The+Best+Young+Adult+Novels+of+All+Time

//** The Best  Young Adult Novels of All Time  **// (in chronological order )

 //**Catcher in the Rye**//    , by J.D. Salinger,     // 1951 // This is the classic coming-of-age novel about Holden Caulfield’s lost weekend in New York City that established the edgy style and voice of young adult literature sixteen years before the genre was invented.  //**The Outsiders**//    , by S.E. Hinton,     // 1967 // Sixteen-year-old Susie Hinton’s novel about gang war between the Socs and the Greasers is just as relevant today as when it     burst on the literary scene to become the first “young adult” novel and to establish a style that came to be called “the new realism.”  //**The Contender**//    , by Robert Lipsyte,     // 1967 // With the gangs after him, 17-year-old high school dropout Alfred Brooks climbs the stairs to the boxing club where champions have worked out and begins to dream of becoming a contender.  //**The Chosen**//    , by Chaim Potok,     // 1967 // The son of a Hassidic rebel and the son of an intellectual Zionist form a deep, though unlikely, friendship and share adolescence, family conflict and a crisis of faith in the 1940s.  //**The Pigman**//    , by Paul Zindel,     // 1968 // Two high school sophomores tell of their friendship with a lonely old man which turns hurtful, then tragic.  //**Go Ask Alice**//    , by Beatrice Sparks,     // 1971 // The purportedly anonymous diary of a girl destroyed by drugs is still relevant after all these years.  //**Deathwatch**//    , by Robb White,     // 1972 // Needing money for school, a college boy accepts a job as guide on a desert hunting trip and nearly loses his life as he becomes prey for a madman with a .358 Magnum.  //**The Chocolate War**//    , by Robert Cormier,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1974 // High school freshman Jerry Renault discovers the devastating consequences of refusing to join in the school’s annual fundraising drive and angering the school bullies. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Forever**//    , by Judy Blume,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1975 // This candid account by 18-year-old Kathy explores the intimate details of a first sexual relationship. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Killing Mr. Griffin**//    , by Lois Duncan,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1976 // A group of high school students kidnaps a strict teacher to get even with him, but they don’t know about his weak heart. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry**//    , by Mildred Taylor, <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> //1976// An African-American family stands strong against the harsh racial climate of 1930s Mississippi. (Newbery Award) <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**I Am the Cheese**//    , by Robert Cormier,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1977 // Where is Adam going on his urgent winter bike ride to nowhere? Who is Brint the Interrogator? And why does Amy never answer the phone? <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**The Last Mission**//    , by Harry Mazer,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1979 // At the age of 15, Jack enlists in the Air Force to get back at Hitler, but he is not prepared for the reality of being a gunner on     bombing raids. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Homecoming**//    , by Cynthia Voigt,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1981 // After their unstable mother abandons them in the middle of a     trip, 13-year-old Dicey leads her brothers and sister on a long walk to find a home with their feisty grandmother. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Annie on My Mind**//    , by Nancy Garden,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1982 // Liza and Annie meet at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. They fall in love and then find that a public declaration is too threatening to their friends and relatives. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Running Loose**//    , by Chris Crutcher,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1983 // Louie Banks takes a stand against his coach and playing dirty football; he falls in love, and loses his girlfriend in a fatal accident—all in his senior year of high school. Over <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**The Moves Make the Man**//    , by Bruce Brooks,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1984 // Jerome, the only black kid in school, practices his basketball moves alone until Bix enters the scene to teach him the fine points of the game and trouble ensues. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Remembering the Good Times**//    , by Richard Peck,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1985 // Tough, beautiful Kate, stalwart Buck, and rich, brilliant Trav form a friendly trio of mutual support until Trav takes his own life. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**The Goats**//    , by Brock Cole,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1987 // Stripped naked and left on a deserted island by fellow campers as a joke, Howie and Laura develop self-respect as they figure out how to survive humiliation, natural dangers and each other. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Hatchet**//    , by Gary Paulsen,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1987 // When the small plane taking him to his divorced father crashes, Brian, the only survivor, is stranded in the Canadian wilderness and must work out his own survival. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Fallen Angels**//    , by Walter Dean Myers,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1988 // Seventeen-year-old Richie Perry’s stint in Vietnam brings home to him the agony and futility of war as he learns to kill and watches his comrades die. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Weetzie Bat**//    , by Francesca Lia Block,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1989 // Lanky lizards! Punk teens Weetzie and Dirk search for love in a     modern fairy tale that is funny, moving, and unlike any book you’ve read before. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Maniac Magee**//    , by Jerry Spinelli,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1990 // Young Jeffrey Magee comes out of nowhere to become a legend as he brings the warring racial factions of the town of Two Mills together. (Newbery Award) <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Calling Home**//    , by Michael Cadnum,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1991 // “ Imitating the dead is easy,” thinks Peter as he telephones the parents of the friend he has accidentally killed. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Downriver**//    , by Will Hobbs,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1991 // Fifteen-year-old Jesse and other rebellious teenage members of     a wilderness survival team abandon their adult leader, steal his van and rafts, and run the dangerous white waters of the Grand Canyon. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Make Lemonade**//    , Virginia Wolff,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1993 // A gutsy and exquisitely touching verse novel in which slovenly Jolly, 17, hires sensible LaVaughn, 14, to help her with her two little kids by different fathers. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Catherine Called Birdy**//    , by Karen Cushman,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1994 // This hilarious journal of a young girl recreates the Middle Ages, fleas and all. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**When She Hollers**//    , by Cynthia Voigt,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1994 // One morning Tish challenges her molesting stepfather with a     knife and must face the dread of what he will do to retaliate that night. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Like Sisters on the Home Front**//    , by Rita Williams- Garcia,   <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1995 // When 14-year-old Gayle gets pregnant for the second time, her exasperated mother sends her ‘down south’ to Uncle Luther’s family to get straightened out. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Tomorrow When the War Began**//    , by John Marsden, <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> //1995// When a band of teenage friends return from a wilderness camping trip to find their town, and their country, in the hands of invaders, they begin their own guerrilla war. **The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963**     , by        Christopher Paul Curtis,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1995 // This novel recounts tragi-comic trip of a family of four to visit relatives in Alabama, just in time for a terrible historical event. (Newbery Award) <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Parrot in the Oven, Mi Vida**//    , by Victor Martinez,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1996 // Set in the gritty projects of a central California town, this novel traces the bittersweet summer when Manny achieves his ambition of being initiated into a gang. (National Book Award) <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Rats Saw God**//    , by Rob Thomas,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1996 // In a paper he grudgingly agrees to write in order to be allowed to graduate, senior Steve York reflects poignantly and often hilariously on his relationship with his famous astronaut father and the events in his life which have made him a “troubled teen.” <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Buried Onions**//    , by Gary Soto,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1997 // Eddie, a homeboy in Fresno, is trying to make a life for himself in a violent world. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Out of the Dust**//    , by Karen Hesse,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1997 // The moving story in blank verse of a young girl’s hard times during the dust bowl times of the thirties. (Newbery Award) <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Tangerine**//    , by Edward Bloor,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1997 // Paul’s thick glasses are no impediment (in his mind) to playing on Tangerine Middle School’s soccer team, but does he really believe the story his parents and older brother tell him about ruining his eyes by staring at an eclipse of the sun? <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**When She Was Good**//    , by Norma Fox Mazer,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1997 // Em Thurkill knows that her nightmare big sister Pamela is dead, but why does she still hear Pamela’s voice in her head? <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Tenderness**//    , by Robert Cormier,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1997 // Runaway Lori has a fixation on 18-year-old Eric, even though she knows he is a serial murderer and will probably kill again. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Bat 6**//    , by Virginia Wolff,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1998 // The 20 girls of the rival sixth grade softball teams of Barlow Road and Bear Creek Ridge recall what happened at the big game in 1949, when Aki had just come back from the internment camp and Shazam’s father had been killed at Pearl Harbor. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Holes**//    , by Louis Sachar,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1998 // There is no lake at Camp Green Lake, but why does the eviltempered woman who is the warden make Stanley Yelnats and his fellow prisoners dig deep holes every day? (National Book     Award and Newbery Award) <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Rules of the Road**//    , by Joan Bauer,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1998 // Jenna Boller, a tall, gawky girl who’s a whiz at selling shoes, and gruff Mrs. Madeleine Gladstone, “the supremely aged president of Gladstone’s Shoes,” learn mutual respect and affection on a     long sales trip, in a story full of wisdom, grace and laughs. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Soldier’s Heart**//    , by Gary Paulsen, 1998 In spare, almost biblical prose, Gary Paulsen writes of the horrors of combat in a Civil War novella based on the life of a real boy, Charley Goddard, who lies his way into the Union Army at     the age of 15. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Whirligig**//    , by Paul Fleischman,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1998 // When 16-year-old Brent causes the death of a girl, his sentence is to go to the four corners of the country to build whirligigs in     her image and to influence others lives in ways he never expects. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Bud, Not Buddy,**//     by Christopher Paul Curtis,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1999 // It’s 1936 and Bud is on the lam from a foster home, riding the rails to find the father he’s never met, Herman E. Calloway, and his famous band, the Dusky Devastators of the Depression. (Newbery Award) <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Monster**//    , by Walter Dean Myers,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1999 // Is Steve Harmon guilty of being the lookout in a botched robbery during which a storeowner is killed? As he awaits the results of     his trial, Steve writes the story as if it were a screenplay for a      movie. (Printz Award) <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Speak**//    , by Laurie Halse Anderson,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 1999 // Unable to tell anyone why she busted a party by calling the cops, Melinda becomes becomes a silent observer of the lies and hypocrisies at her high school while she lives in fear of the boy who raped her. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Dreamland**//    , by Sarah Dessen,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 2000 // With strange, sleepy Rogerson as a boyfriend Caitlin felt she could be anybody, not just the second-rate shadow of her sister— until he began to hit her. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**A Year Down Yonder**//    , by Richard Peck,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 2000 // In this Newbery-winning sequel to “A Long Way from Chicago,” Mary Alice moves in with the terrifying and lovable Grandma Dowdel for more astonishing adventures. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**Gold Dust**//    , by Chris Lynch,    <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 2000 // Through the haze of his obsession with baseball, Richard Riley Moncreif only dimly hears what his best friend in eighth grade, Napoleon Charlie Ellis, is trying to tell him about blackness. <span style="font-family: EideticNeoBoldItalic,cursive;"> //**The Beet Fields: Memories of a Sixteenth Summer**//     , by Gary Paulsen,   <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> // 2000 // Fleeing his drunken mother’s sexual advances, a boy runs away for the summer to work in the beet fields of North Dakota, and then travels with a sleazy carnival. “ <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;">// T //    he achievement of great [young adult] literature is that it extends and applies the spare language, the focused story, the sharply etched conflicts of younger books to     the multilayered, vexing, often ambiguous situations of      the dawning adult world.” — Marc Aronson, “Exploding the Myths: The Truth about Teenagers and Reading” Daniel Boone Regional Library <span style="font-family: EideticNeoItalic,cursive;"> //Serving Boone & Callaway Counties// http://dbrl.org Compiled by Patty Campbell, a well-respected authority on literature for teens.