Feeling the rush when you read your first YA novel is something you remember always. The standards that the characters set for you, the plot, the scenes, the love, the hate, the dynamics… everything is blended so well together like a smoothie you wish would never end.
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Many of us have started our reading journey from YA novels like “The Fault in our Stars”. We have read it once, twice, thrice, and bazillion times. Some of the characters we swooned upon were even brought to life through movies and series and our hearts has never been happier just like Maddy.
So today, we have brought 15 most interesting books to read for you –
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephan Chbosky
- The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
- Ophelia After All by Racquel Marie
- Mirror Girls by Kelly McWilliams
- Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
- A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
- Are you my Twin Flame by Neha Sharma
- Paper Towns by John Green
- The Eclipsed Sun by Ramita Sengupta
- All my Rage by Sabaa Tahir
The ever-so-famous coming-of-age novel is about an introverted and observant child, Charlie. Charlie had a very unconventional style of thinking – ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ shows how he navigates as he goes through the worlds of adolescence and adulthood, and how he interacts with people around him. This book talks about the entire spectrum of an adolescent’s life – sexuality, drug use, rape, and mental health along with many pop cultural references, literary works, and much more.
To Order The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephan Chbosky – Click Here.
Charlie befriends two seniors – Patrick and Sam. With the deteriorating relationship with his sister, he mingles with the wrong crowd. Some wrong moves under the influence, his downfall made him alone and depressed. A reader would understand his symptoms and would conclude that he has PTSD. After being admitted to a mental hospital, all his issues had one beginning, his aunt Helen.
Throughout the book, this psychological trauma explains his flashbacks and derealization stages. As the story comes to an end, Charlie eventually comes to terms with his past: “Even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there”. Charlie decides to “participate” in life.
Angie Thomas’s 2017 young adult novel The Hate U Give was published in 2017. It is Thomas’s debut novel, expanded from a short tale she wrote in college in response to Oscar Grant’s police shooting. Starr Carter, a 16-year-old African-American girl from a poor area who attends an elite private school in a mostly white, affluent part of town, narrates the book.
After witnessing a white police officer shoot and kill her childhood friend, Khalil, Starr becomes embroiled in a national news event. She speaks out against the shooting in increasingly public ways, and societal tensions explode into a riot after a grand jury decides not to indict the officer. Angie Thomas wanted to broaden readers’ awareness of the Black Lives Matter movement as well as the obstacles faced by black Americans who use code-switching while creating the novel.
The novel’s climax happens during the riot that follows the grand jury ruling. Maverick’s store is successfully defended by Starr, Chris, Seven, and DeVante, whom Maverick assisted in leaving the King Lords. The community rises up to King, and as a result of DeVante’s testimony, King is caught and is anticipated to serve a significant sentence in jail. Starr resolves to keep Khalil’s memory alive and to fight injustice in the future.
A heartwarming and effortlessly inclusive coming-of-age tale that expertly conveys the agonising tension of LGBT adolescence. Ophelia, 17, a hopeless romantic, flower-obsessed Cuban and White, knows that the future is approaching quickly. Soon, she’ll graduate and begin college, leaving behind parents she gets along with, best friends with whom she shares everything, and even her beloved rose garden. With so much of her change life, she wishes she could stick to certain rituals.
Secondary characters abound in the narrative, all of whom learn and struggle alongside one another in a tangled web of adolescent friendships. With one of the most diverse characters, this novel covers the life of a high schooler more maturely and rationally.
This is a contemporary coming-of-age story, a profound voyage of self-discovery. It’s sloppy in the way that teens are, but it’s also really sincere.
Charlie Yates and Magnolia Heathwood were separated as infants after their parents were brutally lynched for love across the colour line. Charlie is now a young Black organiser in Harlem at the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, while Magnolia is the heiress to a cotton plantation in rural Georgia. Magnolia has no knowledge of her ancestry, but secrets are difficult to keep in a town haunted by the ghosts of its slave-holding past.
The sisters reunite as adolescents in Eureka, Georgia, a severely haunted town where ghosts linger centuries after their deaths and peril lurk behind every mirror. They couldn’t be more dissimilar, but they’ll need each other to put the ghosts of the past to rest, break the mirrors’ fatal spell, and learn what sisterhood means in a racially divided country.
Kelly McWilliams employs alternate chapters voiced by each sister to take on the problem of colourism, producing a poignant exhibition of sisterhood and bravery amid historical facts, literalizing the ghosts of the Deep South with a vibrant backdrop of haunted homes and vengeful spirits.
Malinda Lo wrote Last Night at the Telegraph Club, a young adult historical book. It is set in 1950s San Francisco and follows Lily Hu, the teenage daughter of Chinese immigrants, as she discovers her sexuality.
As Lily’s story progresses, she and Kath explore their feelings and learn more about the San Francisco LGBT underworld. Simultaneously, the “red panic” is instilling dread throughout Chinatown, as even naturalised or American-born Chinese people are threatened with deportation and forced to spy on others. The risk hits home when Lily’s father’s citizenship papers are confiscated during questioning about communist activities in Chinatown, and Lily is confronted with the potential ramifications of her own actions on her family.
To Order Last Night at the telegraph Club by Malinda Lo – Click Here.
Lily can’t recall when the question arose, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of the Telegraph Club, a lesbian bar.
There isn’t much in historical fiction concerning Asian lesbians. This book’s contents are a unique blend of LGBTQ+, Asian American, and San Francisco history, and they work brilliantly together.
Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder is a young adult mystery series. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder (2019), Good Girl, Bad Blood (2020), As Good As Dead (2021), and Kill Joy (2022) are the four novels in the series (2022).
Andrea “Andie” Bell, a high school student, was allegedly murdered by her boyfriend, Salil “Sal” Singh, who then committed suicide. The case has officially been closed, but 17-year-old Pippa “Pip” Fitz-Amobi believes the true killer is still at large. With the help of Sal’s younger brother Ravi, she begins a project (an EPQ in the British version) pretending to investigate media involvement in the case while actually attempting to identify the true killer. They end up interviewing various people in and around the imaginary town of Little Kilton, near London, which is replaced by the equally fictional Fairview, Connecticut in the American edition.
They discover that Sal is innocent and that she was also murdered by Andie’s killer to cover up the crime. They eventually figure out what happened, clearing Sal’s name and apprehending his true killer. Pip also concludes that Andie was murdered by someone else, which leads to the arrest of four people in connection with the case, two of whom are killers. In the end, her idea garners a lot of attention in their town and in the news.
Nyra and Kritika are two neighbours in their forties, with all their major life decisions figured out. Nyra is a wonderful mother who basks in the lap of leisure time at a dream home of a flat in Gurugram. Kritika, on the other hand, has resumed her prior profession and leads a fascinating life. Happiness, however, is a choice that cannot be coerced; otherwise, it would all be a sham. So, even luxury and stability do not appear alluring to those who are tangled in miserable marriages and have a significant portion of what makes life pleasant missing.
Nyra’s share of happiness has been snatched by her husband who is an alcoholic and a sex addict. While Kritika’s husband is a proud womaniser, who is incapable of introspection. When Siddhartha steps into Nyra’s life, another unpleasant experience buds for her, but it soon branches forth to alter the course of both Nyra’s and Kritika’s life. Siddhartha then becomes the major catalyst that directs the protagonists’ love story toward realization.
‘Are you my Twin Flame?’ is a book about the safe haven of a bond two lost women found in each other and how they fell in love…
The novel follows the protagonist, Quentin “Q” Jacobsen, as he grows up and searches for Margo Roth Spiegelman, his neighbour and childhood sweetheart. Quentin and his companions Ben, Radar, and Lacey learn information about Margo while on the hunt.
Quentin and Margo were pre-adolescents when they discovered the body of a local guy who had committed suicide in their neighbourhood park. Quentin, now a senior at Winter Park High School, is an outsider whose best pals are Ben and Radar, while Margo is a popular student. Margo reappears in Quentin’s life a month before their graduation, climbing through his bedroom window as she did during their initial meeting.
She has designed an eleven-part vengeance plan for a group of people she believes have wronged her over her high school years, including her cheating boyfriend Jase and pals Lacey and Becca. Margo requires an accomplice and a car to assist her, and Quentin agrees.
Margo and Quentin successfully accomplish the tasks, share a romantically ambiguous dance, and return to their houses around daybreak.
After the sudden disappearance of Margo, Q along with his friends go on a mission to find her. When they finally find her, both Margo and Q understand each other from a whole other point of view. Margo chooses to visit New York City after their chat and invites Quentin to accompany her. Quentin wants to stay with her, and they kiss, but he recognises that his family and obligations prevent him from leaving. Margo assures Quentin that she will keep in touch with him.
“The Eclipsed Sun” is an attempt to imagine their reality and present a compassionate story of passionate love, familial relationships, and friendship set against the backdrop of the revolution. A story of passionate love, family ties, and friendship set against the backdrop of a revolution… Suraj’s struggle with the injustice surrounding him begins at a young age, having been born in a country engulfed in the shadow of colonialism.
To Order The Eclipsed Sun by Ramita Sengupta Click Here…
As the nation awakens, a secret revolution is being built by a group of men and women of unrivalled intellect and courage, as well as an unwavering sense of duty to their motherland. Suraj’s life becomes littered with disputes, failures, and tragedies during these stormy years. But his life is also full of love, dreams, passion, adventures, and successes.
“The Eclipsed Sun” is a compassionate story about the incredible heroism of ordinary people who organised a revolution severe enough to threaten the basis of the world’s largest colonial power. It’s a narrative about love in all its forms, triumphing over all odds.
Intrigue, tension, fascinating characters, and genuine depictions of maritime life combine into a truly gripping book. Ramita Sengupta introduces several people with a wide range of attributes through sophisticated character development and intricate yet intriguing narrative. Ramita has always been interested in crime stories, so her reading list is chock-full of dark history, and real-life legends, our freedom fighters, have become her heroes. Her passion for these deeply rooted stories shines through in her book.
Sabaa Tahir’s current young adult novel All My Rage is written by Pakistani-American author Sabaa Tahir.
All My Rage is set in California’s Moja ve Desert and is recounted from three perspectives: Misbah in the past, Noor and Sal in the present. Misbah’s son is Sal.
Sal and Noor were childhood buddies in a small desert village. Noor wishes to attend college, but her guardian will not allow her. Sal wishes to salvage his parents’ motel, but it is deeply in debt. After a catastrophe, their friendship is rekindled, but Sal’s decisions and Noor’s secrets threaten to break them apart. Meanwhile, we learn more about Sal’s mother, Misbah, and what brought her to America.
Well this is it – 10 most interesting books to read for young adults in the YA genre. But there are still lots of fishes in the sea left. So which one is your favourite YA novel and have you read any from the list above. Let us know!!
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Till next time, happy reading.
