Books like Boys I Know by Anna Gracia

Two strangers receive a call that they will die today and use an app to befriend each other, sharing a single unforgettable day that turns into a profound journey of love, friendship, and acceptance.

Ari, a fifteen‑year‑old Mexican‑American with a brother in prison, meets Dante and a friendship sparks that forces him to confront his identity, family, and sexuality.

When a copied email threatens to expose his hidden identity, sixteen‑year‑old Simon Spier must decide whether to protect his secret, save his friend, and risk a new, unexpected romance.

A transgender middle‑school girl navigates her identity and friendship when she strives to play Charlotte in her class theater production, with help from her best friend to reveal her true self.

Cameron Post, a gay teen from a conservative Montana ranch town, is sent to a conversion therapy center after her family demands she change her sexual orientation.

After being adopted by a quirky Dublin couple who treat him only as a house‑guest, Cyril embarks on a life‑spanning quest to discover his origins, his place in Ireland, and the meaning of true belonging.

A transgender teen named Liam, who transforms into Luna after dark, strives to live authentically while seeking acceptance from family and friends.

340 pages ; 21 cm1080L Lexile

Kids celebrate what makes them different in a playful, rhyming book that flips the classic nursery verses for boys and girls.

Five diverse children of the postwar era—Aaron, Walt, Jenny, Branch, and Rudy—navigate trauma, dreams, and sexual awakening as their lives intertwine in the turbulent 1960 New York City.

Sara Suleri Goodyear's *Meatless Days*, recognized now as a classic of postcolonial literature, is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition. Set around the women of her family, *Meatless Days* intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's independence with Suleri Goodyear's most intimate memories of her grandmother, mother, and sisters. In *Boys Will Be Boys*, she returns - with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion - to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his "patriotic and preposterous" disposition). Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear's upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the *Times of Karachi* and the *Evening Times*, on-and-off editor of the *Pakistan Times*, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also "preposterous ... counting himself king of infinite space," a man who imposed outrageously on his children. As Suleri Goodyear chronicles, Pip demanded their loyalty yet banished them easily from his favor; contrary and absurdly unfair, he read their diaries, interfered in their relationships, and believed in a father's inalienable right to oppress his children. Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. And perhaps Pip was not so preposterous after all: "On Judgement Day," he told his daughter. "I will say to God, 'Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.'"