Best Young Adult Books

The Vega twins return to Zodiac Academy for their second semester — and the Heirs' campaign to break them intensifies even as unexpected alliances and undeniable attractions begin to complicate everything.

A powerful, dual-narrated YA novel about a police beating and its aftermath. Rashad, a Black teenager, is brutalized by a white officer who wrongly assumes he is shoplifting; Quinn, a white classmate, witnesses it. Told in their alternating voices, the novel traces how one act of violence forces a community to choose where it stands.

Senior year, college applications, and the question of what happens to Lara Jean and Peter when they go to different schools — or don't. The trilogy's conclusion navigates the practical anxieties of senior year with the same emotional clarity that made the first two books work, and brings Lara Jean's story to a warm, considered close.

Anne Shirley is now sixteen and a teacher at Avonlea school, navigating new friendships, her growing responsibilities at Green Gables, and the same imaginative intensity that has always defined her.

The Reckoners take their fight to Babylon Restored — the flooded ruins of Manhattan — pursuing the Epic known as Regalia while David confronts the possibility that not all Epics are irredeemably corrupt.

Two stories: 'Franny,' in which a young woman has a breakdown at a Yale football weekend while clutching a book about the Jesus Prayer, and 'Zooey,' in which her brother attempts to help her recover. The Glass family — seven exceptionally intelligent siblings raised on comparative religion — are Salinger's sustained meditation on the problem of being too smart for the ordinary world.

Pip Fitz-Amobi has promised herself she is done with murder investigations. Then a boy goes missing on the night of Little Kilton's memorial, and Pip finds herself drawn back into danger — this time broadcasting her investigation as a live podcast.

Prince Yarvi was born with a crippled hand — he would never be the warrior his culture demands. He plans to be a minister instead. Then his father and brother are murdered, and Yarvi is forced onto a throne he doesn't want, sworn to revenge he doesn't know how to take — before being betrayed, enslaved, and left for dead.

Julia Reyes is not the perfect Mexican daughter her parents wanted — she wants to go to college in New York, she reads too much, she speaks her mind. After her seemingly perfect sister Olga dies suddenly, Julia discovers secrets that upend everything she thought she knew about her family.

Ed Kennedy, an underage cab driver with no real ambitions, accidentally stops a bank robbery and begins receiving mysterious playing cards that send him on missions to help — and sometimes confront — strangers in his city.

King Nikolai Lantsov of Ravka battles a dark curse living within him while navigating the political threats gathering at his borders — and two women he trusts with his kingdom but not his secret.

Lirael is a Daughter of the Clayr who has not received the Sight — the gift that defines her people. While she searches for her identity in the Great Library of the Clayr, Prince Sameth struggles with a destiny he doesn't want. The second book in the Old Kingdom series deepens its extraordinary world.

In a far-future world where cities have been mounted on enormous wheels and move across a barren landscape devouring smaller towns for resources, young historian Tom Natsworthy is thrown from London and must survive alongside a scarred girl who wants to assassinate London's most powerful man.

Six months after This Savage Song, Kate and August are in different cities, changed by what they survived. A new kind of monster — one that neither side of Verity created — emerges, and the only way to face it requires both of them to confront what they're becoming. The Monsters of Verity duology concludes.

Lara Jean and Peter are officially together now — but an unexpected letter from another recipient of her love notes introduces John Ambrose McClaren back into her life. A genuine love triangle unfolds as Lara Jean navigates first relationship pressures, family dynamics, and competing versions of herself.

Set immediately after Ignite Me — Juliette and Warner face the consequences of claiming the Reestablishment's power, as new threats emerge from within and without.

Nikolai and Zoya must end a devastating war, forge an unlikely alliance with their oldest enemy, and face the darkest power the Grishaverse has ever produced — before it consumes everything they have built.

After her father's death forces a move to a new town, eighteen-year-old Layken Cohen falls for her neighbour Will — until she discovers they can never be together. He is her teacher. Slam poetry becomes the language of both their grief and their impossible longing in Colleen Hoover's debut novel.

Spensa goes undercover among the alien Superiority to discover the truth behind their war against humanity, only to find that the conflict — and her own abilities — are far more complicated than she was told.

Ten years after a cosmic event granted ordinary people superhuman abilities, the Epics have taken over as tyrants rather than heroes. David Charleston joins the Reckoners — ordinary humans who hunt Epics — to kill Steelheart, the most powerful Epic alive.

The conclusion of His Dark Materials — Lyra and Will descend into the land of the dead, the war against the Authority reaches its climax, and the full theological argument of the trilogy is made explicit. The first children's book to win the Whitbread Prize.

Todd and Viola are separated in a city under brutal occupation. As each is drawn into opposing sides of a conflict, Ness refuses to offer the comfortable moral clarity of most dystopian fiction — both resistance and authority use violence, and both claim necessity.

Five prequel novellas to Throne of Glass that follow teenage assassin Celaena Sardothien while she still serves the Assassins' Guild — charting her doomed romance with Sam Cortland and the betrayal that lands her in Endovier.

Apollo and Meg head west into a scorched California to confront the cruelest emperor yet and free a captive Oracle from the Burning Maze. Rick Riordan's third Trials of Apollo book is the series at its darkest, delivering a gut-punch that reshapes the saga.