My Lost Freedom
A vital, unflinching look at the Japanese American internment experience that grounds abstract history in a teenager's immediate reality.
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A Raisin in the Sun
by Lorraine Hansberry
Young adult · ages 14–18 · 1020L · 1958
The canonical American play about Black family life and the cost of systemic racism—essential reading for teens old enough to hold its complexity and grief, and likely to reshape how they think about class, aspiration, and dignity.
Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
Young adult · ages 12–18 · 1090L · 2020
Victorian prose requires patience, but the psychological maturity — shame, social aspiration, forgiveness — lands harder in the teen years than it does later; a book that rewrites itself on rereading.
The Goblin Emperor
by Sarah Monette
Young adult · ages 14–18 · 1020L · 2016
Quietly devastating and utterly kind — a fantasy novel about power that concludes kindness and courtesy are not weakness but radical choice.