Books like Boys Don't Cry by Fiona Scarlett

At 17, Charlotte Davis has already faced the trauma of abandonment, abuse, and loss. Since her father and best friend are gone and her mother is unreachable, she learns to survive alone in a world that offers little compassion.

At Culver Creek Boarding School, Miles "Pudge" Halter leaves his uneventful home life to find adventure, only to be drawn into the complex world of Alaska Young – a brilliant, enigmatic student whose presence challenges and changes him forever.

A coming‑of‑age epistolary novel that follows introverted teen Charlie through his freshman year in a 1990s Pittsburgh suburb as he navigates high school, friendship and the challenges of adolescence.

When Clay Jenkins discovers 13 tapes left by his classmate Hannah Baker, who recently committed suicide, he must confront the 13 reasons that drove her to end her life—one of which is him.

Eleanor & Park follows two sixteen‑year‑old high school misfits who, across a single school year, find an extraordinary first love that pushes them to confront their insecurities and the challenges of adolescence.

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.

On a private Massachusetts island, teen Cadence spends a summer with her cousins and a boy named Gat, only to wake up with amnesia and a tangled web of secrets, friendships, and loss that threaten to destroy the Liars.

OCD‑stricken Griffin mourns the loss of his first love, Theo, whose drowning death shatters his world and threatens to unravel the secrets he keeps.

After deciding to swear off boys forever, Molly finds her determination undermined by an unexpected attraction to her best friend Kristi's older brother, Ben.

A coming‑of‑age tale that follows teenage girls as they form bonds over shared love for books in a library setting, weaving in themes of friendship, English literature, and the lives of widowers.

In an all‑girls school, four seventh‑graders spar with the lure of boys at the nearby male school, deciding to advertise for pen pals in the boys’ paper—a humorous look at adolescent crushes.

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.'"