Quirky read-alikes for fans of Margo’s Got Money Troubles
There’s something about Margo’s Got Money Troubles that has captured the hearts of readers everywhere. Whether you’re drawn in by the witty writing, well-developed characters, or unconventional family dynamics, there are so many ways to love this quirky and humorous feel-good read.
The popular novel by Rufi Thorpe strikes a chord with many readers who can resonate with Margo, a young women building a life for herself and finding freedom and belonging through self-invention. The audiobook was brought to life with Elle Fanning’s narration, and fans’ dreams came true when it was announced that she was cast to star in the new tv adaptation. The all-star cast also includes Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman, and more who bring this coming-of-age tale to fruition.
Whether you’re trying to recreate the magic of the novel or you’re waiting for the next episode of the show to drop, here is a list of quirky books full of offbeat humor and dynamic characters to help fill that Margo-shaped void.
Books You Should Know About
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
Buy the Pizza Girl audiobook here
Like Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Pizza Girl features another teen navigating an unplanning pregnancy and working to make ends meet. With well-developed characters and a perfect mix of humor and heart, this one is sure to appeal to the readers who fell in love with Margo’s quirky charm.
From the publisher: Eighteen years old, pregnant, and working as a pizza delivery girl in suburban Los Angeles, our charmingly dysfunctional heroine is deeply lost and in complete denial. She’s grieving the death of her father, avoiding her supportive mom and loving boyfriend, and flagrantly ignoring her future.
Her world is further upended when she becomes obsessed with Jenny, a stay-at-home mother new to the neighborhood, who comes to depend on weekly deliveries of pickled-covered pizzas for her son’s happiness. As one woman looks toward motherhood and the other toward middle age, the relationship between the two begins to blur in strange, complicated, and ultimately heartbreaking ways.
Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson
Buy the Nothing to See Here ebook here
Buy the Nothing to See Here audiobook here
Do you like your literary fiction with a side of spontaneous human combustion? Nothing to See Here investigates the complications of familial ties, explores the meaning of chosen families with flawed but earnest characters, and throws in an offbeat twist with this little super-human component. Lillian is a weird but loveable protagonist finding her way in life, and readers are sure to fall in love with her and the strange twins in her care.
From the publisher: Lillian and Madison were unlikely roommates and yet inseparable friends at their elite boarding school. But then Lillian had to leave the school unexpectedly in the wake of a scandal and they’ve barely spoken since. Until now, when Lillian gets a letter from Madison pleading for her help.
Madison’s twin stepkids are moving in with her family and she wants Lillian to be their caretaker. However, there’s a catch: the twins spontaneously combust when they get agitated, flames igniting from their skin in a startling but beautiful way. Lillian is convinced Madison is pulling her leg, but it’s the truth.
Thinking of her dead-end life at home, the life that has consistently disappointed her, Lillian, a truly unforgettable and witty protagonist, figures she has nothing to lose. Over the course of one humid, demanding summer, Lillian and the twins learn to trust each other—and stay cool—while also staying out of the way of Madison’s buttoned-up politician husband. Surprised by her own ingenuity yet unused to the intense feelings of protectiveness she feels for them, Lillian ultimately begins to accept that she needs these strange children as much as they need her—urgently and fiercely. Couldn’t this be the start of the amazing life she’d always hoped for?
With white-hot wit and a big, tender heart, Kevin Wilson has written his best book yet—a most unusual story of parental love and the power of a found family.
Just Watch Me by Lior Torenberg
Buy the Just Watch Me ebook here
Buy the Just Watch Me audiobook here
Margo’s not the only one turning to the internet to make money in a tough situation. Just Watch Me is a fast-paced romp that is equal parts angst and humor as our messy protagonist Dell finds a way to fundraise money to support her hospitalized younger sister.
From the publisher: Dell Danvers is barely keeping it together. She’s behind on rent for her studio apartment (formerly a walk-in closet), she’s being plagued by perpetual stomach pain, and her younger sister, Daisy, is in a coma at a hospital that wants to pull the plug. Freshly unemployed and subsisting on selling plants to trust fund kids, Dell impulsively starts a 24-hour livestream under the username mademoiselle_dell to fundraise for private life support for Daisy.
Dell is her stream’s dungeon master, banishing those who don’t abide by her terms and steadily rising up the platform’s ranks with her sympathetic story and angry-funny screen presence. Once she discovers she has a talent for eating spicy food, her streaming fame explodes and her pepper consumption escalates from jalapeño to ghost to the hottest pepper on earth: the Carolina Reaper. Dell is finally good at something—but as her behavior becomes riskier and a shadowy troll threatens to expose her dark past, Dell must reckon with what her digital life ignores, and what real redemption means.
Narrated in seven taut chapters, one for each day of Dell’s livestream, Just Watch Me careens through a week in the life of this misguided striver with a heart of gold. Voyeuristic and visceral, audacious and outrageous, Lior Torenberg’s debut is both a razor-sharp tragicomedy about the internet economy and a surreptitiously moving tale about the desire to be watched, and the terror of being seen.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Buy the Detransition, Baby ebook here
Buy the Detransition, Baby audiobook here
An unplanned pregnancy and unconventional parenting plan take center stage in Detransition, Baby. This witty and thoughtful story shows that there’s more than one way to be a parent and build a loving family.
From the publisher: Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn’t hate. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.
Ames isn’t happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames’s boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she’s pregnant with his baby—and that she’s not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he’s been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?
This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can’t reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.
Green Dot by Madeleine Gray
Buy the Green Dot audiobook here
Millennial coming-of-age stories are on the rise, and Green Dot’s protagonist Hera is a young woman navigating grown up problems as she tries to forge a path for her future and navigate a complicated affair in the process.
From the publisher: At twenty-four, Hera is a clump of unmet potential. To her, the future is nothing but an exhausting thought exercise, one depressing hypothetical after another. She’s sharp in more ways than one, adrift in her own smug malaise, until her new job moderating the comments section of an online news outlet—a role even more mind-numbing than it sounds—introduces her to Arthur, a middle-aged journalist. Though she’s preferred women to men for years now, she soon finds herself falling into an all-consuming affair with him. She is coming apart with want and loving every second of it! Well, except for the tiny hiccup that Arthur has a wife—and that she has no idea Hera exists.
With its daringly specific and intimate voice, Green Dot is a darkly hilarious and deeply felt examination of the joys and indignities of coming into adulthood against the pitfalls of the twenty-first century and the winding, tortuous, and often very funny journey we take in deciding who we are and who we want to be.
Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin
Buy the Interesting Facts About Space ebook here
Buy the Interesting Facts About Space audiobook here
Enid is an anxious but introspective space enthusiast navigating complicated romantic entanglements in this moving story. Enid’s eccentricities are funny and touching, and this book is a great fit for fans of the complex Millet family in Margo’s Got Money Troubles.
From the publisher: Enid is obsessed with space. She can tell you all about black holes and their ability to spaghettify you without batting an eye in fear. Her one major phobia? Bald men. But she tries to keep that one under wraps. When she’s not listening to her favorite true crime podcasts on a loop, she’s serially dating a rotation of women from dating apps. At the same time, she’s trying to forge a new relationship with her estranged half-sisters after the death of her absent father. When she unwittingly plunges into her first serious romantic entanglement, Enid starts to believe that someone is following her.
As her paranoia spirals out of control, Enid must contend with her mounting suspicion that something is seriously wrong with her. Because at the end of the day there’s only one person she can’t outrun—herself.
Brimming with quirky humor, charm, and heart, Interesting Facts about Space effortlessly shows us the power of revealing our secret shames, the most beautifully human parts of us all.
I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue
Buy the I Hope This Finds You Well ebook here
Buy the I Hope This Finds You Well audiobook here
Margo may have not been one for a traditional office environment, but this upbeat and feel-good workplace comedy is full of misfits and humor to satisfy readers.
From the publisher: As far as Jolene is concerned, her interactions with her colleagues should start and end with her official duties as an admin for Supershops, Inc. Unfortunately, her irritating, incompetent coworkers don’t seem to understand the importance of boundaries. Her secret to survival? She vents her grievances in petty email postscripts, then changes the text color to white so no one can see. That is until one of her secret messages is exposed. Her punishment: sensitivity training (led by the suspiciously friendly HR guy, Cliff) and rigorous email restrictions.
When an IT mix-up grants her access to her entire department’s private emails and DMs, Jolene knows she should report it, but who could resist reading what their coworkers are really saying? And when she discovers layoffs are coming, she realizes this might just be the key to saving her job. The plan is simple: gain her boss’s favor, convince HR she’s Supershops material, and beat out the competition.
But as Jolene is drawn further into her coworkers’ private worlds, this slow burn office romance begins to heat up as her carefully constructed walls begin to crumble—especially around Cliff, who she definitely cannot have feelings for. Eventually she will need to decide if she’s ready to leave the comfort of her cubicle, even if that means coming clean to her colleagues.
Crackling with laugh-out-loud dialogue and relatable observations, I Hope This Finds You Well is a fresh and surprisingly tender workplace comedy about loneliness and love beyond our computer screens. This sparkling debut novel will open your heart to the everyday eccentricities of work culture and the undeniable human connection that comes along with it.
Holding Pattern by Jenny Xie
Buy the Holding Pattern ebook here
Buy the Holding Pattern audiobook here
Margo’s relationships with her parents are one of the most heartwarming pieces of Margo’s Got Money Troubles. In Holding Pattern, this heartwarming novel features a quirky mother-daughter relationship as our protagonist finds herself home again and looking for a fresh start.
From the publisher: Holding Pattern. Noun.
1. A state of suspended progress.
2. The awkward way your mother tries to hug you now that you live with her. Again.
Kathleen Cheng has blown up her life. She’s gone through a humiliating breakup, dropped out of her graduate program, and left everything behind. Now she’s back in her childhood home in Oakland, wondering what’s next.
To her surprise, her mother isn’t the same person Kathleen remembers. No longer depressed or desperate to return to China, the new Marissa Cheng is sporty, perky, and has been transformed by love. Kathleen thought she’d be planning her own wedding, but instead finds herself helping her mother plan hers—to a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur.
Grasping for direction, Kathleen takes a job at a start-up that specializes in an unconventional form of therapy based on touch. While she negotiates new ideas about intimacy and connection, an unforeseen attachment to someone at work pushes her to rethink her relationships—especially the one with Marissa. Will they succeed in seeing each other anew, adult to adult?
As they peel back the layers of their history—the old wounds, cultural barriers, and complex affection—they must come to a new understanding of how they can propel each other forward, and what they’ve done to hold each other back. Brilliantly observant, tender, and warm, Holding Pattern is a hopeful novel about immigration and belonging, mother-daughter relationships, and the many ways we learn to hold each other.
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett
Buy the Mostly Dead Things ebook here
Buy the Mostly Dead Things audiobook here
Though a bit darker, and certainly more morbid, than Margo’s Got Money Troubles, Mostly Dead Things takes dysfunctional family drama to a new level of eccentricity in this darkly humorous and sardonic story about a family coming together in a time of grief.
From the publisher: What does it take to come back to life? For Jessa-Lynn Morton, the question is not an abstract one. In the wake of her father’s suicide, Jessa has stepped up to manage his failing taxidermy business while the rest of the Morton family crumbles. Her mother starts sneaking into the taxidermy shop to make provocative animal art, while her brother, Milo, withdraws. And Brynn, Milo’s wife—and the only person Jessa’s ever been in love with—walks out without a word. It’s not until the Mortons reach a tipping point that a string of unexpected incidents begins to open up surprising possibilities and second chances. But will they be enough to salvage this family, to help them find their way back to one another? Kristen Arnett’s breakout bestseller is a darkly funny family portrait; a peculiar, bighearted look at love and loss and the ways we live through them together.
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
Buy The Road to Tender Hearts ebook here
Buy The Road to Tender Hearts audiobook here
A bittersweet road trip with offbeat characters forming an unconventional family? Yes, please! This whimsical yet thoughtful story is a great next pick for fans of Margo’s Got Money Troubles.
From the publisher: At sixty-three years old, million-dollar lottery winner PJ Halliday would be the luckiest man in Pondville, Massachusetts, if it weren’t for the tragedies of his life: the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the way his marriage fell apart after that. Since then, PJ spends both his money and his time at the bar, and he probably doesn’t have much time left—he’s had three heart attacks already.
But when PJ reads the obituary of his old romantic rival, he realizes his high school sweetheart, Michelle Cobb, is finally single again. Filled with a new enthusiasm for life, PJ decides he’s going to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back.
Before PJ can hit the road, tragedy strikes Pondville, leaving PJ the sudden guardian of his estranged brother’s grandchildren. Anyone else would be deterred from the planned trip, but PJ figures the orphaned kids might benefit from getting out of town. PJ also thinks he can ask Sophie, his adult daughter who’s adrift in her twenties, to come along to babysit. And there’s one more surprise addition to the roster: Pancakes, a former nursing home therapy cat with a knack of predicting death, who recently turned up outside PJ’s home.
This could be the second chance PJ has long hoped for—a fresh shot at love and parenting—but does he have the strength to do both those things again? It’s very possible his heart can’t take it.
Lists You Should Know About
If you’re interested in exploring more quirky reads that will appeal to fans of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, check out some of our complete recommended lists here:
For more great lists, check out the Recommended Lists section of the Resource Center, home of all the great lists maintained by OverDrive’s staff librarians. Lists include bestsellers, favorite genres, kids and teens, LOTE content, seasonal favorites, and more!
Thank you for joining us on this week’s round up of books for fans of Margo’s Got Money Troubles! Reach out to your Digital Content Librarian or Account Manager for more information on how to provide the best content for your community.
About the author: Claire has worked in publicity for the arts, public libraries, and archives. At OverDrive she helps public libraries manage their collections and creates lists of the hottest titles to help her partners shop and promote their collections to their patrons. When she isn’t reading she loves to run, try new recipes (while listening to an audiobook), plan her next road trip, or hang out with her two dogs and cat. Claire is always excited to talk about a good mystery or spooky books!