Books for Teens: A Short Guide to Young Adult Reading

BankStreetBooks focuses mainly on reading from birth to twelve. This short section is for the years after that — and for the parents, teachers, and librarians who are still handing books to young people who increasingly want to choose their own.

Young adult and middle grade: where the line falls

The Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, defines “young adult” as ages 12 through 18. The ALA’s Newbery Medal, meanwhile, counts readers up to and including fourteen as children. The overlap is real: a twelve- or thirteen-year-old may be reading middle grade, young adult, or both in the same week.

In broad terms, young adult (YA) books differ from middle grade in a few ways:

• Protagonists are usually teenagers, and the story is told from inside a teen’s perspective rather than a child’s.
• Themes go further. Identity, independence, relationships, injustice, violence, and grief are explored more directly and with less cushioning.
• Content can be more mature, including strong language, violence, and sexual content, though this varies enormously from book to book.

Some books sit right on the line. The Giver is a Newbery Medal winner, which places it within the children’s range, yet it is frequently taught to teens and our catalog suggests it for roughly twelve and up. It includes a disturbing scene about “release.” A teen who loved middle grade a year ago may still want it now, and that is fine.

Respecting a teen reader’s independence

The biggest change in the teen years is not the books; it is who chooses them. A few principles help:

• Offer, don’t assign. Leave books where they will be found. Mention one you think they’d like and why, then drop it.
• Ask about what they’re reading, with genuine interest. Many teens will talk more freely about a book they chose when the conversation doesn’t feel like an evaluation.
• Read what they’re reading, sometimes. Reading a book your teen recommends is one of the most respectful things you can do.
• Count every format. Graphic novels, verse novels, audiobooks, fan-favorite series, and nonfiction about a narrow obsession are all reading.

Being aware of content

It is reasonable to want to know what is in a book your teen is reading. Content awareness is not the same as restriction; it is the information you need to be available for a conversation. Read a summary or a review, skim the book, or read it alongside them. If a book deals with something hard — violence, grief, racism, war — the most useful thing you can offer is your willingness to talk about it.

Different families draw lines in different places, and a thirteen-year-old and a seventeen-year-old are not the same reader. Our catalog notes flag mature content so you can make informed choices. Our guide to hard topics through books has more on talking through difficult material.

Teen titles from our catalog

Graphic novels

• American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang (Michael L. Printz Award, 2007), braids three plots, one of them featuring the Monkey King, into a story about fitting in. One thread deliberately uses a stereotype in order to criticize it, which is worth talking through.
• March: Book One opens John Lewis’s own account, in comics form, of his part in the civil rights movement; it was written with Andrew Aydin and drawn by Nate Powell. Expect scenes of violence against protesters.
• The Iliad, Gareth Hinds’s version of Homer in comics form, can make the original far less intimidating later on. The battles are drawn plainly and are violent.

See also our guide to graphic novels for kids, which separates middle-grade and teen titles.

Verse novels

• Long Way Down, by Jason Reynolds (Newbery Honor, 2018), unfolds in the minute it takes an elevator to descend, as a fifteen-year-old who means to avenge his brother is confronted by figures from his past. It deals with gun violence and grief.
• The Poet X, by Elizabeth Acevedo, follows Xiomara, a teen in Harlem who finds her voice through slam poetry. It won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (2018), the Michael L. Printz Award (2019), and the Pura Belpré Author Award (2019), and it is best suited to older teens.

Our guide to verse novels for young readers has more.

Novels for older teens

• The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas, follows sixteen-year-old Starr Carter after she witnesses a police officer shoot her childhood friend. It contains strong language and violence and is aimed at older teens.
• The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, has Death as its narrator and a girl living with a foster family in Nazi Germany at its center. It is long and literary, and it does not look away from death or the Holocaust.

Bridging from middle grade

• The Giver, by Lois Lowry (Newbery Medal, 1994), is a frequently taught dystopian novel about a community without pain or choice.

For more, visit the teens age page and the teen topic, or filter by age in the book finder.