YA 2023 Top Picks

In a futuristic world, teenaged Nailer scavenges copper wiring from grounded oil tankers for a living, but when he finds a beached clipper ship with a girl in the wreckage, he has to decide if he should strip the ship for its wealth or rescue the girl.

Harlem. Ever since her body grew into curves, Xiomara Batista has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. 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. Mami is determined to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, and Xiomara understands...

"Sage has learned to substitute causes for relationships, and it's working just fine--until Shane Cavendish strolls into her math class. He's a little antisocial, a lot beautiful, and everything she never knew she always wanted"--

"Seventeen-year-old Kira Fujikawa has never had it easy. Shes bullied by the popular girls in school. Her parents ignore her. And shes also plagued with a secret: She can see yokai, the ghosts and demons that haunt the streets of Kyoto. But things accelerate from bad to worse when she learns that Shuten-doji, the demon king, will rise at the next blood moon to hunt down an ancient relic and bring the world to a catastrophic end. Not exactly skilled...

When high school student Clay Jenkins receives a box in the mail containing thirteen cassette tapes recorded by his classmate Hannah, who committed suicide, he spends a bewildering and heartbreaking night crisscrossing their town, listening to Hannah's voice recounting the events leading up to her death.

In this rom com from the author of Someone Else's Summer, a hopeless romantic juggles senior year stress, family problems, and faulty friendships around the end of senior year and prom. Quincy Walker is a hopeless romantic, so when she's kissed by a stranger in a dark theater, her rom-com obsessed imagination begins plotting the perfect movie-version ending to her senior year (which ends, like all great high school rom-coms, with the prom). With the...

Grace, adopted at birth, is raised as an only child. At sixteen she's just put her own baby up for adoption, and now is looking for her biological family. She discovers Maya, her loudmouthed younger bio twin sister who was also adopted ; and Joaquin, their stoic older bio brother, who has no interest in bonding over their shared biological mother after seventeen years in the foster care system. Grace struggles between cautious joy at having found...

With the rising number of missing Indigenous women, her family's involvement in a murder investigation, and grave robbers profiting off her Anishinaabe tribe, Perry takes matters into her own hands to solve the mystery and reclaim her people's inheritance. Perry Firekeeper-Birch has always known who she is - the laidback twin, the troublemaker, the best fisher on Sugar Island. Her aspirations won't ever take her far from home, and she wouldn't have...

While visiting her father who lives in Jamaica, eighteen-year-old Tilla faces a storm of dark secrets that threaten to unravel her own life, while an actual storm, Hurricane Gustav, threatens the lives of those she loves.

"What are you running from? . . . Sam is afraid of just about anything and everything that's unhealthy ever since his father died. Something about the Springtrap costume in the role-playing area of Freddy Fazbear's Mega Pizzaplex chills Luca to the core. And Grady's fear of being trapped in small spaces makes working as a Pizzaplex technician extremely challenging. But in the world of Five Nights at Freddy's, our deepest fears have a way of chasing...