60+ of Your Favorite Books About Siblings
This Riot Recommendation is sponsored by Whiskey and Charlie by Annabel Smith.
First they were family.
Then they were strangers.
Now they are lost.
Whiskey and Charlie might have come from the same family, but they’d tell you two completely different stories about growing up. Whiskey is everything Charlie is not – bold, daring, carefree – and Charlie blames his twin brother for always stealing the limelight, always getting everything, always pushing Charlie back.
When they were just boys, the secret language they whispered back and forth over their crackly walkie-talkies connected them, in a way. The two-way alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta) became their code, their lifeline. But as the brothers grew up, they grew apart. By the time the twins reach adulthood, they barely even speak to each other.
When Charlie hears that Whiskey has been in a terrible accident and has slipped into a coma, he can’t make sense of it. Who is he without Whiskey? As days and weeks slip by and the chances of Whiskey recovering grow ever more slim, Charlie is forced to consider that he may never get to say all the things he wants to say.
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Your siblings can be your best friends, your worst enemies, and/or some incomprehensible combination of both. They see you in the most mundane, most boring moments of your everyday childhood life, and in your most triumphant or most catastrophic. They often have an identical upbringing (though not always), but can turn out to be someone with whom you have little to nothing in common. To sum up: sibling relationships are complicated, which make them the perfect subject for fiction.
We asked you to share your favorite books about siblings, and you answered! Here are more than 60 of your favorites. You’ve got plenty of awesome reading to dig into here. Some of these books are about those sibling relationships and others simply feature a great — or not-so-great — siblingship:
Among Others by Jo Walton
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
Beauty by Robin McKinley
Beezus and Ramona by Beverly Cleary
The Bride’s Necklace by Kat Martin
The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren
The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
Deep series by Debi Gliori
Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie by Jordan Sonnenblick
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald
Feed by Mira Grant
A Fist Full of Sky by Nina Kiriki Hoffman
Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E. L. Konigsburg
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
The Girls by Lori Lansens
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The Great Glass Sea by Josh Weil
The Guest List by Fern Michaels
Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt
Hotel New Hampshire by John Irving
The Hundred Secret Senses by Amy Tan
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb
I Love I Hate I Miss My Sister by Amelie Sarn
I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson
Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma
In Her Shoes by Jennifer Weiner
Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell
Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson
The Kane Chronicles by Rick Riordan
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
Naked by David Sedaris
One Crazy Summer and sequels by Rita Williams-Garcia
Opposite of Me by Sarrah Pekkanen
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
The Pain and The Great One by Judy Blume
Peace Like A River by Leif Enge
The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall
The Piper’s Son by Melina Marchetta
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
The Rolling Stones by Robert Heinlein
Rules by Cynthia Lord
Rushed to the Altar by Jane Feather
The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefvater
Sister Salty, Sister Sweet by Shannon Kring Biro and Natalie Kring
Sisters by Raina Telgemeier
Spider Sisters by John Trent
Super Fudge by Judy Blume
Sweet Valley High series by Francine Pascal
The Things a Brother Knows by Dana Reinhart
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
Tuesdays at the Castle by Jessica Day George
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
