6 Girl-Powered YAs on the Ways Music Can Change Your Life

This Song Will Save Your Life, by Leila Sales
After a suicide attempt that’s more cry for help than bid for oblivion, Elise finds herself even more of an outcast than before. But all that changes the night she discovers an underground club while walking the streets of her hometown. There, she meets new friends including a sexy DJ willing to teach her his trade. Soon she’s living for the night, when she can become herself in the DJ booth—but figuring out how to combine her day- and nighttime selves ends up being more challenging than learning to beat match.

Screaming Divas, by Suzanne Kamata
The Screaming Divas are four damaged and difficult girls who connect through their need to lose themselves in music. Trudy’s a delinquent, Cassandra’s an addict, Esther’s trying to figure out her sexuality, and Harumi can barely escape from under her parents’ thumbs. When they’re onstage, none of that matters—but will the band be enough to save them? Kamata evokes the kinetic energy of artistic collaboration—and the dark flipside of artistic temperament.

After Tupac and D Foster, by Jacqueline Woodson
Woodson’s book captures that shocking, mystical moment when music becomes a conduit to a larger world, familiar to so many who used mixtapes and playlists as the first bridges to a place outside their own experience. When our unnamed narrator and her best friend meet D Foster running free in their Queens neighborhood, she opens their eyes not only to the music of Tupac, but to the possibilities of a life beyond what they know. In spare, evocative prose, Woodson makes the argument for art’s power to expand your soul.

I’m Glad I Did, by Cynthia Weil
JJ Green is an aspiring songwriter in 1963 when she’s offered an assistant job in Manhattan’s Brill Building, where legendary songwriters and singers have made their mark. Her parents disapprove of her musical path, and set down an ultimatum: she has three months to convince someone to record one of her songs, or she resets her sights on law school.  Grammy-winning songwriter Weil is the perfect guide through the glittering, shady, bygone world of the 1960s recording industry, complete with a sexy writing partner, a faded singer in need of one great comeback song, and a sense of the turbulent times outside the Brill Building’s doors.

Girl Defective, by Simmone Howell
Girl Defective is about first love, small-town life, and the power of music to tell you what you’re feeling when you can’t figure it out yourself. Following the defection of her performance-artist mother, Skylark Martin was raised by her dad in small-town Australia, where she and her eccentric little brother help him run indie record store The Wishing Well. With the help of her family’s inexhaustible vinyl collection, Sky deals with confusing feelings for both the sexy, tragic new shop employee and her It Girl best friend, Nancy, while trying to figure out where her own future lies. Though Sky doesn’t play music herself, she knows that great songs can define you, cheer you, and even save you. We count her as a girl who rocks.

Supergirl Mixtapes, by Meagan Brothers
Fleeing depression and suffocating small-town life with her father and grandmother, Maria heads to New York to reconnect with the artist mother she barely knows. When school sucks and her mom’s maternal instincts leave something to be desired, the “supergirl mixtapes” her best friend sends help Maria adjust to her new life. A gritty portrait of 90s New York and constant undercurrent of music fandom animate her struggles to reconcile herself with her estranged mother and the father she left behind, and to figure out where she really belongs.