A teen novelist, set loose in New York City after her debut sells big. A girl mutated by fever, just discovering the extent of her new supernatural powers. The dregs of the human race, fighting to survive alien invasion. In the best teen books of the year, young protagonists navigate life in our world and at the end of it. They struggle to survive and thrive in imagined universes, dead-end towns, and deep under the sea. These are the year’s most moving, heart-pounding, and engrossing teen books.
It’s a phenomenal thing that some of the biggest titles of the last couple of years have been LGBTQ, from Scott Westerfeld’s Afterworlds, to Nina LaCour’s Everything Leads to You, to Andrew Smith’s Printz Honor–winning Grasshopper Jungle, to Jandy Nelson’s Printz Award–winning I’ll Give You the Sun—not to mention some of this year’s most highly lauded […]
You have a choice this Sunday: binge-watch season 3 of Gilmore Girls while working your way through the trick or treaters’ candy you purposely bought too early…or join the National Novel Writing Month movement and start writing that novel. YOU know the one. Maybe it’s been kicking around your brain for ages even though you’ve never written a word […]
With news that Rainbow Rowell’s next YA novel will be Carry On, a fantasy novel based on the fanfic epic embedded in last year’s Fangirl, comes joy, flailing, and a desire to reread Fangirl immediately. And after you’ve raced through Cath and Levi’s adorable, slow-motion college romance, with stops in the Harry Potter-esque world of Simon Snow, read these […]
The idea that readers can’t identify with unlikable characters is hilariously, fatally flawed. In pursuit of a good story, we’ve rooted for the success (or at least avidly followed the story) of psychopaths, rabbits, the color red, unapologetic pedophiles, and bees. If you stick googly eyes on a rock and give it a purpose (to kill all the other […]