6 of the Best YA Outsider Stories

Mexican Whiteboy, by Matt de la Peña
Like many teens from multicultural families, Danny feels caught between worlds. At his preppy boarding school, Danny, half-Mexican, is too brown. With his father’s relatives in National City, just north of the border, he’s too white. Which makes it pretty easy to retreat and feel like nothing. Readers are thrown, like Danny, into a world of Spanglish, street slang, high obstacles, and tough-talking swagger. But by the end of the book, thanks to baseball and unexpected friendships, Danny begins to feel at home in his own skin, whatever shade it is.

If You Could Be Mine, by Sara Farizan
“What can’t be…” This is the invisible but omnipresent and seemingly iron curtain that separates 17-year-old Sahar from her culture, her family, and her best friend, Nasrin, because in Tehran, it is illegal for two girls to love each other. Sahar thinks they may have found the solution in sexual-reassignment surgery, but will desperate measures only make her an outsider to her true self? This book is a highly celebrated depiction of what it is to be not just gay and/or transsexual in post-revolutionary Iran, but young and marginalized in general.

Lies We Tell Ourselves, by Robin Talley
As if tackling the alienation that permeated school integration of the 1950s wasn’t enough for her first novel, Talley also explores the judgment and exclusion faced by homosexuals in the era. It’s 1959 in Davisburg, Virginia, and the last thing African American student Sarah Dunbar thinks she’ll be finding at her new school are romantic feelings for a girl who thinks she shouldn’t be there in the first place. The unexpectedness of her attraction goes double for white separatist Linda Hairston. From today’s perspective, it’s easy to go in hostile toward Linda, but alternating points of view allow both characters to fully develop, so that we find each is an outsider in her own perilous way. The language might make some readers uncomfortable, which is precisely the point.

King Dork Approximately, by Frank Portman
The loooong-awaited sequel to one of my favorite books (YA and beyond) reacquaints readers with Tom Henderson (aka Chi-Mo, aka King Dork), whose particular anarchist brand of “preemptive self-ostracism” will appeal to many. A punk-rock antihero with one friend and a caterpillar-shaped head wound to his name, Tom is continuing Tenth Grade: Act 2 at a new school (his old one has closed thanks to a pervy assistant principal busted with the help of Tom’s Catcher Code [see, Catcher in the Rye]). There are so many misadventures and blindingly hilarious digressions, it’s hard to sum up. You’ll just have to read it.

How to Save a Life, by Sara Zarr
Sometimes we’re born outsiders, sometimes we become them. Sometimes others make us outsiders, sometimes it’s a choice we make ourselves. And sometimes it’s only another outsider who can pull us in. These are themes National Book Award finalist Zarr explores in her fourth novel, told through dual protagonists Jill MacSweeney, who has lost her dad and is about to gain a(n unwanted) baby sister, and Mandy Kalinowski, a pregnant teen who needs a mother more than she wants to be one. Zarr is a gifted author and observer of the teen condition, with a voice that veers between tender and unvarnished but always remains authentic.

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Love it or hate it (or write two whole books about how much you hate it—see, King Dork), you can’t deny that Catcher is the grandaddy of outsider stories. Can a wealthy white boy from the Upper East Side of New York City really be considered an outsider? Holden Caulfield painfully and vividly paints himself as one in the classic coming-of-age story, which is part of the book’s brilliance: Being an outsider is as much about what’s going on inside of you as what’s going on outside.