Favorite Young Adult Series and Titles

The next installment of The Best of EatReadSleep’s 10th Anniversary series!

For about fifteen years, I either worked with teens in a library or, later, selected teen books for the library system, and I really enjoyed this collection. Young adult literature is a thriving subculture. At conferences, these authors are rock stars, and their fans are not only teenagers, but plenty of adults, especially librarians and teachers. Young adult books are where all of the latest headlines go to live through stories, and there is some great and undervalued writing going on in this space. Some of my selections are a few years old, but definitely stand the test of time.

Beloved Series

If you’ve read EatReadSleep for any number of years, you know that I have covered some YA series every time a new volume comes out. Here are some of my favorites, although I am sure that I’m leaving out something fantastic. Click on the titles for the full reviews, and search the authors for more reviews in the series.

Megan Whalen Turner’s “Queen’s Thief” series starts with a teen-appropriate The Thief and then moves into complex and subtle intrigue with a hint of fantasy.

I will read anything by Maggie Stiefvater, but her “Raven Cycle” is a favorite fantasy series. It starts with The Raven Boys.

Another winning series is “The Lumaterre Chronicles,” by Melina Marchetta, which starts with Finnikin of the Rock, but I reviewed the second volume, Quintana of Charyn. High fantasy with some adult content. The writing is exquisite.  

My Plain Jane and others by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows are hilariously reimagined classics. These are delightful audiobooks, too, narrated by Fiona Hardingham.

Favorite Authors and Single Titles

Jason Reynolds has been the author of many of my favorite kids’ books. The first teen title I read by Jason was the stunning Long Way Down.

John Green had a lot of hits, such as Turtles All the Way Down, although his last work, The Anthropocene Reviewed, was for adults. His teens were always precocious and witty, like the kids I worked with in our library book groups.

Ruta Sepetys is another author who is consistently a winner, especially her first, Between Shades of Gray, and my favorite, The Fountains of Silence.

The Downstairs Girl, by Stacey Lee. A young Chinese woman in reconstruction Atlanta is determined to make it as a writer.

Everything Sad Is Untrue, by Daniel Nayeri. A true story about the Christian author’s family fleeing Iran, humorously told in the style of Scheherazade.

Eleanor and Park, by Rainbow Rowell. A brilliant teen romance made agonizing by family secrets and the helplessness of the young and dependent.

There are some excellent LGBTQ+ writers in teen literature, and they’ve been winning awards for decades. A few of my favorites include:

Darius the Great Is Not Okay, by Adib Khorram. Take a trip to Persia—Iran—with this vulnerable and sweet young man and his family. It won the Morris Award for debut novels.

I’ll Give You the Sun, by Jandy Nelson. A brother and sister work through dark secrets to live into the meaning of art. A Printz and Stonewall winner.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Saenz. In 2013, it was the first LGBTQ romance I ever read. This beautiful and heartbreaking book won the Stonewall Award, a Printz honor, and the Pura Belpré Award.

I read the mind-bending We Are the Ants on my way to a Baker & Taylor conference in Orlando, where I met the kind author, Shaun David Hutchinson, and we wept together over the loved ones we had lost to Alzheimer’s.

In our next installment, we will venture into favorite children’s titles from the last ten years!

The Downstairs Girl, by Stacey Lee

Jo Kuan makes hats that the ladies of Atlanta adore, but she was fired because Mrs. English worried that employing a Chinese girl might hurt her reputation. Besides, she says, Jo is a saucebox. Old Gin arranged for Jo to get her former job back as a lady’s maid for spoiled, short-tempered Caroline Payne, but what Jo really wants is to write for the Bell family’s local newspaper. She knows a lot about the newspaper business, since she and Old Gin secretly live in the Bell’s basement, and she eavesdrops through an old abolitionist’s listening tube right under the print shop. Jo overhears young Nathan Bell worrying about declining subscriptions, so she forms a plan that will benefit them both. When she anonymously submits an “agony aunt” advice column to the paper, subscriptions begin to climb, and Jo takes on the pseudonym “Miss Sweetie.”

Chinese immigrants were brought into the South for a brief span of years to take on the manual labor formerly filled by African slaves. In the post-reconstruction, segregated region, they occupied a social position just slightly above blacks, but certainly outside of the realm of wealthy whites. In this novel, many Atlantans reacted to their existence with surprise and confusion. Since Jo was wittily articulate and had a flair for fashion, her presence seemed an affront to the wealthy, simpering debutantes.

Young Jo lives in a world of secrets. No one knows that a Chinese girl is the true identity of the controversial, pro-suffragist Miss Sweetie, nor does anyone ever ask where she lives. On the other hand, Jo does not even know her own parents, and she is similarly in the dark about her exact relationship to Old Gin, the only guardian she has ever known. Old Gin is filled with secrets of his own, both about the past and about his dealings with the shady characters that flit through the stables at the Payne’s estate, where he works. While Jo schemes to uncover the frail old man’s situation without his knowledge, she has learned that information can be powerful. Jo holds several secrets in her pocket that gain her a bit of privilege, but she is well aware that her hard-earned life could easily collapse like a house of cards.

Stacey Lee has created an immensely likeable and intelligent protagonist in Jo Kuan. This diligent and hardworking young woman is so focused on straining upward for herself and Old Gin that she pushes her own feelings away. Ever practical, she ignores her heart, since she knows that romantic relationships across ethnic boundaries are illegal in any case. In her carefully regulated society, crossing boundaries leads only to punishment and shame. Lee skillfully weaves the political issues of Jim Crow laws and women’s suffrage into a coming-of-age tale filled with family entanglements and the fierce struggle for individual freedom.

Very highly recommended for teens and adults.

Disclaimer: I read a library copy of this book. Opinions expressed are solely my own and may not reflect those of my employer or anyone else.