21 Recent And Upcoming YA Books That I Absolutely Love

Regency romance meets The Count of Monte Cristo in this divine tale of high-society revenge. Disgraced and sent away, Lady Ela Dalvi has spent the past three years soaking in bitterness, plotting revenge against Poppy, her former best friend and the cause of her current turmoil. Taking on the alias Lyra Whitley, she begins to worm her way back into elite social circles, doing her best to take Poppy down and unexpectedly reconnecting with Keston, the boy she’d fallen for prior to her downfall. 

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Bracken’s newest series begins triumphantly with this Arthurian fantasy. Mortal Tamsin has been working as a Hollower for the last decade, breaking into crypts and stealing treasure to keep herself and her brother, Cabell, alive. She’s searching for a legendary ring that might be able to remove a curse from Cabell, and she thinks her long-absent thief of a foster father may have taken it when he absconded. To find it, she will have to team up with her rival Emrys. 

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When Stevie wakes up after a bad fall, she doesn’t remember anything about the last two years. So when Nora, a girl she apparently fell in love with during the missing time, shows up, Stevie has no recollection of her or their time together plotting to escape their conservative town. As Stevie relearns what her relationship with her parents and friends has become, reestablishes her connection with her own sexuality, and rediscovers her feelings for Nora, she has to come to terms with the vast distance between the person she thought she was when she woke up and the person she has become. Derrick’s solo debut is a heartfelt musing on love and memory. 

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Dominican American Yolanda is looking forward to her upcoming initiation into her family’s bruja tradition when she suddenly starts having visions of violence. They all seem to center around a new white student at her high school, the son of a politician with a past containing racist incidents and a present causing problems in the activist group at school, the Brave Space Club. Yolanda has to do her best to grapple with her visions and stop a tragedy before it begins. Vividly imagined and nuanced, Yolanda’s story is one not to be missed. 

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Smith’s genre-bending companion novel to the beloved Hearts Unbroken is a deliciously spooky adventure teen audiences will devour. Hughie Wolfe (Mvskoke) is volunteering at a new spooky show and Halloween attraction called Harvest House. But after he learns that it features a character described as the vengeful spirit of an “Indian maiden,” he becomes unsettled by the organizer’s stereotypical and offensive choices and tries to figure out when to speak up. All the while, strange things are happening near Harvest House, and Hughie and friends decide to investigate whether a haunting is truly taking place. 

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If you’re like me, and can’t get enough of “main character travels to a new place and ends up in a rom-com” stories, you’ll be delighted by Viva Lola Espinoza. Lola is spending the summer in Mexico City with her grandmother, where she’s shocked to learn that her bad luck in love is in fact a curse. Luckily, her job at her cousin’s restaurant brings her into contact with Javi, who is willing to help her break it. But then there’s also the very flirty Rio... 

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Samantha and her mother have very different expectations for the future, and that’s never been more clear than when her mother tells her to run for homecoming queen. After a huge fight, Samantha ends up facing a very different version of her mother: the high school version…in the ’90s. Startled by the fact that she’s clearly traveled through time, and believing that the only way to get back to her own time is to help her mother win homecoming queen, she starts to integrate herself into the school culture — including snagging a cute love interest of her own. Filled with the vibes of the 1990s, without shying away from some of the problems of the era, Throwback is a complete joy.  

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Lois Lane’s big-city summer isn’t going as planned. Her roommate is annoying, the internship she’s at is boring, and her boss is kind of the worst. It’s only when she uncovers a scandal that she decides she needs to veer off course, working together with the last person she expected to create her own website for young women. Kuhn and Jovellanos have whipped up a lovely fresh take on a classic heroine.  

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Ying’s debut in YA is an intense and emotionally layered graphic novel tracing the effects of an eating disorder on a teen’s life. Valerie has been bingeing and purging for years in secret, trying to cope with a mother who monitors her weight and makes constant body-shaming comments. With a tragedy looming on the horizon, it’s only a matter of time before parts of Valerie’s carefully hidden secret begin to come to light, and it will be up to her to ask for help.

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Harriet and her historian father have transformed the old plantation in Louisiana where they live into an enslaved people’s museum, and the pair run tours together. While the loss of Harriet’s mother is still fresh, it’s the arrival of another mother that throws her world into chaos — that is, a mother-daughter duo with big plans for the property next door, including turning it into a wedding venue. And when her school announces it will be the new location for prom, Harriet is ready to use any power she can to cancel it. McWilliams is an expert at character building, and Harriet is a wonderful and welcome addition to YA. 

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Imogen is an ally, not just to her queer little sister and her queer best friends Lili and Gretchen, but to the community as a whole. But she’s straight. Definitely straight. When Lili confesses that she told her new college friends she and Imogen used to date, Imogen plays along. But as she begins to spend more time with the lovely Tessa, Imogen’s lie starts to feel more like it may have been the truth all along. Imogen, Obviously is perhaps Albertalli’s best book yet, with an introspective look at how identity can shift and an engaging love story. 

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Senior year has arrived for Effie Galanos, but her mind has been firmly on college for a long time. After all, she has to not only consider what school might fit — her major, where she wants to be located, campus culture — but also make sure the campus is accessible enough for her to maneuver in her wheelchair. And when it seems like her longtime crush is also applying to her dream school, she begins to imagine a whole new world of possibilities. Where You See Yourself is an absolutely necessary and affirming addition to YA shelves.

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This eye-catching nonfiction title uses full-page illustrations to explore American identity and history. With collaged archival photographs, maps, documents, graphic elements, and handwritten text, Aberg-Riger deconstructs myths of American history in our society today.

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Don’t go in the water. That’s all Bronwyn seems to hear, over and over again. The only reason she's even in Hillwoods is because her grandmother is dying, which hardly makes for a lighthearted trip. Bronwyn’s cousin Anais tries to keep her safe, but outsiders rarely understand that the Hillwoods residents’ rituals are less about superstition and more about survival. Tirado’s sophomore novel is yet another spectacular thriller/horror tale that will please those who love things going bump in the night. 

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Superstar author Jason Reynolds returns to the world of Miles Morales in this all-too-welcome sequel. While sitting in his in-school suspension — his grand prize for saving the world, naturally — Miles can sense (Spidey-sense, that is) something wrong. But the appearance of an unexpected foe leads him to a new goal: stopping the destruction of the world’s, especially Black and brown, history. 

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Soccer is everything to Valentina Castillo-Green, so when a fight with longtime rival Leticia Ortiz leads to her team losing not just the game, but also respect from her teammates and chances with college recruiters, it’s devastating. Needing to escape home and her father’s intense expectations, she heads to her childhood summer soccer camp, only to find she’s co-captaining a team with Leticia. Marie gives her protagonist space to catastrophically fuck up and later work to earn redemption, giving this rivals-to-lovers story huge emotional depth and allowing it to soar off the page. 

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This achingly beautiful story follows an Iranian family over 80 years, from the perspective of three generations of teens. In 1939, Bobby hides his sexuality, knowing acknowledging it publicly would lose him the MGM studio contract his mother did so much to get him. In 1978, Saeed’s family sends him to the US after learning of his involvement in the emerging revolution. And in 2019, Moud is openly gay, heading to Tehran with his father Saeed to visit his dying grandfather. 

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Neilson’s sophomore novel is a haunting love story for the ages, perfectly layered and exquisitely told. Aria and Derek were best friends until a few years ago, and Aria has never quite known the reason for their rift. She didn’t expect the cause of Derek’s odd behavior to be that there’s a ghost inside him, one that will either get what it wants or take Derek’s life instead. Aria herself used to see ghosts, but a tea brewed by her grandfather severed her connection to the spirit world. Now, she has to reach back inside to find the gifts the tea quieted to try and help the boy she cares about. 

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This sequel to the stellar Ballad & Dagger is joining an already epic bibliography, considering Older is one of the best fantasy authors writing today. After the revelation that Mateo and Chela are both gods in human form, the pair discover that raising their community’s sunken island home, San Madrigal, was just the start. In Brooklyn, Mateo is watching the diaspora community fight each other, while San Madrigal is playing host to both Chela and armies of creatures fighting to survive. 

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This exceptional sequel to Little Thieves (a retelling of “The Goose Girl” from the point of view of the wicked handmaiden) not only improves on its already great predecessor but is genuinely one of the best things I’ve ever read. Vanja may have started a cult, but she didn’t mean to. It was just supposed to get her out of a tight spot, but now the god she invented has turned out to be real and has come to claim her boyfriend as a virgin sacrifice…

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High school friends Casey, Jacob, Eddie, and Zoe are the anonymous creators behind We’ll Never Tell; the viral YouTube channel features some of LA’s most interesting places, and they often have to trespass to get their footage. On their last hurrah before splitting up after graduation, they’re heading to the Valentini murder house, last occupied in 1972 when a gruesome murder-suicide took place there. But it’s hardly an easy in and out. After an alarm is tripped, they all rush to escape and Jacob gets left behind — dead. The three remaining members have to work to put together what happened in the house in both the past and present. Thriller fans, especially those who love One of Us Is Lying, will devour this page-turner.

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