Fiction for Older Young Adults
Discover captivating fiction books for older young adults. Explore our curated list of adult fiction titles perfect for mature teen readers seeking deeper, engaging stories.
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The Death of Jayson Porter
by Jaime Adoff
Sixteen-year-old Jayson Porter wants to believe things will get better. But the harsh realities of his life never seem to change. Living in the inland-Florida projects with his abusive mother, he tries unsuccessfully to fit in at his predominately white school, while struggling to maintain even a thread of a relationship with his drug-addicted father. As the pressure mounts, there’s only one thing Jayson feels he has control over—the choice of whether to live or die. In this powerful, gripping novel, Coretta Scott King Award–winning author Jaime Adoff explores the harsh reality of a teenager’s life, giving hope even in the bleakest of hours.
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Zorn
by Graham Worthington
In the year 2035 it's cool to be bisexual - or at least pretend to be - and cool to be young, but to be both and on holiday in France is the coolest of all. Zorn and family are at The Anders Hotel, in the little port of Roknor, whose main attraction in daytime is its crowded beach, and in the evening its many clubs. Rejoicing in recently turning sixteen, Zorn has ten days to find Holiday Love, and isn't helped by the presence of Kevin, a coarse and violent homophobe. But despite their differences, neither can escape life's challenges, and find to their dismay that our joys and sorrows come mixed and inseparable. The mid twenty-first century is a time of looking back, a time laden with much nostalgia for the past, but little money. The Great World Depression of the 2020s has seen to that. It is a time of thumbing through the music, films and fashions of the last century, a time of imitating the lost Golden Age of the 1900s. It is also the era of core language, the final perfection of politically correct speech avoiding the use of such hideously offensive words as "he" and "she," with all their built-in stereotypes, all their dangerous assumptions about gender roles and sexuality. Yet it is a time when, though all has changed, nothing has changed. The sea still surges to the distant horizon, the waves still crash to the beach, and on these daily washed sands new people act out the ancient dramas afresh. Zorn is a story of romance, adventure and coming of age in this post-apocalyptic society.
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Stormwitch
by Susan Vaught
In Pass Christian, Mississippi, in 1969, sixteen-year-old Ruba, trained by her Haitian grandmother in both voodoo and Amazonian warrior tactics, uses her skills to fight against racism and the African witch Zashar, now coming ashore in the form of Hurricane Camille.
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Last Dance on Holladay Street
by Elisa Lynn Carbone
In 1878, thirteen-year-old Eva seeks her birth mother in Colorado, only to find the city and her mother are not what she imagined.
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The Lion Hunter
by Elizabeth Wein
It is the sixth century in Aksum, Africa. Young Telemakos?King Arthur's half-Ethiopian grandson'is still recovering from his ordeal as a government spy in the far desert, trying to learn who was breaking the Emperor's plague quarantine. Before he is fully himself again, tragedy and menace strike, and he finds himself sent, with his baby sister, Athena, to live with Abreha, the ruler of Himyar'a longtime enemy of the Aksumites, now perhaps a friend. His aunt Goewin, Arthur's daughter, warns him that Abreha is a man to be wary of, someone to watch carefully. Telemakos promises he will be mindful'but he does not realize that Goewin's warnings are not enough to protect him. The Sunbird (?Intense, absorbing, and luminously written,? Kirkus Reviews, starred review) was the first book about Telemakos. The Lion Hunter continues his story, to be quickly followed by The Empty Kingdom'a two-book sequence called The Mark of Solomon.
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Melonhead
by Katy Kelly
In the Washington, D.C. neighborhood of Capitol Hill, Lucy Rose's friend Adam "Melonhead" Melon, a budding inventor with a knack for getting into trouble, enters a science contest that challenges students to recycle an older invention into a new invention.
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I Wanna Be Your Shoebox
by Cristina Garcia
Because Yumi RuĂŤz-Hirsch has grandparents from Japan, Cuba, and Brooklyn, her mother calls her a poster child for the twenty-first century. Yumi would laugh if only her life wasn't getting as complicated as her heritage. All of a sudden she's starting eighth grade with a girl who collects tinfoil and a boy who dresses like a squid. Her mom's found a new boyfriend, and her punk-rock father still can't sell a song. She's losing her house; she's losing her school orchestra. And worst of all she's losing her grandfather Saul. Yumi wishes everything could stay the same. But as she listens to Saul tell his story, she learns that nobody ever asks you if you're ready for life to happen. It just happens. The choice is either to sit and watch or to join the dance. National Book Award finalist Cristina GarcĂa's first middle-grade novel celebrates the chaotic, crazy, and completely amazing patchwork that makes up our lives.
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Cuba 15
by Nancy Osa
For fans of Matt de la Peña and Sandra Cisneros comes a novel about family and identity, where Violet Paz prepares for her quinceañero and learns about her Cuban heritage. Violet Paz has just turned fifteen, a pivotal birthday in the eyes of her Cuban grandmother. Fifteen is the age when a girl enters womanhood, traditionally celebrating the occasion with a quinceañero. But while Violet is half Cuban, she’s also half Polish, and more importantly, she feels 100% American. Except for her zany family’s passion for playing dominoes, smoking cigars, and dancing to Latin music, Violet knows little about Cuban culture, nada about quinces, and only tidbits about the history of Cuba. So when Violet begrudgingly accepts Abuela’s plans for a quinceañero–and as she begins to ask questions about her Cuban roots–cultures and feelings collide. The mere mention of Cuba and Fidel Castro elicits her grandparents’sadness and her father’s anger. Only Violet’s aunt Luz remains open-minded. With so many divergent views, it’s not easy to know what to believe. All Violet knows is that she’s got to form her own opinions, even if this jolts her family into unwanted confrontations. After all, a quince girl is supposed to embrace responsibility–and to Violet that includes understanding the Cuban heritage that binds her to a homeland she’s never seen. “Violet’s hilarious cool first-person narrative veers between farce and tenderness, denial and truth.”—Booklist, Starred Review "This funny and tender chronicle of Violet's 15th year...[has] heart and humor."-Kirkus Reviews “Cuba 15 will make readers laugh, whether or not their families are as loco as Violet’s.”—The Horn Book Magazine "Osa's tale about a warmhearted, fun-loving family, a teenager's typical ambivalence about different cultures, the stress of dealing with high school demands and pressures, a budding romance, and how an imaginative, high-spirited young woman handles some thorny issues and does some growing up in the process, rings true and makes for an entertaining story."-VOYA "The characters are so charming that while readers are in their company, the experience is interesting and engaging."-SLJ A Pura Belpré Honor Book An ALA Notable Book An ALA Best Book for Young Adults A Booklist Top Ten Youth First Novels
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Xangans
by Graham Worthington
Xangans are unique; they are the only blogging community who have named themselves after their on-line playground, Xanga.com, The World's Greatest Blogging Community. It is their jungle, their pulpit and endless party, Xanga. Knowing each other well onscreen, yet rarely meeting in real life, they form an Empire on which the Sun never Sets, straddling the world from Detroit to Liverpool, from Toronto to Singapore. Entertaining, quarrelsome, compassionate, bitchy, they have used Xanga to express their talents, their beliefs, their confusions, their pain, their joy, until it has become an essential and enduring part of their lives. I first joined Xanga in 2006. I too flirted with other blogging systems, and saw them swell to vast size, only to dwindled into irrelevance; Xanga has remained the only one in which the written word has ruled and flourished. In this collection of thirty-three blogs, stories and poems by Xangans writing today, some published writers, some - as yet - unknown, we hear the voices of on-line authors struggling to make sense of this world. From the raw cynicism of Lindensmith's "Another Night on the Town" to the life-affirming cheer of Lymne Hamel's "Blessings," we pass through eroticism, through the joys and terrors of love, through the conflicts of religion and the confusions of society, through satire, humor, horror and sentiment.