The Serpent King Author Jeff Zentner on His Top 10 Southern-Set YA Novels

In Jeff Zentner’s gorgeous southern-set debut, The Serpent King, three best friends and outsiders face an uncertain, post–high school future. Dill Early is the musically gifted son of an imprisoned Pentecostal preacher, Lydia a fashion blogger who has already made a name for herself in the outside world, and Travis a gentle giant who uses internet forums and fantasy worlds to escape his abusive father. It’s a book that crackles with sharp character portraits, beautiful writing, a claustrophobic small-town setting, and the perilous power of hope for something more.
Zentner will be appearing at the Brentwood, TN, Barnes & Noble on Saturday, June 11, at 2 p.m. to read from and sign copies of The Serpent King as part of B-Fest, our first ever teen book festival. Here he is to share his 10 favorite southern-set YA novels.
The American South is one of my favorite settings for literature. It’s such a vibrant, haunted, and beautiful place, filled with ghosts and stories. It’s not hard to see why so many of America’s greatest storytellers—whatever their chosen medium—have come from here. Great art grows up from the soil like kudzu.
So it stands to reason that some of my favorite books ever are YA books set in the South. In no particular order, here are ten of them.

Where Things Come Back, by John Corey Whaley
This is the only book ever to have won both the Printz and Morris awards, and when you read it, it’s abundantly clear why. It’s about 17-year-old Cullen Witter, who is making his way through a summer of love and loss, trying to hold his family together, while his sleepy hometown of Lily, Arkansas, comes alive over a sighting of a species of woodpecker thought to be extinct. Meanwhile, there’s an apparently unconnected narrative woven through about a young missionary struggling with faith and searching for meaning. This book is complex, hilarious, sad, poignant, and lyrical, and it brims with the atmosphere of the rural South. This is the book that made me see there was a place in young adult literature for a story like The Serpent King, and so in addition to this book’s considerable merits, it will always be one of the most important books I’ve ever read.

Simon vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda, by Becky Albertalli
This book also won the Morris Award and was long-listed for the National Book Award, and it’s also extremely easy to see why. Set in suburban Atlanta, it’s the story of Simon Spier, Oreo-lover extraordinaire. Simon is gay and not out of the closet. He has been emailing with an anonymous boy from his school named Blue. Another student finds out and blackmails Simon with his emails in order to enlist Simon’s help in getting to know a girl. This book is exactly the right amount of everything: the right amount of sweet, the right amount of melancholy, the right amount of profound, the right amount of funny. It’s full of vibrant characters and features one of the most wonderful, supportive families I’ve ever seen in a novel. It’s one of the most universally loved YA books I’ve ever encountered and certainly one of the most important. This is the kind of book that becomes a lifeline to kids.

Mosquitoland, by David Arnold
If you’ve ever wondered what people mean when they talk about a book’s “voice,” you should pick up a copy of Mosquitoland and read it. That’s what voice is—when a character’s personality leaps from the page and grabs you by the lapels. I don’t know if it’s entirely accurate to say that this book is set in the South, since it’s actually a road-trip book, but most of the road trip takes place in the South and originates in Jackson, Mississippi (aka Mosquitoland). This is the story of Mary Iris Malone (aka Mim), a plucky, sassy, snarky girl who steals money to hop a Greyhound bus north to Ohio in order to find her mother. Hijinks (many quite bizarre) ensue as Mim meets a cast of characters worthy of a Flannery O’Connor novel. Mim, like the South itself, is magnificently flawed and lovable. And like the South, once you spend some time with her, you’ll never want to leave. This is truly a novel in the great Southern tradition of storytelling. It’ll make you laugh and cry while giving you a thousand new favorite book quotes. It’s a masterful book that can do all that.

Looking for Alaska, by John Green
Before John Green was JOHN GREEN, he wrote one of the great masterpieces of young adult literature, Looking for Alaska. This is the story of Miles “Pudge” Halter, a kid is obsessed with the final words of famous people who finds himself at a prestigious boarding school in Alabama. He becomes enamored with Alaska Young, a beautiful, intriguing girl. I would have loved this book as a teenager and related deeply to its too-clever-for-their-own-good characters. This is another book that made me see there might be a place in YA literature for the sort of stories I wanted to write.

The Love That Split the World, by Emily Henry
I knew I was going to love this book the minute I heard the pitch for it, which compared it to Friday Night Lights. Sure, this book takes place in small-town Kentucky, but the comparison is apt, because it too captures all the aching heartbreak and ramshackle beauty of the rural South. This magical-realist time travel novel tells the story of Natalie Cleary, who’s months away from going on to bigger and better things at Brown University. But some very odd things start happening to her—things that involve romance and lots of it. Through her gorgeous, lyrical prose, Henry makes small-town Kentucky one of the most prominent characters in the book and captures with effortless precision the musical rhythms of Southern speech. This one’s going to be a classic.

My Heart and Other Black Holes, by Jasmine Warga
This book is also set in rural Kentucky and tells the story of Aysel, whose obsession with physics is matched only by her obsession with plotting her own death. She’s a pariah in her small town, enduring the whispers of classmates after her father committed a violent crime. I loved this book because of how vividly it describes the physical and emotional sensations of depression and how it captures the feeling of being trapped. The best books about the South deal with the good and bad of it, and feeling trapped and judged can be one of the downsides of living in the South. This is another book that will be a lifesaver to kids.

Suffer Love, by Ashley Herring Blake
This book has a special place in my heart because it’s set just outside of Nashville, my beloved hometown. It’s told from the point of view of Hadley and Sam, who learn during the course of their burgeoning friendship that they have something in common: their parents’ infidelities. This book explores relationships and love in all of their complexities and does so with honesty, never looking away from the messiness of growing up. What I love about this book is that it could have been set somewhere more glamorous and sexy than a suburb of Nashville. But many, many teens in America grow up in unglamorous places, and they deserve to see their stories told with this caliber of writing, in a setting that conveys the universality of the struggles of coming of age.

If I Was Your Girl, by Meredith Russo
Speaking of stories that haven’t been told enough, this is the story of Amanda Hardy, the new girl in small-town Lambertville, Tennessee. She begins to spend time with a handsome, kind boy at school, but she’s petrified he’s going to learn her secret: she’s transgender. This book is a double whammy, telling a story about a transgender girl and about a girl coming of age in the rural South, two underrepresented stories in YA. Meredith Russo’s writing is elegant, poignant, and hilarious, with a pitch-perfect ear for Southern speech.

Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward
I’m cheating a little here because this wasn’t marketed as a YA book, but it does have a young adult protagonist and point of view, so I’m counting it. This is the story of Esch, her father, and her brothers in the fraught days leading up to Hurricane Katrina on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This book is as gorgeous and brutal as anything ever written and is one of my top five favorite books of all time. It will leave your jaw in the red dirt.

The Key to Extraordinary, by Natalie Lloyd
I’m cheating here, too, because this also isn’t a YA novel; it was sold as a middle grade. But while Natalie Lloyd writes for children, her stories are anything but childish. The Key to Extraordinary is the story of Emma, who is trying to find a treasure that could save her quirky Tennessee town. She is a quintessential Southern storyteller—her stories are like mason jars packed with wit, wistfulness, humor, and heart. It’s no wonder the Obamas own a copy of Lloyd’s first book, A Snicker of Magic. There are so many lines in Key that will burn themselves onto your heart. I wish I had her books when I was a kid. I’m glad I have them now.
Jeff Zentner’s The Serpent King is on sale now.