Benny and Babe

by Gary Paulsen

Like Benny, your protagonist here is a kid forced into unfamiliar territory where he has to shed his assumptions about how the world works—except instead of country life, it's pure survival. Paulsen has that same gift Colfer does for making a young person's resourcefulness feel genuinely earned rather than magical, and the relationship between the boy and his environment mirrors how Benny gradually respects Babe's competence.

by Megan Whalen Turner

This one's a surprise—it reads like a straightforward adventure about a clever kid, but Turner is playing a much deeper game with perspective and trust, the way Colfer plays with Benny's assumptions about Babe. The con-artist energy and the slow reveal that characters aren't quite what they seem will scratch the same itch, and the banter between characters has real teeth to it.

by S. E. Hinton

Published in 1967, this gives you that different-decade requirement, and it shares Colfer's gift for capturing how kids actually talk and think—not sentimentalized, not dumbed-down. The class tensions between the Greasers and Socs echo the townie-versus-local dynamic in *Benny and Babe*, and Hinton understands that real adolescent conflict isn't about good versus evil, it's about territory and belonging.

by David Almond

Almond writes contemporary realism with a quietly magical undercurrent—there's something genuinely strange happening, but the book never breaks character to explain it. Like Colfer, he trusts young readers to sit with ambiguity, and the friendship between Michael and Skellig has that same rough-edged, earned quality as Benny and Babe's partnership. The setting is working-class England, so there's real texture to the world.

by Louis Sachar

Sachar does something brilliant here: he takes the setup of a kid in an unfamiliar, hostile environment (like Benny at the lake) and builds an entire mystery around why the rules are what they are. The humor is dry and character-driven rather than slapstick, the friendships feel real because they're forged through genuine hardship, and there's that same satisfaction of watching a kid figure out how to navigate a world that doesn't care about his expectations.