Young Adult

Sonora Reyes has a gift for writing about the hardest parts of growing up without making them feel like lessons. In The Golden Boy’s Guide to Bipolar, her companion novel to the award-winning The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School, she turns her attention to Cesar Flores, the golden boy brother who was a supporting character…

Adam Silvera’s debut novel More Happy Than Not announces a major new voice in Young Adult fiction — a book that takes on grief, identity, memory, and the particular anguish of being gay in a neighborhood where that is not safe, and does so with a structural audacity that distinguishes it from its more conventional…

History Is All You Left Me by Adam Silvera is a striking and emotionally devastating young adult novel about grief, first love, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive loss. About the Book Adam Silvera’s second novel opens with a death: Griffin has just learned that his first love, Theo, has drowned in Santa…

Summary Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X is a verse novel set in Harlem, told in the voice of Xiomara Batista, a sixteen-year-old Dominican-American girl who is large, loud on the inside, and almost entirely silent on the outside. Xiomara lives in a household governed by her mother’s devout Catholicism and by the unspoken rule that…

Summary Tarisai has grown up in a sprawling estate called the Bhekina House, raised by a woman known only as The Lady, isolated from other children, and trained to please. She is part Raybearer, part something else entirely, and she carries a power she does not fully understand: anyone she touches with her Ray can…

The Sun Is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon is an exhilarating, intellectually ambitious young adult novel that unfolds over a single day in New York City as two teenagers fall in love against the backdrop of an impending deportation — a book that asks the biggest questions about fate, choice, and what connects us…

Joy McCullough’s 2020 Meridian Award-winning YA novel in verse weaves two narratives together: Em processing her brother’s acquittal for sexual assault, and the 15th-century French noblewoman Marguerite de Bressieux who sought justice after her own assault. Formally ambitious and emotionally unsparing, We Are the Ashes, We Are the Fire is one of the most important young adult books of its era.

Some books arrive at exactly the right moment. Casey McQuiston’s debut novel Red, White and Royal Blue landed in 2019 and immediately became one of those rare reads that people pressed into the hands of friends with the words “you have to read this.” It is a romantic comedy about Alex Claremont-Diaz, the half-Mexican, politically…

Ethan Wate has spent his whole life in Gatlin, South Carolina, dreaming of leaving. He has also spent months dreaming of a girl he has never met — the same girl, in the same burning field, in dreams that feel more real than his waking life. When Lena Duchannes arrives at Gatlin High as the…