In May of 2017, I asked the readers of this site to recommend books for teen and young adult readers. You gave me this list: over 100 titles, nearly all of them with hundreds (some of them thousands) of five star reviews on Amazon. It’s a list that covers so many genres and has the potential to turn so many students into lifelong readers. Thank you so much for your help with this!

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About the Categories

To help you find books more easily, I put them into rough categories based on their subject matter. Some of these categories have pretty broad names, and it’s clear that some categories are entirely missing. For example, I have a category for contemporary Native American books but not for books that represent any other ethnicities (even though lots of other groups are present in many other books). This happened because I built the list based on reader recommendations, not because I was deliberately trying to exclude certain groups. In many cases, I had trouble deciding how to categorize a book: Lots of books cross all kinds of genres. I hope that with future recommendations, we can continue to build and refine the list the list so that the categories are more accurate and the list better represents all cultures.

Mature Content: Proceed with Caution

I have not personally read all of these books, but I know for a fact that some of them contain material that may not be appropriate for younger readers. When compiling the list from the recommendations, I had to remove some titles because they were not labeled on Amazon as “Teen” or “Young Adult” books, and it was difficult to tell from the books’ descriptions whether they might contain mature content, so I figured better safe than sorry.

With that said, not every book here is appropriate for all students. My advice is that before recommending a book to a student, you should read it first (or talk to someone who has), read the reviews on Amazon, and check Common Sense Media to see if they have a review; these will specifically describe any content that may be considered inappropriate for some readers.

Suggestions Welcome

This list is by no means finished; I will continue to add to it over time. If you would like to suggest a title, please send us an email here and we’ll take a look. Please do not submit more than 3 titles at once, and please only recommend books that are either labeled as YA/teen or that you have personally read and can verify that they do not contain mature content. I realize this is a gray area, and lots of YA books contain violence, sex, profanity, drug use, and other material some parents may not want their kids to read, which is why we’re trying to at least stick with books that have been labeled for younger readers.