worth a look — with a warningA List of Cages
Robin Roe
Two boys in alternating chapters, one bright and one being hurt at home, and it gets very hard to read before it gets better. It rewards the patience.
- Alternating first-person chapters
- Two damaged kids who find each other
- Mental illness treated as illness
- Graphic child abuse
Worth a look — with a warningGirl in Pieces
Kathleen Glasgow
The bleakest book here and the most honest about self-harm and recovery, written in fragments that mirror how little Charlie can hold together at once.
- Mental illness treated as illness
- Notes, lists and quotations
- An ending that hurts
- Explicit self-harm throughout
Great matchThe Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky
The book that set the template Niven writes in: a watchful, damaged narrator, friends who take him in, and a truth that only surfaces at the end.
- Mental illness treated as illness
- Grief you haven't dealt with
- Notes, lists and quotations
- Nineties setting, single narrator
Best for how it feels from insideWords on Bathroom Walls
Julia Walton
A boy with schizophrenia narrating his hallucinations in diary entries to a therapist he refuses to speak to — funny about it, and in love anyway.
- Mental illness treated as illness
- Notes, lists and quotations
- Two damaged kids who find each other
- Lighter and more hopeful
What should you read after All the Bright Places?
All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green — two clever teenagers in love, one of them running out of time, cracking jokes right to the end. The book Niven's readers name next more often than any other.
If what stayed with you was alternating first-person chapters, read Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell instead: two misfits trading chapters, the narration warming up as their home lives get worse. The same structure, aimed at a smaller and quieter kind of hurt. It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini is the other strong option — vizzini checked himself into a psychiatric ward and then wrote a comedy about a fifteen-year-old doing the same. Finch's side of the book, treated properly.
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