July’s Top Picks in Teen Fiction

Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls, by Lynn Weingarten
Weingarten’s story of a headlong best friendship that ends with one half of the BFF necklace dead promises to be a dark delight. A year after once-airtight Delia and June drifted apart, Delia’s nosedive into hard living has ended with her suicide by fire. But June has the horrible suspicion there’s more to Delia’s death. Her plunge into a small-town netherworld of conspiracy and deceit in search of the truth is intercut with flashbacks to the girls’ intense bond.

Jesse’s Girl, by Miranda Kenneally
Best. Career day. Ever. After Maya fesses up to her rock star dreams, her high school’s principal uses his unexpected connections to let her shadow country star Jesse Scott for a day. But the opportunity is bittersweet: seeing what Jesse has reminds Maya of what she doesn’t, and the singer’s giant ego threatens to derail their connection before it even begins. It’s a fairy-tale romance rooted in realistic issues, that goes down like cold lemonade.

Survive the Night, by Danielle Vega
Vega’s gory horror story is set deep below the streets of New York City. Fresh out of rehab, Casey follows the sociopathic bad girl who first led her astray to a hellish underground rave called Survive the Night. There, far greater horrors than ex-boyfriends and police raids await them, including a fresh corpse in a subway tunnel, and the thing that killed it…

Stone Rider, by David Hofmeyr
In a far-future dystopic wasteland, few humans live to middle age, and 15-year-old Adam has lost his whole family to their world’s harsh conditions. Alone and facing the same fate, he enters the Blackwater Race, taking off on his biomechanical byke in the hopes of winning entrance to the utopian haven of the Sky-Base, a city in the clouds. But first he must beat out vicious competitors, the races’s bloodthirsty overseer, and the brutal landscape itself.

From This Moment, by Lauren Barnholdt
In the third and final book in Barnholdt’s Moment in Time trilogy, in which three former friends face their past promises to each other during a senior trip, Aven takes the wheel. When she, Lyla, and Quinn were freshmen, they swore to commit one act of wild bravery over the course of their high school career. Now, Aven wants to make good on the promise, by finally admitting to her best friend, Liam, that her feelings for him are anything but platonic.

The New Order, by Chris Weitz
In his dystopian thriller The Young World, in which Earth’s adult population falls prey to a fatal plague known as the Sickness, Weitz introduced a Manhattan-based crew of of teen survivors attempting to make their way in a frightening new world. In The New Order, book two in a planned trilogy, survivors (and love-match-waiting-to-happen) Donna and Jefferson are a continent apart, and facing an even more terrifying threat than the Sickness.

The Battle of Zombie Hill, by Nancy Osa
In this new series starter, Rob finds his way to a mysterious beach after his plane crashes over the ocean. There he meets a girl, Frida, who teaches him how to survive. But when he decides survival isn’t enough and tries to make his way home, he finds himself in the middle of a supernatural war against the nefarious Dr. Dirt. Frida and Rob form their own army, pitting their motley forces against zombie attack.

The Escape, by Hannah Jayne
Two boys head off on a hike in the forest abutting their hometown. Only one comes back, bloody and confused, discovered by police chief’s daughter Avery. When the body of the other boy, Adam, is discovered, it’s down to his traumatized companion to remember what happened—before the murder charge is pinned on him. Avery, no stranger to a painful past, wants to help him recover his memories, but quickly learns things aren’t exactly as they seem.

Outrage (Singular Menace series #2), by John Sandford and Michele Cook
Sandford and Cook’s Uncaged combined kids in peril with the dangerous side of animal-rights activism. Foster child Shay went looking for her brother, Odin, after he disappeared following his activist group’s strike on the scary Singular corporation. In follow-up Outrage, Shay and her street kid allies have rescued Odin and human test subject Fenfang from Singular’s secret lab. Now, armed with the memories Singular implanted in Fenfang’s brain, Shay and Odin are working to bring the evil company down.

The Six, by Mark Alpert
Suffering from muscular dystrophy that will eventually take his life, Adam escapes into virtual reality games, where he can leave his physical body behind. And when his father’s artificial intelligence program, Sigma, goes rogue and sets out to destroy humanity, Adam is recruited alongside five other terminally ill teens by the U.S. Army’s Pioneer Project. The six give up their earthly existence, allowing their minds to be uploaded into robot bodies, becoming the world’s best hope of surviving AI attack.