YA Staff Picks

Fifteen-year-old Mercy Wong is determined to break out of poverty in Chinatown. She gains admission to a prestigious finishing school through cunning and bribery and soon discovers that getting in was easy: carving a niche among the spoiled heiresses proves more difficult. When the earthquake strikes, Mercy and her classmates are forced to a survivor encampment where her quick-witted leadership rallies them to help in the tragedy's aftermath.

Sisters Stella and Ellie Steckler are both determined to win a scholarship and escape their stifling small town, but their plans are upset when a new girl joins the cross country team and then disappears.

In 1426 in Joseon, a year after her father vanishes while investigating the disappearance of thirteen girls, eighteen-year-old Min Hwani returns to the island of Jeju to pick up his trail with the help of her estranged sister.

"The term "Apple" is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly "red on the outside, white on the inside." Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist...

"A gang leader's son finds his effort to go straight for the sake of his child challenged by a loved one's brutal murder, in a poignant exploration of Black coming-of-age set seventeen years before the events of the award-winning 'The Hate U Give'"--

An honors student at Jefferson Academy, seventeen-year-old Keira enjoys developing and playing Slay, a secret, multiplayer online role-playing game celebrating black culture, until the two worlds collide.

"A terrifying, futuristic United Sates where Muslim-Americans are forced into internment camps, and seventeen-year-old Layla Amin must lead a revolution against complicit silence"--

Perfect Mexican daughters do not go away to college. And they do not move out of their parents' house after high school graduation. Perfect Mexican daughters never abandon their family. But Julia is not your perfect Mexican daughter. That was Olga's role. Then a tragic accident on the busiest street in Chicago leaves Olga dead and Julia left behind to reassemble the shattered pieces of her family. And no one seems to acknowledge that Julia is broken,...

Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.