The most recommended books about teenage boys

Families come in all shapes and sizes, and it's crucial for children to see a variety of experiences in literature.

Hey, Kiddo portrays the author's upbringing with his grandparents due to his absent father and mother's substance abuse. The book offers child-friendly talking points on the challenging topic of addiction. It captures the complexities of growing up and family life amidst life-changing events.

How could you not love a book written by a mother-daughter combo? It’s impossible.

Though the books in this series (My Body, My Self for Boys/Girls; What’s Happening to My Body for Girls/Boys) are getting a little old copyright-date-wise, they are packed with detailed information that I go back to over and over again, each time I pull together material for a puberty class.

Though they were written at a time before gender-inclusive language hit the scene, they cover the topics youth are most curious about; and provide checklists, games, inquiries, and other interactive activities for readers to work through. 

Set in Southeast Alaska, Jimmy Bluefeather honestly depicts both environmental and generational change.

A Tlingit-Norwegian canoe carver anticipates the end of his life while his grandson struggles with his own future and a whale biologist resists authority in favor of moral action. Heacox grounds his beautifully-written story in considerable research as well as with respect for cultural beliefs and practices.

The canoe carver in particular is well-drawn and memorable, with toughness, resilience, and humor earned from living close to the Earth and its waters, in a place of stories. A canoe journey carries the story into a wild landscape, questions about conflicts between economic development and the preservation of lands and cultural values, and understandings of human frailty and strength. 

Plenty of sociologists have gone into schools and tried to work out what kids think, but few have written about the experience as clearly, directly, and thoughtfully as Corrigan.

Corrigan did research with teenage working-class boys who attended two different schools in Sunderland in the early 1970s. He found, in short, that these boys did not like school; they especially did not like the fact that they were forced to go. This made Corrigan question why we make young people attend institutions that they hate, and which they do not benefit from.

Despite recent ‘progressive’ reforms in education, nothing had changed: ‘they didn’t like [school] when it was all maths and exams; they now didn’t seem to like it when it was all civics and projects’.

I know, I know…’What about Sixth Sense’? That’s usually the Stephen King book people remember when they think of plot twists. It was great, but this one is by far my favorite King novel. It’s got multiple twists, starting with one near the beginning, where you quickly realize you’re not reading the kind of story you thought you were reading.

Then there’s a more traditional twist near the end. And in between King displays his special genius, immersing the reader in a character’s slow, steady descent into madness. I finished it in a single session, and after thirty years can still remember sitting there long after it was over, just staring at the wall.

For my money, Stern is the South’s premiere literary comic writer. In this one, he is a Southern Philip Roth with an I.B. Singer twist. A teenage boy discovers a frozen rabbi in the Kelvinator inside his parent’s Memphis basement. The rabbi’s been frozen for one hundred years. Bernie thaws him and what ensues covers a universe of incident: teenage hope and angst, Talmudic wisdom, kabbalistic film-flammery, the seduction of all of Memphis, from lowlifes to elite, by a rabbi (who can fly) selling himself as the font of all magic and knowledge. Stern obviously loves his Memphis and his Jews. At the same time he skewers them with the sleekest wit. Even Israel gets a gratuitous knock. It was the only thing I did not like in the book but it was fleeting, so I got over it. Such is the power of genius.

Having grown up gay in a small town in the South, this resonated with me as an out gay man in a big city in my twenties, because it got everything about being gay in a small Southern town right: the tone, the emotion, the terror, and most of all, it got how there are more of us in those small Southern towns than we realize at the time, and how leaving for bigger, “better” places isn’t always the answer. 

I had no idea what I was getting into with this book, and the experience was so much richer for that blindfold. That title alone was enough to intrigue me–what on earth could it mean? This is one of the most interesting and shocking coming-of-age stories I have ever read.

The island world the author creates made me think of Lord of the Flies and what can happen when youth is allowed to go unsupervised. This is deliciously dark and twisted stuff. It’s a short book, but you won’t forget it.

Deposing Nathan was everything I'd dreamed it would be—deep, torturous, intense, and beautiful. Zack Smedley’s poignant and relevant storytelling hooked me from the first line to the unexpected twist and through the surprising ending. In this powerful story, Nate has been called to deliver a sworn statement against his ex-boyfriend Cam. What first seemed like a simple premise brought me back to my days of questioning sexuality, religion, family expectations, and familial commitment, and it unearthed memories of the struggles of finding myself as a teenager and navigating complex emotions. 

This novel lakes us into a somewhat seamy underclass of contemporary society. The unfeeling main character is very convincing.