Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews

• Seventeen-year-old Greg Gaines likes making movies with his sort-of-friend Earl and tries to get through high school by having  access to all the social groups but by not belonging to any one clique, which in his own words means he keeps "an insanely low profile."
  
• Keeping a low profile becomes tricky when Greg's mom asks him to befriend a girl, Rachel, who he has some embarrassing history with and who now has cancer.
• What ensues is Greg (and sometimes Earl) doing their best to cheer up Rachel without punching themselves in the face too many times.

Imagine The Fault in Our Stars with a lot less romance and way more boy humor, movie-making, and inter-racial friendship. The narrator, Greg, says this book "contains precisely zero Important Life Lessons, or Little-Known Facts About Love, or sappy tear-jerking Moments When We Knew We Had Left Our Childhood Behind for Good, or whatever," but it will make you laugh a lot more than it will make you cry (and I do mean a lot).

Grades 9-12