10 YA Books That Should Be Added to the Required Reading Canon

Lies We Tell Ourselves, by Robin Talley
The opening pages of Talley’s debut drop readers into the mind of Sarah Dunbar, one of nine high-achieving black teens chosen to integrate Virginia’s Jefferson High School. It’s a chapter of civil rights history rendered with visceral closeness: the taunts, the terror, the knowledge that nothing is keeping Sarah and her classmates alive but the thinnest veneer of control among the mob. From this powderkeg moment Talley’s story expands and keeps expanding, into a rich, deeply compassionate romance that wraps up two girls from either side of a racial divide, who come to realize they have far more in common than they could’ve imagined—including a shared secret that has them noticing not just each other’s verbal dexterity and unexpected kindness, but the softness of their skin, the brightness of their eyes. Sarah’s opposite number is Linda Hairston, the popular, intellectually incurious daughter of a virulently segregationist journalist. When the girls are paired for a class project, Sarah deftly picks apart Linda’s blind bigotry—and as Linda’s ideological defenses crumble, so do those around her heart. Even in a story that so clearly depicts people standing on the wrong and right sides of history, Talley works in shades of gray: Sarah knows what she’s doing is for a greater good, but she knows, also, that’s she’s a pawn—she and every student at her school, playing out a race war in miniature for the benefit of later generations. And while Linda’s father is purely villainous, it’s clear Linda’s own bigotry is shaped by mental and emotional abuse, and a desire to stay safe until she can escape his house. That Talley manages to give her characters a hopeful yet uncompromised ending is a feat of delightful witchcraft.

All American Boys, by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
YA authors Reynolds and Kiely share the reins of this illuminating, enraging story, which borrows from a breaking news narrative that has become heartbreakingly familiar—an African American is beaten or worse by (usually) a cop, the attack is captured on a cell phone, and a cycle of rage and helplessness begins that rarely results in justice—without ever feeling like an “issues” book. Reynolds takes on the voice of black teen Rashad, who’s shopping at a convenience store when a cop attacks and hospitalizes him under a frighteningly flimsy pretext. Kiely writes from the perspective of Rashad’s white classmate Quinn, who witnesses the worst of the attack by a cop who has been like a father to him, and who finds his assumptions about society, himself, and the people he’s closest to unraveling. Rashad watches from his hospital bed as his story—and his hashtag, #RashadIsNotatSchoolToday—spins outward into a call to arms, whether or not he’s prepared for it, as Quinn struggles to decide whether silence and self-hatred puts him at even more risk than speaking out.

Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, by Meg Medina
High school is a battlefield in Medina’s funny, complex, achingly true story about the long shadow the titular bully casts on the life of new girl Piddy. Its perfect title is also its perfect first line, kicking off an exploration of the destabilizing power of random hatred; racial, social, and class divides; and the hollowing, erasing effects of a bully’s campaign of terror. Medina pulls no punches and offers no easy escapes for Piddy, a Latina girl who doesn’t present as tough enough to hang with her new school’s Latina clique, and is targeted after her figure draws the attention of the wrong girl’s boyfriend. Yaqui strikes just as Piddy’s life with a perpetually bone-tired single mother and vivacious de facto aunt is increasing in complexity; her ruthlessness is compounded by the pain of Piddy’s new perspective on her mom and her absent dad, her growing estrangement from her best friend, and the realization that her childhood is entirely behind her.

Conviction, by Kelly Loy Gilbert
Most of us will never have to make a decision as life-changing and wretchedly unfair as high school student Braden does in Gilbert’s breathtaking debut: what he’ll say on the witness stand, when his words will determine whether his deeply complicated, bullying father will be found guilty for the murder of a cop. The book unfolds like a thriller, as the truth about what happened on that contested night slowly comes to light. But the story that takes shape alongside Braden’s extraordinary drama is a universal one: the painful discovery of parental figures’ fallibility. The feeling of betrayal that can come when we realize the people we put our trust in as kids are just as prone to human weakness as we are. And the discovery that growing older doesn’t mean growing up, and that achieving adulthood isn’t the same as figuring everything out.

Feed, by M.T. Anderson
Written six years before The Hunger Games made dystopia the white-hottest publishing trend since glittery vampires, Feed kicks off with a killer first line (“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck”) and never lets up. Our protagonist, Titus, is an everyboy in a heinously tech-saturated world, in which gnarly environmental toxins make skin lesions a hot new accessory, interstellar travel inspires boredom at best, and mega-corporations have 24/7 access to consumer brains via their “feeds,” devices hardwired into the brain and shaped by your consumption habits to give you a constant stream of information, “entertainment,” and shopping options. When Titus, his friends, and an intriguing new girl, Violet, have their feeds hacked on a trip to the moon, they spend a few days recovering in a weird bubble of mental silence. Soon Titus finds himself falling under the rebellious influence of Violet, who grew up feed-less and whose body is responding in increasingly erratic ways to the hack. As he watches Violet fall apart, Titus, a boy who grew up in a world hellbent on stripping its citizens of all emotional vocabulary, has to decide whether to keep on fighting the feed, or to do the easiest thing in the world: give in. This book is permanently relevant, heartbreaking and hilarious, and so massively entertaining it should keep readers’ hands off their own portable feeds for a while.

Outrun the Moon, by Stacey Lee
Let Mercy Wong hereby join the ranks of timeless, indomitable girl heroines like Pippi Longstocking, Lyra Belacqua, and Hermione Granger. In Lee’s sophomore novel, Mercy lives in early 20th-century San Francisco’s Chinatown with her fortune-teller mother, launderer father, and weak-lunged brother. Lee brilliantly spins a story in which this Chinese American teen finagles herself entrance, in a bigoted America, to a genteel, all-white girls’ school. But her journey is a rocky one, and Mercy is on the brink of being thrown out when a historic earthquake strikes the city, killing rich and poor alike and shaking people of all stripes out of their houses. In the park where refugees gather, Lee evokes a place out of time, a tiny, hard-won idyll in the midst of a broken city. There, led by a grieving Mercy, the remaining girls of St. Clare’s School reject panic and base survivalism in favor of compassion and collaboration. Mercy’s first-person narration is informed by her mother’s practice, full of lovely insights on Chinese folk beliefs, myth, and medicine. She’s a girl who bends but doesn’t break, and her story is the kind we should be reading right alongside Mick Kelly’s.

Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel, by Sara Farizan
Leila’s realization that she’s gay (by way of a fling with a girl at a Model UN conference) opens her up to a whole new world of observing what’s behind the expected shape of the world, centering in particular on questioning the default settings—whiteness, straightness—of her elite prep school, from her position as an Iranian girl in the closet. A galaxy of people with their own problems lights up around Leila, a believable ecosystem of classmates and family members handling (or not) their own issues and relationships. But there’s also a fox in the henhouse: Saskia, a sexy new girl who likes to kiss Leila just for fun, and just might be bent on making her lose her mind. On top of everything else, the book is funny and warm and a blast to read, with a perfectly believable, mostly well-adjusted heroine trying to do her best.

All the Rage, by Courtney Summers
Summers’ incendiary take on rape culture centers on a girl at the social and economic fringes of her high school and small town, who’s assaulted by a boy cushioned from responsibility by his family’s money and his place atop the popularity food chain. Romy is a heroine who paints on red lipstick like it’s armor, but is so bruised she can barely accept it when a boy who doesn’t know her story shows signs of respectful interest. She struggles to take pleasure in life again, while the people who used to be her friends take her victimization as an excuse to discredit and dehumanize her. It offers a window on a side of our culture so twisted the victims of sexual brutalization somehow bear the guilt of the attack. All the Rage stands on its own and also makes for a phenomenal companion read to rape culture must-read Speak, highlighting the way that some things haven’t changed, and adding another indelible heroine to a growing canon of sexual assault survivors in YA.

The Last Leaves Falling, by Sarah Benwell
Abe Sora is a sensitive, bookish teen and aspiring professor whose life is cut short by his diagnosis with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). The disease won’t just end his life, it will make what remains of it a slow march of bodily degradation, as he loses his ability first to walk unassisted, then to manage even the most basic tasks, like removing his clothing and, most crucially, the typing he relies on to communicate with the outside world. Sora struggles with pain, anger, and fear, with guilt over what his condition is doing to his small family, and with the existential question that won’t stop dogging him: Is it possible to live out his life with dignity? Through the homework message board where he starts as a lurker, he encounters a host of ableist prejudices and watches gloriously mundane lives unfolding from across an unbreachable divide. But the board also introduces him to the two friends who become his IRL confidantes, and ultimately give him the courage to seize an ending of his choosing.

If I Was Your Girl, by Meredith Russo
Russo’s debut is a delicate, deeply compassionate story told through beautiful prose. Amanda is a new girl in a small town, testing a tentative reconciliation with her estranged father and trying to fit in with new friends and an intriguing crush. But Amanda used to be Andrew, before recognizing, after a hate-fueled attack and suicide attempt, that transitioning was the only way to make her life worth living. Flashbacks to her disorienting years living as Andrew punctuate the book, but primarily the story focuses on its heroine’s present, as a gentle beauty whose sense of self-preservation in a normative small town might be outweighed by her desire to share all of herself with the boy she’s falling in love with. An arresting, compassionate reminder of how far some have to go to claim the lives they need to live, written by a transgender author who kicks off with a generous and enlightening foreword.