Best YA Literary Fiction Books of All Time
The Perks of Being a Wallflower (Released: January 1999)
Author(s): Stephen Chbosky
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.06 (1169 Ratings, 95 Reviews)
Pages: 240
Standing on the fringes of life... offers a unique perspective. But there comes a time to see what it looks like from the dance floor. This haunting novel about the dilemma of passivity vs. passion marks the stunning debut of a provocative new voice in contemporary fiction: The Perks of Being A WALLFLOWER This is the story of what it's like to grow up in high school. More intimate than a diary, Charlie's letters are singular and unique, hilarious and devastating. We may not know where he lives. We may not know to whom he is writing. All we know is the world he shares. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it puts him on a strange course through uncharted territory. The world of first dates and mixed tapes, family dramas and new friends. The world of sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, when all one requires is that the perfect song on that perfect drive to feel infinite. Through Charlie, Stephen Chbosky has created a deeply affecting coming-of-age story, a powerful novel that will spirit you back to those wild and poignant roller coaster days known as growing up.
Genre(s): Young Adult, Fiction, Classics, Friendship, Bildungsromans, social science, General, LGBTQ
All the Light We Cannot See (Released: January 2014)
Author(s): Anthony Doerr
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.20 (775 Ratings, 115 Reviews)
Pages: 544
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).
Genre(s): Fiction, Historical Fiction, War, General, History, Classics, Friendship, Young Adult, Adventure
The Help (Released: January 2009)
Author(s): Kathryn Stockett
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.19 (653 Ratings, 47 Reviews)
Pages: 534
There's Aibileen, raising her seventeenth white child and nursing the hurt caused by her own son's tragic death; Minny, whose cooking is nearly as sassy as her tongue, and white Miss Skeeter, home from college, who wants to why her beloved maid has disappeared.
Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, Young Adult, Literature, Spanish, African American women
A Study in Scarlet (Released: January 198)
Author(s): Arthur Conan Doyle, Stephen Fry (Narrator)
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.02 (588 Ratings, 36 Reviews)
Pages: None
The first of the Sherlock Holmes' adventures, this book introduces the great sleuth and explains how Dr. Watson and Holmes come to share rooms together and solve mysteries together.
Genre(s): Fiction, Classics, Mystery, Murder, Crime, Crime Fiction, Private investigators, General, Adventure, Young Adult
The Hate U Give (Released: January 2017)
Author(s): Angie Thomas
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.49 (550 Ratings, 114 Reviews)
Pages: 444
Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighbourhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a police officer. Now what Starr says could destroy her community. It could also get her killed.
Genre(s): Young Adult, Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Police shootings
A Thousand Splendid Suns (Released: August 2000)
Author(s): Khaled Hosseini
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.35 (533 Ratings, 57 Reviews)
Pages: 372
Mariam and Laila are born a generation apart but are brought together by war and fate. Together they endure the dangers surrounding them and discover the power of both love and sacrifice.
Genre(s): Fiction, Young Adult, General, War, Literature, Friendship, Women, Classics, Family
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (Released: January 2015)
Author(s): Becky Albertalli
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.05 (451 Ratings, 90 Reviews)
Pages: 336
Sixteen-year-old and not-so-openly gay Simon Spier prefers to save his drama for the school musical. But when an email falls into the wrong hands, his secret is at risk of being thrust into the spotlight. Now Simon is actually being blackmailed: if he doesn’t play wingman for class clown Martin, his sexual identity will become everyone’s business. Worse, the privacy of Blue, the pen name of the boy he’s been emailing, will be compromised. With some messy dynamics emerging in his once tight-knit group of friends, and his email correspondence with Blue growing more flirtatious every day, Simon’s junior year has suddenly gotten all kinds of complicated. Now, change-averse Simon has to find a way to step out of his comfort zone before he’s pushed out—without alienating his friends, compromising himself, or fumbling a shot at happiness with the most confusing, adorable guy he’s never met.
Genre(s): Young Adult, Fiction, LGBTQ, Friendship, Extortion, Juvenile Fiction
Radio Silence (Released: January 2016)
Author(s): Alice Oseman
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.03 (217 Ratings, 60 Reviews)
Pages: 496
What if everything you set yourself up to be was wrong? Frances has been a study machine with one goal. Nothing will stand in her way; not friends, not a guilty secret – not even the person she is on the inside. Then Frances meets Aled, and for the first time she's unafraid to be herself. So when the fragile trust between them is broken, Frances is caught between who she was and who she longs to be. Now Frances knows that she has to confront her past. To confess why Carys disappeared… Frances is going to need every bit of courage she has.
Genre(s): Young Adult, Fiction, LGBTQ, Juvenile Nonfiction, Young Adult Fiction
Sadie (Released: December 2015)
Author(s): Courtney Summers
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.08 (225 Ratings, 59 Reviews)
Pages: 359
Told from the alternating perspectives of nineteen-year-old Sadie who runs away from her isolated small Colorado town to find her younger sister's killer, and a true crime podcast exploring Sadie's disappearance.
Genre(s): Young Adult, Fiction, Mystery, LGBTQ
The Poet X (Released: January 2018)
Author(s): Elizabeth Acevedo
Ratings and Reviews from Hardcover
Rating: 4.43 (193 Ratings, 61 Reviews)
Pages: 368
Fans of Jacqueline Woodson, Meg Medina, and Jason Reynolds will fall hard for this astonishing New York Times-bestselling novel-in-verse by an award-winning slam poet, about an Afro-Latina heroine who tells her story with blazing words and powerful truth. Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.
Genre(s): Young Adult, Fiction, LGBTQ