There is a particular kind of YA novel that does something unusual: it uses physical confinement as a vehicle to ask genuinely large questions. What is a life fully lived? What do you owe the people who love you, and what do you owe yourself? Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon is that kind of book, and it does it better than almost anything else published in its decade.
Yoon’s debut arrived in September 2015 published by Delacorte Books for Young Readers (Penguin Random House), and it landed at number one on the New York Times Young Adult bestseller list immediately. It stayed on that list for 40 weeks. Yoon became the first Black woman to hit number one on the NYT Young Adult bestseller chart, which is the kind of fact that belongs in more conversations about this book than it currently appears in. The novel also earned Yoon a Michael L. Printz Honor, a Coretta Scott King New Talent Award, and a 2017 film adaptation starring Amandla Stenberg and Nick Robinson that introduced the story to audiences who had never held a physical book.
What makes the book’s origin story worth knowing is how unlikely it is. Yoon spent two decades as a programmer for investment management firms after majoring in electrical engineering at Cornell University. She only began writing fiction after the birth of her biracial daughter, wanting to put a child who looked like her daughter on the page. The book that resulted from that impulse is 320 pages of first-person narration from Madeline Whittier, a half-Japanese, half-African-American teenager with severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), a real condition that has kept her inside her Los Angeles home for her entire life. Maddy has not touched the outside world in seventeen years. Then a boy named Olly moves in next door, and the novel becomes something more complicated than a love story.
The twist, when it comes, is not cheap. Yoon uses it to interrogate the ethics of protective love, the way a parent’s fear can become its own kind of prison. That question is the novel’s real subject, and it separates Everything, Everything from dozens of books that might resemble it on the surface.
What to Look for in Books Like Everything, Everything
The books on this list were chosen against a specific set of criteria. They all involve romantic love that must negotiate some form of impossible circumstance, whether physical illness, psychological confinement, or the hard geometry of two people whose lives are trying to push them apart. They prioritize interiority: what it feels like to be trapped inside a body or a situation, written in a voice that does not collapse into self-pity. They use narrative form to mirror content, moving between vignettes, alternating perspectives, or compressed timelines to tell stories about time being short and space being small. And at least one of them you have probably never heard of, which matters, because the whole point of a list like this is to find the room at the back of the library that most people walk past.
The Books
Five Feet Apart by Rachael Lippincott
Published by Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers in November 2018, 288 pages.
Stella Grant has cystic fibrosis and a hospital routine so disciplined it has become its own form of identity. Will Newman has cystic fibrosis and a studied indifference to his own survival. CF patients must stay at least six feet apart to prevent cross-infection; they must never touch. Lippincott’s novel proposes a rebellion of one foot: five feet apart instead of six, reclaiming one foot of space as an act of will.
The structural parallel to Everything, Everything is obvious and deliberate. Where Maddy is sealed away from the world by her mother’s fear, Stella and Will are sealed away from each other by biology. Lippincott built her narrative from a screenplay by Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis, and the visual economy of that source shows in how she writes physical space: every hallway, every ward window, every carefully measured distance does double duty as emotional landscape.
What makes this stand apart from the Yoon novel is its dual perspective. Chapters alternate between Stella and Will, and Lippincott uses the contrast to argue something Yoon does not quite get at: that two sick people are not the same kind of sick, and that shared diagnosis is not the same as shared experience. Stella’s hypervigilance and Will’s nihilism are both responses to the same illness, and watching them negotiate between those two positions is more honest about chronic illness psychology than most books in this space.
The novel became a New York Times number-one bestseller and won the 2019 Goodreads Choice Award for Young Adult Fiction. A fun publishing footnote: Lippincott wrote the first complete draft in fourteen days under a crash deadline from the publisher and then, by her own account, passed out for two weeks.
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
Published by St. Martin’s Griffin in 2013, 324 pages.
This is the novel that earned John Green’s endorsement in the New York Times Book Review, which was noted approvingly and, honestly, should not have been necessary. Eleanor & Park is better than its reputation-by-association suggests. It is a 1986-set Omaha love story between two sixteen-year-olds who meet on a school bus, fall into each other through comic books and mixtapes, and proceed to carry on the most carefully observed first romance in contemporary YA fiction.
Eleanor is a large girl with wild red hair, living in poverty and domestic violence. Park is half-Korean, gentle, quietly musical, the product of a warm and stable home that is almost alien to Eleanor’s experience. Their socioeconomic and cultural asymmetry is not window dressing. Rowell uses it to ask what it means to love someone whose world is nothing like yours, and how love can fail not because of feeling but because of circumstance.
The connection to Everything, Everything is not medical. It is architectural. Both novels are about characters who are cut off from a fully inhabitable life, and in both cases, the romance is the first crack of light through that wall. Eleanor’s confinement is economic and domestic; Maddy’s is immunological. The texture of the confinement differs. The interior life it produces does not.
Eleanor & Park is a 2014 Michael L. Printz Honor Book and won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction. A film adaptation has been in development for years. The novel has also been challenged and removed from school libraries, which the Anoka-Hennepin district in Minnesota famously revisited after controversy, ultimately concluding that the book was “powerful, realistic, and relevant.”
The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
Published by Delacorte Press in November 2016, 344 pages.
Yoon’s second novel is a single-day story set in New York City. Natasha, an undocumented Jamaican immigrant whose family is facing deportation in hours, collides with Daniel, a Korean American poet whose parents expect him to be a doctor. Their entire relationship takes place within one day. The novel was a 2016 National Book Award finalist, a Printz Honor Book, and a New York Times number-one bestseller. It was also, by 2019, a film starring Yara Shahidi and Charles Melton.
What separates this from Everything, Everything while making it the most natural companion read is Yoon’s escalating confidence in structure. Where Everything, Everything used illustrations, instant messages, and vignettes to break up its first-person prose, The Sun Is Also a Star embeds short dictionary-style definitions and brief chapters from peripheral characters, including a security guard, a receptionist, and a hat. The hat gets two paragraphs. They are among the best two paragraphs in the book.
Both novels share Yoon’s defining structural technique: interruption as a form of emotional punctuation. The brief, non-narrative inserts do not slow the story. They reset the reader’s breathing and return to the main current with increased velocity. If Everything, Everything proved Yoon could build a world in a sealed room, The Sun Is Also a Star proved she could build one in the span of an afternoon.
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Published by Dutton Books (Penguin) in January 2012, 313 pages.
The conversation about books like Everything, Everything cannot avoid this novel. It arrived three years earlier and redrew the landscape of YA fiction so completely that the genre it helped to create is, to some extent, the genre in which Yoon is working.
Hazel Grace Lancaster has stage IV thyroid cancer. Augustus Waters is a bone cancer survivor with one leg. They meet in a support group and fall, improbably and inevitably, in love. Green does not shield the reader from what this means. The deaths in this novel are earned and devastating and exactly as unfair as death is in life.
The Fault in Our Stars spent a remarkable 69 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and was adapted in 2014 into a film starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort that earned more than $307 million worldwide against a $12 million production budget. By the end of its theatrical run, it had become one of the most profitable YA adaptations in film history relative to its budget.
What Green does differently from Yoon is resist comfort. Everything, Everything has a twist that opens a door. The Fault in Our Stars has only the door that has always been there, and both characters know it. The result is a book that operates less as a romance and more as an argument: that love and loss are not opposites but neighbors, and that beauty does not require permanence.
Under Rose-Tainted Skies by Louise Gornall
Published by Clarion Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) on January 3, 2017, 320 pages.
This is the book on this list that not enough people have read, and the gap between its quality and its cultural footprint bothers me.
Seventeen-year-old Norah has agoraphobia, OCD, and anxiety severe enough that she has not left her home in four years. She attends school online, manages her panic attacks alone while her mother travels for work, and narrates her condition in a first-person voice that is, by turns, agonizing and unexpectedly funny. Then Luke moves in next door and catches her fishing for groceries from her porch with a stick, and what follows is one of the most structurally honest portrayals of the intersection of romantic feeling and psychological illness in the genre.
Gornall wrote this novel from personal experience with mental illness, and it shows in the granularity of Norah’s interiority. The panic attacks are not literary events. They are procedural and specific and exhausting in the way that actual panic attacks are. The novel does not resolve Norah’s conditions. It shows her making incremental, painful, real progress while acknowledging how much remains.
The parallel to Everything, Everything is almost exact in its architecture and completely different in its emotional register. Norah cannot leave her house. Maddy cannot leave her house. Both meet a boy next door. But Yoon’s tone is warmer and more hopeful; Gornall is rawer, closer to the nerve. Publishers Weekly called it “an intimate glimpse into the mind of a young woman battling some very real demons.” School Library Journal described it as “a love story set against the backdrop of debilitating mental illness, infused with humor, self-doubt, and, eventually, self-acceptance.” Both assessments are accurate and neither tells you quite how good the book actually is.
Sick Kids in Love by Hannah Moskowitz
Published by Entangled Teen in November 2019, 300 pages.
This is the other book on the list that deserves a much larger readership than it has.
Isabel Kaufman is sixteen, Jewish, has rheumatoid arthritis, and a firm rule against dating. She meets Sasha at the hospital during an infusion. He has Gaucher disease, is also Jewish, and is gorgeous and foul-mouthed and completely uninterested in being manageable. The book’s cover announces, with justified confidence: “they don’t die in this one.” Moskowitz wrote it during NaNoWriMo in 2017, completing the full novel in a single month. The published version won the 2020 ALA Sydney Taylor Honor Award and received starred reviews from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Booklist, all three of which is the kind of critical consensus that should translate to wide readership.
The novel earns particular respect for two things. First, it refuses to make chronic illness metaphorical. Isabel’s RA and Sasha’s Gaucher disease are not symbols for emotional pain. They are specific, ongoing physical realities that shape how the characters move through the world, what they are allowed to do, and how they think about their futures. Second, Moskowitz writes both characters as people with robust interiorities, humor, irritating qualities, and genuine growth arcs that have nothing to do with their illnesses.
Sick Kids in Love and Eleanor & Park share something that neither shares with Everything, Everything: both use private, semi-secret mutual language, whether comic books and mixtapes or hospital-room banter, as the load-bearing structure of the romance itself. The relationship is built in the space of that shared language, not in dramatic declarations. Both novels argue that intimacy is made of small things offered consistently, over time, and that this is actually harder and more meaningful than the grand gesture.
When We Collided by Emery Lord
Published by Bloomsbury Children’s Books in April 2016, 352 pages.
This novel appeared the year after Everything, Everything and shares its interest in the romance of catastrophe, but takes a harder road to get there.
Jonah moved to Vail, Oregon after his father’s death, helping to hold his family together. Vivi arrives in town explosive, electric, and in the middle of a manic episode that neither she nor the reader fully understands until the novel is already deep in its second half. Their summer together is luminous and terrifying. Lord is dealing with bipolar disorder here with the kind of specificity that Yoon applies to SCID: not as a quirk or a dramatic device, but as a medical reality that has its own logic, its own timeline, and its own catastrophic potential.
What Lord does that is formally unusual is hold two perspectives in sustained tension without ever resolving one at the expense of the other. Jonah’s chapters are quieter, grief-hollowed. Vivi’s chapters are dense with sensation and color, the prose itself speeding and doubling back in a way that mimics the experience she is living through. It is a structural technique that rewards attention.
When We Collided is not as discussed as it should be. The YA mental health fiction shelf is crowded, but this one is made of more careful materials than most of what sits on it.
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
Published by Pamela Dorman Books (Viking/Penguin) in January 2012, 369 pages.
This one crosses the line from YA into adult fiction, and I am including it because the questions it raises are ones that Everything, Everything also raises, just from different angles.
Louisa Clark is twenty-six, funny in the way that people who have never been given much to work with are funny: resourcefully, out of necessity. She takes a job caring for Will Traynor, a wealthy, formerly athletic man who has been left a quadriplegic after an accident two years prior. What develops between them is love in the genuine sense, not the easy sense.
Moyes does not make this comfortable. Will’s position on his own life is stated early and does not change easily. The novel refuses to use romance as a cure. That refusal is exactly what makes it a serious companion to Everything, Everything, which also refuses, in its own way, to let love be a simple solution. Both books ask what it means to love someone in a body that is working against them, and both resist the answer that most readers might prefer.
Me Before You was adapted in 2016 into a film starring Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin that grossed over $208 million worldwide. The ethical debate around the novel’s ending remains active and is worth your time.
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
Published by Balzer + Bray (HarperCollins) in April 2015, 303 pages.
The connection to Everything, Everything is tonal rather than structural, but it is real and it is worth naming.
Simon Spier is sixteen, gay, and conducting a secret email romance with a boy who goes by the pseudonym “Blue.” He does not know who Blue is in person. His secret is discovered and used against him. The novel is about what it means to live in a space of confinement, not a sealed room but a closet, and about the terror and exhilaration of choosing to step outside of it for love.
Albertalli writes in a voice that is warm, funny, and completely convinced of Simon’s interiority. There is no distance between the reader and the character. The same quality defines Yoon’s Maddy: both heroines narrate from so deeply inside their own perspective that the reader does not observe them so much as temporarily become them.
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda won the 2016 William C. Morris Debut Award, was adapted into the 2018 film Love, Simon, and became the first major studio film centered on a gay teen romance. For readers who responded to Everything, Everything‘s emotional directness, this novel delivers the same temperature of feeling while placing its confinement in a different register entirely.
A Note Before You Go
The best thing about the books on this list is that none of them are doing exactly what the others are doing. They share a concern with love under pressure, with interiority made vivid by circumstance, and with the question of what it costs to choose connection when connection is dangerous. But each of them has its own argument, its own formal strategies, and its own particular emotional difficulty.
Everything, Everything spent 40 weeks on the bestseller list because it found an enormous number of readers who recognized something true in it. What it was true about, I would argue, is not illness. It is the experience of being young and confined by forces outside your control, and the question of whether love is worth the risk of losing everything that currently keeps you safe.
Every book on this list is asking the same question from a different room in the same house. The house is worth exploring.