Teen Books: Top Picks

In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage and great courage as she relates what she must do to survive while keeping secret all that she can.

Beatrice Pryor lives in a dystopian Chicago, which is divided into five factions devoted to different virtues. On a set day every year, sixteen-year-olds must select which faction they will devote the rest of their lives to. Beatrice must choose between staying with her family and being who she really is. Beatrice also has a secret, one she has been warned can mean death if exposed. Now, Beatrice will be forced to make tough choices that can determine the course of her future.

Set over the course of one school year in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits--smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place.

Marcelo Sandoval, a seventeen-year-old boy on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, faces new challenges, including romance and injustice, when he goes to work for his father in the mail room of a corporate law firm.

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers, especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about.

Told from the alternating perspectives of nineteen-year-old Sadie who runs away from her isolated small Colorado town to find her younger sister's killer, and a true crime podcast exploring Sadie's disappearance.

World War II is drawing to a close in East Prussia, and thousands of refugees are on a desperate trek toward freedom, almost all of them with something to hide. Among them are four different teens grappling with the bitter cold, the ever-present danger of falling bombs, and their own dark secrets.

A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery: Humanity has conquered all those things and has even conquered death. Now Scythes are the only ones who can end life, and they are commanded to do so in order to keep the size of the population under control. Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe, a role that neither wants. These teens must master the "art" of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.