With a new school year starting up and many schools opting to carry on classes virtually, new crushes are gonna look *a little different* for a lot of people. But fear not—even if you only get to stare at your crush through the webcam for the mere hour and a half spent together in your Zoom classroom, you can still have the falling in love montage of your dreams.
In fact, it could even be better than you hoped for. If there’s anything these books about falling in love through phone and computer screens—over texts, emails, or social media—and even old-fashioned love letters have taught us, it’s that the screens and space between us allow us to reveal more about ourselves than we might do face to face.
With the digital space allowing them to be their true selves, love tends to follow closely behind.
Fall in Love Through the Screen
11 YA BOOKS THAT PROVE IT’S POSSIBLE
1. Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choi
Penny and Sam might be the blueprint for crushing over text, and a great example of how the protection of hiding behind your screen allows you to open up more. They meet face to face first, but all of their opening up happens in their texts bubbles, which become their safest spaces.
For Penny Lee, high school was a total non-event. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she somehow managed to land a boyfriend, he doesn’t actually know anything about her. When Penny heads to college in Austin, Texas, to learn how to become a writer, it’s seventy-nine miles and a zillion light years away from everything she can’t wait to leave behind.
Sam’s stuck. Literally, figuratively, emotionally, financially. He works at a café and sleeps there too, on a mattress on the floor of an empty storage room upstairs. He knows that this is the god-awful chapter of his life that will serve as inspiration for when he’s a famous movie director but right this second the seventeen bucks in his checking account and his dying laptop are really testing him.
When Sam and Penny cross paths it’s less meet-cute and more a collision of unbearable awkwardness. Still, they swap numbers and stay in touch—via text—and soon become digitally inseparable, sharing their deepest anxieties and secret dreams without the humiliating weirdness of having to see each other.
2. Tweet Cute by Emma Lord
Pepper and Jack don’t know they’re falling for each other when they start texting every day under pseudonyms on an anonymous app, but they do know they’re beefing with each other via their family restaurant’s respective Twitter accounts, and sparks fly on the screen and IRL.
Meet Pepper, swim team captain, chronic overachiever, and all-around perfectionist. Her family may be falling apart, but their massive fast-food chain is booming—mainly thanks to Pepper, who is barely managing to juggle real life while secretly running Big League Burger’s massive Twitter account.
Enter Jack, class clown and constant thorn in Pepper’s side. When he isn’t trying to duck out of his obscenely popular twin’s shadow, he’s busy working in his family’s deli. His relationship with the business that holds his future might be love/hate, but when Big League Burger steals his grandma’s iconic grilled cheese recipe, he’ll do whatever it takes to take them down, one tweet at a time.
All’s fair in love and cheese—that is, until Pepper and Jack’s spat turns into a viral Twitter war. Little do they know, while they’re publicly duking it out with snarky memes and retweet battles, they’re also falling for each other in real life—on an anonymous chat app Jack built. And as their battle gets more and more personal, until even these two rivals can’t ignore they were destined for the most unexpected, awkward, all-the-feels romance that neither of them expected.
3. Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
Felix’s ploy to catfish the bully at his Brooklyn art school into a confession backfires when he finds himself opening up to his bully and realizing that he isn’t as bad as he seems…
Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, Felix also secretly fears that he’s one marginalization too many—Black, queer, and transgender—to ever get his own happily-ever-after.
When an anonymous student begins sending him transphobic messages—after publicly posting Felix’s deadname alongside images of him before he transitioned—Felix comes up with a plan for revenge. What he didn’t count on: his catfish scenario landing him in a quasi–love triangle….
But as he navigates his complicated feelings, Felix begins a journey of questioning and self-discovery that helps redefine his most important relationship: how he feels about himself.
4. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
Simon Spier isn’t out. Neither is Blue, the anonymous student at his school he’s been (anonymously) emailing with and falling for, hard. Having someone to open up to over email gives both of them the confidence they need to be their full selves.
Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical.
But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now change-averse Simon has to find a way to step out of his comfort zone before he’s pushed out—without alienating his friends, compromising himself, or fumbling a shot at happiness with the most confusing, adorable guy he’s never met.
Incredibly funny and poignant, this twenty-first-century coming-of-age, coming out story—wrapped in a geek romance—is a knockout of a debut novel by Becky Albertalli.
5. You Say It First by Katie Cotugno
Meg wasn’t even calling for Colby when she got him on the other line at her job at WeCount, making phone calls to persuade people to vote. But as fate would have it, that’s who she gets, and even if they disagree more often than not, something blooms for them across the line.
Meg has her entire life set up perfectly: she and her best friend, Emily, plan to head to Cornell together in the fall, and she works at a voter registration call center in her Philadelphia suburb. But everything changes when one of those calls connects her to a stranger from small-town Ohio.
Colby is stuck in a rut, reeling from a family tragedy and working a dead-end job. The last thing he has time for is some privileged rich girl preaching the sanctity of the political process. So he says the worst thing he can think of and hangs up.
But things don’t end there.
That night on the phone winds up being the first in a series of candid, sometimes heated, always surprising conversations that lead to a long-distance friendship and then—slowly—to something more. Across state lines and phone lines, Meg and Colby form a once-in-a-lifetime connection. But in the end, are they just too different to make it work?
6. Love, Creekwood by Becky Albertalli
Simon and Bram are adjusting into their LDR and sometimes, new circumstances call for tried and true methods of coping: for them, it’s back to emailing. They’re not the only ones whose relationship is blossoming even more with the help of emails—Leah and Abby might be living together, but they’re getting closer and closer through the screen.
It’s been more than a year since Simon and Blue turned their anonymous online flirtation into an IRL relationship, and just a few months since Abby and Leah’s unforgettable night at senior prom.
Now the Creekwood High crew are first years at different colleges, navigating friendship and romance the way their story began—on email.
Fall in love all over again with the characters from the bestselling Simonverse novels in this highly anticipated epilogue novella. Perfect for fans of Becky Albertalli, the movie Love, Simon, and the new Hulu series spin-off, Love, Victor!
7. Frankly in Love by David Yoon
Frank and Joy aren’t real dating—they’re fake dating, so they can real-date their *actual* partners, who their parents don’t approve of. But the texts they send each other to coordinate their schemes end up bringing them closer together than they anticipated.
High school senior Frank Li is a Limbo—his term for Korean-American kids who find themselves caught between their parents’ traditional expectations and their own Southern California upbringing.
His parents have one rule when it comes to romance—“Date Korean”—which proves complicated when Frank falls for Brit Means, who is smart, beautiful—and white. Fellow Limbo Joy Song is in a similar predicament, and so they make a pact:
They’ll pretend to date each other in order to gain their freedom.
Frank thinks it’s the perfect plan, but in the end, Frank and Joy’s fake-dating maneuver leaves him wondering if he ever really understood love—or himself—at all.
8. Don’t Read the Comments by Eric Smith
This one’s for the gamers. Divya is a popular streamer on Glitch, and Aaron writes video games but plays them, too. Together, they play Reclaim the Sun and take on trolls, but they build a relationship that goes deeper than troll defense.
Divya Sharma is a queen. Or she is when she’s playing Reclaim the Sun, the year’s hottest online game. Divya—better known as popular streaming gamer D1V—regularly leads her #AngstArmada on quests through the game’s vast and gorgeous virtual universe.
But for Divya, this is more than just a game. Out in the real world, she’s trading her rising-star status for sponsorships to help her struggling single mom pay the rent.
Gaming is basically Aaron Jericho’s entire life. Much to his mother’s frustration, Aaron has zero interest in becoming a doctor like her, and spends his free time writing games for a local developer. At least he can escape into Reclaim the Sun—and with a trillion worlds to explore, disappearing should be easy. But to his surprise, he somehow ends up on the same remote planet as celebrity gamer D1V.
At home, Divya and Aaron grapple with their problems alone, but in the game, they have each other to face infinite new worlds… and the growing legion of trolls populating them. They may think they can drive her out of the game, but everything and everyone Divya cares about is on the line.
9. Every Other Weekend by Abigail Johnson
Adam and Jolene don’t bond over the best circumstances – spending every other weekend in the same apartment building, where both their dads live. But they understand each other, and texting fills the void between the two times a month they get to actually see each other.
Adam Moynihan’s life used to be awesome. Straight As, close friends and a home life so perfect that it could have been a TV show straight out of the 50s. Then his oldest brother died. Now his fun-loving mom cries constantly, he and his remaining brother can’t talk without fighting, and the father he always admired proved himself a coward by moving out when they needed him most.
Jolene Timber’s life is nothing like the movies she loves—not the happy ones anyway. As an aspiring director, she should know, because she’s been reimagining her life as a film ever since she was a kid. With her divorced parents at each other’s throats and using her as a pawn, no amount of mental re editing will give her the love she’s starving for.
Forced to spend every other weekend in the same apartment building, the boy who thinks forgiveness makes him weak and the girl who thinks love is for fools begin an unlikely friendship. The weekends he dreaded and she endured soon become the best part of their lives. But when one’s life begins to mend while the other’s spirals out of control, they realize that falling in love while surrounded by its demise means nothing is ever guaranteed.
10. What I Like About You by Marisa Kanter
Nash doesn’t know what Hallie looks like, nor does he know her real name—to him, she’s Kels, his online BFF who he’s starting to fall for. Meanwhile, real life Hallie meets Nash and starts to see him everywhere, and she’s falling for him, too—except he has no idea she’s Kels.
There are a million things that Halle Levitt likes about her online best friend, Nash. He’s an incredibly talented graphic novelist. He loves books almost as much as she does. And she never has to deal with the awkwardness of seeing him in real life. They can talk about anything…
Except who she really is.
Because online, Halle isn’t Halle—she’s Kels, the enigmatically cool creator of One True Pastry, a YA book blog that pairs epic custom cupcakes with covers and reviews. Kels has everything Halle doesn’t: friends, a growing platform, tons of confidence, and Nash. That is, until Halle arrives to spend senior year in Gramps’s small town and finds herself face-to-face with real, human, not-behind-a-screen Nash. Nash, who is somehow everywhere she goes—in her classes, at the bakery, even at synagogue.
Nash, who has no idea she’s actually Kels. If Halle tells him who she is, it will ruin the non-awkward magic of their digital friendship. Not telling him though, means it can never be anything more. Because while she starts to fall for Nash as Halle…he’s in love with Kels.
11. How to Speak Boy by Tianna Smith
This one is a little more analog—Quinn and Grayson don’t like each other IRL. But the anonymous correspondence via notes dropped into each other’s cubbies proves that they have more in common than they thought, and just like with these other relationships, the open roads of expression give way to new feelings.
Quinn and Grayson have been fierce speech and debate rivals for years. They can’t stand one another, either in or out of competition.
But when their AP Government teacher returns their school assignments to the wrong cubbies, they begin exchanging anonymous notes without knowing who the other is.
Despite their differences, the two come together through their letters and find themselves unknowingly falling for the competition. Before the state tournament, the two of them need to figure out what they want out of life, or risk their own future happiness. After all, what’s the point of speech and debate if you can’t say what’s in your heart?
These books will help give you the confidence boost to take your crush from the Zoom screen to the DMs! Do you already have a gameplan to get your online crush? Let us know in the comments!