Riot Recommendation

16 Of Your Favorite Young Adult Friendships

Jamie Canaves

Contributing Editor

Jamie Canavés is the Tailored Book Recommendations coordinator and Unusual Suspects mystery newsletter writer–in case you’re wondering what you do with a Liberal Arts degree. She’s never met a beach she didn’t like, always says yes to dessert, loves ‘80s nostalgia, all forms of entertainment, and can hold a conversation using only gifs. You can definitely talk books with her on Litsy and Goodreads. Depending on social media’s stability maybe also Twitter and Bluesky.

This Riot Recommendation asking for your favorite young adult friendships is sponsored by Nimbus Publishing, bringing you The Goodbye Girls.

The Goodbye Girl cover imageThe students at Lizzie’s high school are notoriously terrible at breakups. Forget awkward conversations—they’re dumping each other via text. Inspired by the breakups around her, sixteen-year-old Lizzie, strapped for cash and itching to go on the school’s band trip to NYC, teams up with her best friend, Willa, to create a genius business: personalized breakup baskets. The Goodbye Girls operate secretly, and business is booming. It’s not long before someone starts sending impossibly cruel baskets to seemingly random targets, undermining everything Lizzie and Willa have built. Will Lizzie end up saying goodbye to the business for good?


Being a young adult is hard when everyone expects you to behave like an adult but still treats you like a child. Plus a million other reasons. Enter good friends to save the day! Or at least offer an ear, laugh, distraction, and adventure idea. So we asked you to tell us your favorite young adult friendships and here they are:

Mila and Riley in Undead Girl Gang

Zoe and Digby in Stephanie Tromly’s Trouble series

Alex and Rishi in Labyrinth Lost

Zelie and Amara in Children of Blood and Bon

Xiomara and Caridad in The Poet X

Moss’s entire friend group in Anger is a Gift

Anne and Diana & Emily and Ilse of L.M. Montgomery works

The girls in Maurene Goo’s The Way You Make Me Feel

The feminist trio in UKYA Am I Normal Yet? by Holly Bourne

Quinn and Hana in Wild Blue Wonder

Jess and Leslie from Bridge to Terabithia

Nina and Inej from Six of Crows & Crooked Kingdom!

R.J. Palacio’s Auggie and Summer and Jack Will in Wonder

Beverly Cleary’s Beatrice and Henry

The girls in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Tiffany, Erin, KJ, MacKenzie in Paper Girls