A Different Kind of Mother's Day Booklist

Mother's Day on May 12th will be a tough day for me. My mother and maternal grandmother passed away last year, so this will be my first one without them. I will spend the day thinking and talking about them, and of course, missing them.

I wanted to take a different approach to a Mother's Day booklist this time -- to highlight novels with more complicated mother-daughter relationships. Ones that involve grief, illness, strife, and / or estrangement. 

I'm hoping this booklist helps any teens who can relate and feel alone in their experience. 

1. Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir by Tyler Feder: Tyler Feder shares her story of her mother's first oncology appointment to facing reality as a motherless daughter in this frank and refreshingly funny graphic memoir.
2. Delicious Monsters by Liselle Sambury: Told in alternating timelines, seventeen-year-old Daisy and her mother move into her deceased uncle's mansion, only to find horrors waiting inside, and ten years later, Brittney investigates the mystery behind the Miracle Mansion that turned her mother's life around.
3. Going Bicoastal by Dahlia Adler: Told in alternating timelines, Jewish seventeen-year-old Natalya spends one summer in New York with her dad, trying to muster the courage to talk to her girl crush, and the other in Los Angeles with her estranged mom, going for a guy she never saw coming.
4. Home Is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo: A novel in verse follows the experiences of a misfit teen in a discriminatory suburban community who questions her mixed heritage before unexpected family revelations force her to fight for her own identity.
5. Hungry Ghost by Victoria Ying: After the sudden death of her father, 16-year-old Valerie Chu, who is hiding an eating disorder from her friends and family, reevaluates her life, her choices and her own body as she tries to find the strength to seek help.
6. Lawless Spaces by Corey Ann Haydu: While a highly publicized sexual assault case threatens to destroy her and her mother, sixteen-year-old Mimi Dovewick tries to understand their tense relationship by reaching out to the women of her maternal line through the journals they all kept.
7. My Week with Him by Joya Goffney: Kicked out of her house by her heartless mother two months before her graduation, Nikki is determined to flee Texas but finds her plans put on hold when her best friend Malachai begs her to stay with him for the remainder of spring break and her little sister goes missing.
8. Starfish by Akemi Dawn Bowman: Kiko Himura yearns to escape the toxic relationship with her mother by getting into her dream art school, but when things do not work out as she hoped Kiko jumps at the opportunity to tour art schools with her childhood friend, learning life-changing truths about herself and her past along the way.
9. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo: When Xiomara Batista, who pours all her frustrations and passion into poetry, is invited to join the school slam poetry club, she struggles with her mother's expectations and her need to be heard.
10. The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling by Wai Chim: Working almost constantly to help out at her father's restaurant and care for her siblings, a teen from a migrant Asian family starts dating a delivery boy before her mother's progressing mental illness upends everything she understood about her family.

For more book recommendations on grief and loss check out:

• YA Books on Grief and Loss
• BKLYN BookMatch: For Teens Dealing With Grief
• BKLYN Inclusive Services -- Young Adult Books About Death and Grief

If you're struggling right now, check out NYC Teenspace for free mental health support for ages 13-17. For more information on grief, try visiting https://kidshealth.org/en/teens/someone-died.html. 

Here are some other resources to check out: 

• Mental Health is Health
• The Trevor Project