Want your next read to feature mental health as a topic? Check out one of these staff-recommended titles! This list has titles for adults, teens, and kids.
Kids
With heart and humor, How to Train Your Pet Brain welcomes kids to explore how their bodies and minds work together to process emotions. Lighthearted illustrations paired with grounded language help kids understand why their brain does what it does, that big feelings are OK, and a strategy to help feel calm.
A touching story about a little boy whose worry monster follows him everywhere he goes. It’s there when he gets dressed, when he wants to play with his toys, and even when his friends come over to visit. How can he escape his worries?
How does it feel to be a Pigeon? Well, the bus driver is trying to get him to act happy, but as we all know, this is one bird that is not going to be told what to do! Throughout this hilarious board book, Pigeon runs through his signature gamut of emotions while attempting to thwart his old nemesis.
Search Your Feelings continues Katie Cook’s adorable run of Star Wars primers for young Padawans. Featuring poems and art about different emotions that tie to iconic moments from across the Star Wars saga, this is the perfect book to add to a youngling’s growing library.
Tiny T. Rex and his friend Pointy are planning a campout in the backyard, but they are both worried that the dark will be altogether too dark, so they plan on bringing a night light with them–but when the night light does not work they bravely open their eyes and discover the stars above.
Teens
A captivating and powerful novel that lingers long beyond the last page, Challenger Deep is a heartfelt tour de force by one of today’s most admired writers for teens about a boy struggling with schizophrenia.
Clinically-depressed Darius Kellner, a high school sophomore, travels to Iran to meet his grandparents, but it is their next-door neighbor, Sohrab, who changes his life.
From bestselling author of the Shatter Me series and the National Book Award-nominated A Very Large Expanse of Sea, Tahereh Mafi, comes a stunning novel about love and loneliness, navigating dual-identity as a Muslim teenager in America, and reclaiming your right to joy.
Charlotte Davis is in pieces. At seventeen she’s already lost more than most people lose in a lifetime. But she’s learned how to forget. Every new scar hardens Charlie’s heart just a little more, yet it still hurts so much. It hurts enough to not care anymore, which is sometimes what has to happen before you can find your way back from the edge.
From the critically acclaimed author of Allegedly, Tiffany D. Jackson, comes a gripping new novel perfect for fans of E. Lockhart and Gillian Flynn about the mystery of one teenage girl’s disappearance and the traumatic effects of the truth.
Adults
Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them–the bank robber included–desperately crave some sort of rescue.
Just Peachy is a comic series that explores what the day-to-day is like with depression and/or anxiety. The all-too-real cartoon protagonist gives readers a character to empathize with, and helps explain some of the not often talked about consequences and symptoms of having depression.
Nora Seed finds herself faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, or realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
A young woman’s life seems glowy. She’s got good looks, good credentials, a fun job, and an Upper East Side apartment. But with her parents dead and her boyfriend and best friend both trouble, she withdraws for a year of drug-induced hibernation while she grapples with her sense of being emptily out of step with the world.
Danika Brown knows what she wants: professional success, academic renown, and an occasional roll in the hay to relieve all that career-driven tension. But romance? Been there, done that, burned the T-shirt. Then big, brooding security guard Zafir Ansari rescues Dani from a workplace fire drill gone wrong and a video of the heroic rescue goes viral. Suddenly, half the internet is shipping #DrRugbae-and Zaf is begging Dani to play along.