Six Fantastic Stand-Alone Young Adult Books
- The Bossy Bookworm
- 5 hours ago
- 6 min read
Aren't young adult books just the best?
I was recently speaking to a group about publishing and books, and they asked for some young adult book recommendations. Which brings me to revisiting this post from a few years ago. I could have listed so many fantastic young adult titles here, but I picked these varied, wonderful six.
Young adult is one of my favorite genres to read for fun and to edit. The main protagonists are often figuring out the world, their place in it, and who they are and want to be. They're making mistakes and realizing where they draw their own lines in the sand. Things are big, and young people's feelings about all of it understandably vacillate between joy, dread, confusion, and wonder.
Some other Bossy Bookworm Greedy Reading Lists you might like featuring a number of young adult books: Six Royally Magical Young Adult Series, Six Magical Fairy Tales Grown-Ups Will Love, and Six Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Novels.
You can search to find alllll of my young adult posts on this site--some are part of a series, others stand on their own--by going to the Bossy Book Reviews part of the site menu and then to Search by Category, then choosing Young Adult.
What are your favorite young adult books, or books that made you delight in feeling all the feelings young people face?
01 Believarexic by J. J. Johnson
I guess I should preface this glowing review by noting that I worked on this book before it was published. (And I had an uncharacteristically tough time noting any editorial issues because I was so captivated by the story and kept having to go back to force myself to read it with an editor's eye.) I also have a t-shirt with this book title on it. And I also adore the author.
So why the Believarexic obsession? In Johnson's book, her fifteen-year-old self struggles with an eating disorder and enters a residential treatment program to try to heal physically and emotionally. The center and its methods aren't what she'd imagined, and she must cope with more than she could have predicted, including accusations, stressors, confusion, the challenges and joys of various interpersonal relations, physical and emotional discomfort, and important realizations that come about in unexpected ways.
Johnson transports you to her late 1980s teenage bubble and allows you to live alonside her through her sharply life-changing experiences. Her young voice is honest and lovely and funny and powerful. I wanted to abandon everything to tear through this book.
Johnson also wrote the wonderful books The Theory of Everything and This Girl Is Different.
This book is about to be slightly edited and will be a modern edition that remains true to the late 1980s setting into which Johnson so skillfully place the reader.
02 A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi
In A Very Large Expanse of Sea, it's been a year since the events of 9/11, and Shirin, a sixteen-year-old Muslim girl who lives in the United States, is still living with the uncomfortable, sometimes frightening fallout. She's judged and suspected everywhere she goes because of the way she looks.
Shirin has learned to brace herself against prejudice because she wears a hijab, or because of her religion. She sticks with her brother, coping with her stress by breakdancing (this part is, of course, glorious) with her brother and focusing on music.
But then Ocean James comes along. It's like Ocean is living in another world from Shirin, but he sees her, really sees her, and she finds herself wanting to let someone into her own world for the first time in a long time.
Oh, I loved this book! Mafi provides such excruciating teen angst and an unfolding first love with rich layers of diversity--plus prejudice, fear, and ignorance that complicates everything. The ending felt rushed, but my love for this book outweighs any disappointment about the ending by a mile.
03 All the Bright Places by Jennifer Niven
Violet is still reeling from her sister's death. She's eager to graduate from high school and escape her small Indiana town, but the days are interminably long.
Theodore Finch considers his balance between life and death every day, weighing the factors that entice him to keep going and those that tempt him to stop.
When Violet and Theodore encounter each other, they find that they can finally let down their guards, showing each other the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of themselves.
Could what's between them even be love? Or are they simply linked by their pain and their honesty--and is that bond enough to bring them peace?
In All the Bright Places, Niven offers a lovely, wonderfully odd, sometimes sad story, with vivid characters, hope, devastating loss, and love.
(I see from the Netflix logo on the cover that this is a movie now! Have you seen it? Any thoughts?)
04 Gwen & Art Are Not in Love by Lex Croucher
Lex Croucher's queer medieval rom-com--the author's debut young-adult novel--is an absolute gem; it's full of excellent banter and lots of heart. I smiled while reading this one.
“Nobody else is ever going to care as much as you do about the things that you want, Gwendoline. So it's up to you --you can put them aside forever, if you can live with that, or you can put on your big-girl girdle and demand more for yourself.”
It's hundreds of years after King Arthur's reign, and his descendant and namesake Arthur, a future lord and committed partier and social butterfly, has long been betrothed to the short-tempered princess Gwendoline.
Gwendoline has strong opinions and is feeling constricted in her prescribed royal role even without the weight of her pending marriage upon her.
But Gwendoline and Arthur detest each other. And when they're forced to spend the summer together at Camelot to prepare for their upcoming nuptials, it doesn't take long for them to realize that Art has been kissing a boy and that Gwen has a crush on the only female knight in the kingdom.
I just loved the redefining of class-driven limitations (as with the attraction between Gwen's lady's maid and Arthur's right-hand-man); the unorthodox and touching loyalty within a reimagined Gwen-Arthur relationship; and the LGBTQ-positive, actively reinvented possibilities for the royals.
For my full review, please check out Gwen and Art Are Not in Love.
05 Goodbye Days by Jeff Zentner
Carver's life was rocked after he sent a text to his three best friends friends moments before the car they were in crashed, killing them all.
Now everyone--Eli's angry twin sister with her attempts to freeze out Carver at school; Mars's father with his push for a criminal investigation-- seems to be blaming Carver for his beloved friends' deaths. But Carter is taking self-loathing to another level all by himself. Can a new therapist; an unlikely, grieving girlfriend; and Blake's grandmother help Carver come to terms with what's happened and help him find a way to move forward?
In Goodbye Days, we get what feels like a genuine peek into the boys’ friendship via their really funny banter and their endearingly oddball, silly, spot-on, laid-bare-honest train-of-thought discussions, as well as through their plausible, Carver-imagined exchanges. I adored all of this.
This isn’t the point, but I admit that I was distracted by no one even temporarily slinging some of the immense amount of potential blame toward the person who answers a text while driving rather the person that sent it. I expected this to be touched on, if only in the heat of the moment. When wild and awful, heartbreaking thoughts are flying after a tragedy, and when some people are focused on settling responsibility (and while Carver is being vilified), this felt like something that might come up.
Carver’s plunge into the penance he feels he needs to experience, especially with Mars’s dad, slayed me.
Goodbye Days is so very very sad and so very very funny.
This is a gem from Zentner, who also wrote The Serpent King and Rayne and Delilah's Midnite Matinee, and In the Wild Light, a book about best friends set in Appalachia.
06 Driving by Starlight by Anat Deracine
Leena and Mishie are sixteen-year-olds living in Saudi Arabia. They listen to forbidden music, secretly wear Western clothing, and otherwise rebel in small ways against the Saudi cultural police.
Driving by Starlight is a story about family, independence, gender inequality, and a youthful yearning for freedom. I loved the strong female protagonists and their fire and grit and growth.
Both of the more modern-day storylines were wrapped up neatly with a bow. I would have been in favor of having the romantic element being tied up without the Eve aspect, or having neither of them tied up at all. The “end of movie”-type closure for both felt too convenient, and even a little dismissive of the complexities of the time and of the specific difficulties of the characters' situations.
However, I love love loved this book. Driving by Starlight is a deep, lovely, meaningful story with a vivid Saudi Arabian setting and conflicts related to religion, friendship, gender, and family. The story celebrates true friendship, loyalty, and fantastic, clever, clever ladies overcoming obstacles in their paths.
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