For a reader who just finished
after Make Me a Liar by Melissa Landers · ages 13–17
Young adult · grades 8–12 · 850L
A grounded and honest look at the specific anxieties of coming out in a small community, avoiding melodrama in favor of realistic social navigation.
Same style
Young adult · ages 14–18 · grades 9–12 · 820L
A searing, unflinching look at complicity and silence in a boarding-school community after a student's suicide—important reading for teens ready for grief and moral complexity, but not cathartic.
by Rebecca Jenshak
Young adult · ages 13–17 · grades 8–12 · 850L · 2026
A grounded look at the exhaustion of code-switching and the specific bravery required to drop the mask in a high school setting.
by Karen Healey
Young adult · ages 14–18 · grades 9–12 · 820L
A genuinely original YA fantasy rooted in Māori culture and grief—atmospheric and morally complex, without the melodrama that sinks most teen paranormal books.
Stretch them up
Young adult · ages 14–18 · grades 9–12 · 1050L · 2024
A genuine doorstop fantasy that respects teen readers' intelligence — ornate prose, deep worldbuilding, and a narrator whose unreliability becomes part of the pleasure.
Young adult · 1050L · 1952
The most philosophically rigorous American family saga; demands intellectual maturity but rewards it with a genuinely moral argument about choice and human nature that lands harder at 15–16 than at 12.
Young adult · ages 14–18 · grades 9–12 · 1050L
A play about mass hysteria and coerced confession that lands harder after every election cycle — teens wrestle with why good people participate in injustice, and it's the rare YA text that trusts them with that complexity.
Complementing on naming feelings
Middle grade · age 12+ · grade 7+ · 780L · 2021
A rare middle-grade novel that treats LGBTQ+ identity and first love with genuine tenderness and philosophical depth—kids who are questioning will see themselves, and allies will understand what's at stake.
Verse novel · ages 6–10 · grades 1–5 · 520L · 1998
A masterwork of bilingual wordplay that reads aloud with infectious energy—kids feel seen in the code-switching, and the poems actively teach that two languages in one mind is a superpower, not a problem.
by Ali Benjamin
Young adult · ages 13–18 · grades 8–12 · 770L · 2015
A genuinely moving meditation on grief, friendship, and how we live with the people we lose—the jellyfish research threads beautifully into the emotional architecture, and Sufi's voice feels specific and real.
We'd skip — for now
by Chloe Walsh
A step up — ages 17–18 · grade 12
Skip it if your teen has unprocessed trauma around sexual assault or if Catholic institutional critique feels too pointed for your family right now.