2011 Best Teen Fiction
Each year, Austin Public Library youth services librarians read hundreds of books and we gather together lists of our favorites. Some of these win awards and are placed on official reading lists. . . and some aren't. If you're looking for great books that you might have missed last year, here are a few to try.
Recommended for Grades 8-12.
Book List Category:
By Veronica Roth.
In a future Chicago, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she is an anomoly who does not fit into any one group, and that the society she lives in is not perfect after all.
By Joan Bauer.
Twelve-year-old Foster McFee and her mother escape from her mother's abusive boyfriend and end up in the small town of Culpepper, West Virginia, where they use their strengths and challenge themselves to build a new life, with the help of the friends they make there.
By Tara Altebrando.
Jane, her twin brother Marcus, and their father have been on the road since her mother's departure years ago, but when they inherit a house on Coney Island, Jane not only begins to find a home, she learns much about her mother, too.
By Sean Beaudoin.
When hard-boiled, seventeen-year-old private investigator Dalton Rev transfers to Salt River High to solve the case of a dead student, he has his hands full trying to outwit the police, negotiate the school's social hierarchy, and get paid.
By by Ransom Riggs.
After a family tragedy, Jacob feels compelled to explore an abandoned orphanage on an island off the coast of Wales, discovering disturbing facts about the children who were kept there.
By Malinda Lo.
Seventeen-year-olds Kaede and Taisin are called to go on a dangerous and unprecedented journey to Tanlili, the city of the Fairy Queen, in an effort to restore the balance of nature in the human world.
By Rosemary Clement-Moore.
Seventeen-year-old Amy Goodnight has long been the one who makes her family of witches seem somewhat normal to others, but while spending a summer with her sister caring for their aunt's farm, Amy becomes the center of weirdness when she becomes tied to a powerful ghost.
By Nova Ren Suma.
Two years after sixteen-year-old Chloe discovered classmate London's dead body floating in a Hudson Valley reservoir, she returns home to be with her devoted older sister Ruby, a town favorite, and finds that London is alive and well, and that Ruby may somehow have brought her back to life and persuaded everyone that nothing is amiss.
By by A.S. King.
Overburdened by his parents' bickering and a bully's attacks, fifteen-year-old Lucky Linderman begins dreaming of being with his grandfather, who went missing during the Vietnam War, but during a visit to Arizona, his aunt and uncle and their beautiful neighbor, Ginny, help him find a new perspective.
By Laini Taylor.
Seventeen-year-old Karou, a lovely, enigmatic art student in a Prague boarding school, carries a sketchbook of hideous, frightening monsters--the chimaerae who form the only family she has ever known.
By edited by Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant.
A collection of fourteen fantasy stories by well-known authors, set in the age of steam engines and featuring automatons, clockworks, calculating machines, and other marvels that never existed.
By Ilsa J. Bick.
Alex, a resourceful seventeen-year-old running from her incurable brain tumor, Tom, who has left the war in Afghanistan, and Ellie, an angry eight-year-old, join forces after an electromagnetic pulse sweeps through the sky and kills most of the world's population, turning some of those who remain into zombies and giving the others superhuman senses.
By Ashley Hope Pérez.
Marooned in a broken-down Houston neighborhood--and in a Mexican immigrant family where making ends meet matters much more than making it to college--smart, talented Marissa seeks comfort elsewhere when her home life becomes unbearable.
By Jen Violi.
Donna's discovery, that she wants to be a mortician, helps her come into her own and finally understand that moving forward doesn't mean forgetting someone you love.
By Han Nolan.
Married, pregnant, and living at a "fat camp" in Maine, sixteen-year-old Eleanor has many questions about her future, especially whether the marriage will last and if she should keep the baby.
By Kendare Blake.
For three years, seventeen-year-old Cas Lowood has carried on his father's work of dispatching the murderous dead, traveling with his kitchen-witch mother and their spirit-sniffing cat, but everything changes when he meets Anna, a girl unlike any ghost he has faced before.
By Blake Nelson.
While she is in a rehabilitation facility for drug and alcohol abuse, seventeen-year-old Maddie meets Stewart, who is also in treatment, and they begin a relationship, which they try to maintain after they both get out.
By Coe Booth.
Tyrell's life is spinning out of control after his father is released from prison, his little brother is placed in foster care, and the drug dealers he's living with are pressuring him to start dealing.
By Jennifer Ziegler.
Unlike her romantic sister, Gabby is down-to-earth and does not put her trust in relationships, but when the richest boy in school befriends her, she discovers that emotional barriers might actually be getting in the way of her happiness.
