Young Adult Book Recommendations
What the Librarian Reads
I am a high school librarian. Every day I have students, usually kids who would rather do anything but read, come to me for book recommendations. The books have to be fun, quick with the attention and relatively easy to read. These are some of my go to favorites for those kids.
My favorite book to recommend.
You cannot go wrong with Skyward by Brandon Sanderson. You have a strong female character who has spent her life battling the system. Added bonus is interesting and fun side characters, including a talking spaceship named M-bot, who loves mushrooms, and a giant caterpillar (at least in my eyes) named Doomslug.
As I tell my teenager students when they look at me like I’m insane as I recommend a talking spaceship and a giant caterpillar, “You want me to read about a talking spaceship?”
“Yes. Trust me, M-bot and Doomslug work perfectly in this book, and you will grow to love them.” Almost always, the students I recommend these books to will come back for the rest of the collection, Startsight, Cytonic and the recently released book, Defiant, as well as the Skyward Flight collection.
Lovers of the Dystopian novel.
For those students who loved Hunger Games, Divergent or the Maze Runner and are still looking to feed that “end of the world” craving, I have a couple different selections of young adult novels to send them too.
Eve, by Ana Carry, is about a girl surviving in a time when a virus wiped out most of the human population. Believing she is being educated to become an artist or a teacher in New America when, the night before her graduation, Eve learns the truth of her further, she bolts and learns to survive on her own in the wilderness. It’s an excellent read and wildly popular with both male and female students.
And because you can never have too much of young adults fending for themselves in a post apocalyptic world, I recently stumbled across the Fortune Falls series by Lou Vane. It is about a group of students isolated in the woods when a deadly virus decimates the human population.
Fun fact, I haven’t read these books. I stumbled across them in a book review and ordered them because I needed new blood in my dystopian collection. That said, I cannot keep these books on the shelf. Fortune Falls, and the three books that follow them, is a current favorite. My students cannot get enough of them and, even more exciting, they often attract that male student who would rather would be anywhere else but the library or caught dead with a book.
Murder and Mystery
I personally love a good (fictional) murder/mystery. For those slightly edgy students, those girls who are looking for something fun to pass the time, I love introducing them to We Were Liars by E. Lockheart.
We Were Liars is about a group of cousins/friends who spend their summers at a private family island swimming, gossiping and causing a little havoc. It seems relatively simple and until, as I explain to my students, you hit a major plot twist! If you have read We Were Liars, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t read it, just know, reading this book is like a shock to your body when you jump off the dock in cold water! And no one sees it coming!
For my super-duper edgy readers, those kids, usually girls, who like something completely out of the box, I recommend almost anything by Mindy McGinnis and two of my favorites are The Initial Insult and The Last Laugn, a retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s, The Cask of Amontillado. It’s about a teenage girl who is willing to do anything to figure out what happened to her parents, including bricking her former best friend in a wall.
Yes, it is about as crazy as it sounds and, as I tell my young readers, no matter what you think is happening at the end of The Initial Insult, you will quickly find out you are wrong when you read the companion novel entitled The Last Laugh.
Fantasy
For my students who love a little bit of fantasy mixed in with their historical fiction and a tiny bit of romance, I have had a tremendous success with The Dark Days Club by Alison Goodman and the books that follow. These books are fun, with a strong female, who wears fancy clothing and attempts to conduct herself in Victorian societies’ norms, all while being a kick-butt superhero and attempting to navigate the tricky waters of love between two equally hot suitors. Side note, while romance is a part of this book, it is delicately handled so there just is enough spice to satisfy my romance girls, but tame enough to pass even the most dedicated of book banners.
Just note, on The Dark Days Club, these books are long, and I only recommend them to students who I know are accomplished readers.
