A High School Reading List, from the Tayshas Program, a reading incentive program designed for young adults in Texas, grades 9-12, who are encouraged to read books from a selected reading list prepared by the Tayshas Committee of the Texas Library Association. The Tayshas Reading List takes its name from the Caddo Indian word meaning "friends or allies". Written texas, texios, tejas, teyas, or tayshas.
For more information, visit the Tayshas Reading List Web page.
Book List Category:
By Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui ; translated by Linda Coverdale.
The true story of the remarkable 10-year-old Yemeni girl who dared to defy her country's most archaic traditions by fighting for a divorce.
By Ann Angel ; introduction by Sam Andrew.
This book examines the life and musical career of Janis Joplin.
By Heidi Ayarbe.
Poised to lead his high school soccer team to its third straight state championship, seventeen-year-old star player Jake Martin struggles to keep hidden his nearly debilitating obsessive-compulsive disorder.
By by Cris Beam.
J, who feels like a boy mistakenly born as a girl, runs away from his best friend who has rejected him and the parents he thinks do not understand him when he finally decides that it is time to be who he really is.
By Martyn Bedford.
A teenager wakes up inside another boy's body and faces a life-or-death quest to return to his true self or be trapped forever in the wrong existence.
By Lynn Biederman & Lisa Pazer.
In their separate voices, three morbidly obese New York City teens relate their experiences participating in a clinical trial testing lap-band surgery for teenagers, which involves a year of weekly meetings and learning to live healthier lives.
By Franny Billingsley.
In the early twentieth century in Swampsea, seventeen-year-old Briony, who can see the spirits that haunt the marshes around their town, feels responsible for her twin sister's horrible injury until a young man enters their lives and exposes secrets that even Briony does not know about.
By Holly Black.
When Cassel Sharpe discovers that his older brothers have used him to carry out their criminal schemes and then stolen his memories, he figures out a way to turn their evil machinations against them.
By Karen Blumenthal.
For more than a decade starting in 1920, millions of regular Americans ignored the law of the land. Parents became bootleggers, kids smuggled illegal alcohol, and outlaws became celebrities. It wasn't supposed to be that way, of course. When Congress passed the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the sale and manufacture of alcohol in the United States, supporters believed it would create a better, stronger nation. Instead it began an era of lawlessness, when famous gangsters like Al Capone rose to fame, and many reconsidered their concept of right and wrong. This is the story of those years in American history-- the story of prohibition.
By Caroline Bock.
Told in several voices, a group of Long Island high school seniors conspire to protect eighteen-year-old Jimmy after he brutally assaults two Salvadoran immigrants, until they begin to see the moral implications of Jimmy's actions and the consequences of being loyal to a violent bully.
By Libba Bray.
When a plane crash strands thirteen teen beauty contestants on a mysterious island, they struggle to survive, to get along with one another, to combat the island's other diabolical occupants, and to learn their dance numbers in case they are rescued in time for the competition.
By Martha Brooks.
Shortly after her first kiss but before her sixteenth birthday in December, 1941, Marie Claire and her younger brother and sister are sent to a tuberculosis sanatorium near their Manitoba farm.
By Jennifer Brown.
When seventeen-year-old Alex starts dating Cole, a new boy at her high school, her two closest friends increasingly mistrust him as the relationship grows more serious.
By Lucy Christopher.
Sixteen-year-old Gemma, a British city-dweller, is abducted while on vacation with her parents and taken to the Australian outback, where she soon realizes that escape attempts are futile, and in time she learns that her captor is not as despicable as she first believed.
By Joshua C. Cohen.
High school sophomore Danny excels at gymnastics but is bullied, like the rest of the gymnasts, by members of the football team, until an emotionally and physically scarred new student joins the football team and forms an unlikely friendship with Danny.
By Rachel Cohn & David Levithan.
Told in the alternating voices of Dash and Lily, two sixteen-year-olds carry on a wintry scavenger hunt at Christmas-time in New York, neither knowing quite what--or who--they will find.
By Trish Cook and Brendan Halpin.
Two teenagers--a heavy-metal-music-loving boy who is still mourning the death of his mother years earlier, and a beautiful, popular girl whose parents divorced because her father is gay--try to negotiate the complications of family and peer relationships as they get to know each other after learning that their father and mother are marrying each other.
By Sarah Dessen.
Following her parents' bitter divorce as she and her father move from town to town, seventeen-year-old Mclean reinvents herself at each school she attends until she is no longer sure she knows who she is or where she belongs.
By Heather Dixon.
Confined to their dreary castle while mourning their mother's death, Princess Azalea and her eleven sisters join The Keeper, who is trapped in a magic passageway, in a nightly dance that soon becomes nightmarish.
By Sharon Dogar.
What was it like hiding in the Annex with Anne Frank? This novel tells the story from the point of view of Peter Van Pels, from the day he went into hiding with the Franks, through his imprisonment at Auschwitz.
By Jennifer Donnelly.
An angry, grieving seventeen-year-old musician facing expulsion from her prestigious Brooklyn private school travels to Paris to complete a school assignment and uncovers a diary written during the French revolution by a young actress attempting to help a tortured, imprisoned little boy--Louis Charles, the lost king of France.
By Jenny Downham.
When eighteen-year-old Mikey's younger sister claims to have been raped and he seeks to avenge the crime, he meets Ellie, the sister of the accused, and befriends her, complicating the situation considerably for all of them.
By by Jane Eagland.
Seventeen-year-old Louisa Cosgrove is locked away in the Wildthorn Hall mental institution, where she is stripped of her identity and left to wonder who has tried to destroy her life.
By by Gary Ghislain.
Fourteen-year-old David, the son of a famous French psychologist, falls in love with Zelda, a new patient who believes she is from outer space, and soon they are tearing through Paris in search of her chosen one, Johnny Depp, so that she can take him to her home planet, Vahalal.
By Kerstin Gier ; translated from the German by Anthea Bell.
Sixteen-year-old Gwyneth discovers that she, rather than her well-prepared cousin, carries a time-travel gene, and soon she is journeying with Gideon, who shares the gift, through historical London trying to discover whom they can trust.
By Kathryn Miller Haines.
In 1942 New York City, fifteen-year-old Iris grieves for her mother who committed suicide and for the loss of her life of privilege, and secretly helps her father with his detective business since he, having lost a leg at Pearl Harbor, struggles to make ends meet.
By Pete Hautman.
A new and enigmatic student named Shayne appears at high school one day, befriends the smallest boy in the school, and takes on a notorious drug dealer before turning himself in to the police for killing someone.
By Pete Hautman.
June is starting at her sixth school in four years when she meets Wes, who has just broken up with a girlfriend, and although they do not share an instant or intense connection, attraction turns to love and they wonder where it will lead.
By Jenny Hubbard.
In 1982 Buncombe County, North Carolina, sixteen-year-old Alex Stromm writes of the aftermath of the accidental drowning of a friend, as his English teacher reaches out to him while he and a fellow boarding school student try to cover things up.
By Antony John.
Eighteen-year-old Piper becomes the manager for her classmates' popular rock band, called Dumb, giving her the chance to prove her capabilities to her parents and others, if only she can get the band members to get along.
By Maureen Johnson.
Rory, of Bénouville, Louisiana, is spending a year at a London boarding school when she witnesses a murder by a Jack the Ripper copycat and becomes involved with the very unusual investigation.
By A.S. King.
When her best friend, whom she secretly loves, betrays her and then dies under mysterious circumstances, high school senior Vera Dietz struggles with secrets that could help clear his name.
By Lisa Klein.
When her dalliance with Sir Walter Ralegh is discovered by Queen Elizabeth in 1587, lady-in-waiting Catherine Archer is banished to the struggling colony of Roanoke, where she and the other English settlers must rely on a Croatoan Indian for their survival. Includes author's note on the mystery surrounding the Lost Colony.
By Jean Kwok.
Caught between the pressure to succeed in America, her duty to their family, and her own personal desires, Kimberly Chang, an immigrant girl from Hong Kong, learns to constantly translate not just her language but herself back and forth between the worlds she straddles.
By Chris Lynch.
Teens D.J. and Russell, life-long friends and neighbors, had drifted apart, but when their firefighter fathers are both killed, they try to help one another come to terms with the tragedy and its aftermath.
By Kimberly Marcus.
High school senior Liz, a gifted photographer, can no longer see things clearly after her best friend accuses Liz's older brother of a terrible crime.
By Sharon E. McKay ; photographs by Rafal Gerszak.
A powerful novel of enduring friendship set amid the terror and chaos of present-day Afghanistan.
By Lauren Myracle.
When her best friend falls victim to a vicious hate crime, sixteen-year-old Cat sets out to discover the culprits in her small North Carolina town.
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 Michael Northrop.
Seven high school students are stranded at their New England high school during a week-long blizzard that shuts down the power and heat, freezes the pipes, and leaves them wondering if they will survive.
By Lauren Oliver.
Lena looks forward to receiving the government-mandated cure that prevents the delirium of love and leads to a safe, predictable, and happy life, until ninety-five days before her eighteenth birthday and her treatment, she falls in love.
By Kenneth Oppel.
When his twin brother falls ill in the family's chateau in the independent republic of Geneva in the eighteenth century, sixteen-year-old Victor Frankenstein embarks on a dangerous and uncertain quest to create the forbidden Elixir of Life described in an ancient text in the family's secret Biblioteka Obscura.
By Cathy Ostlere.
In 1984, following her mother's suicide, 15-year-old Maya and her Sikh father travel to New Delhi from Canada to place her mother's ashes in their final resting place. On the night of their arrival, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is assassinated, Maya and her father are separated when the city erupts in chaos, and Maya must rely on Sandeep, a boy she has just met, for survival.
By Matt de la Pena.
Seventeen-year-old Kidd Ellison runs away to work for the summer at a beach campsite in California where his hard work and good looks lead to friendship and love but painful past memories surface in menacing ways.
By Stephanie Perkins.
When Anna's romance-novelist father sends her to an elite American boarding school in Paris for her senior year of high school, she reluctantly goes, and meets an amazing boy who becomes her best friend, in spite of the fact that they both want something more.
By Dana Reinhardt.
Although they have never gotten along well, seventeen-year-old Levi follows his older brother Boaz, an ex-Marine, on a walking trip from Boston to Washington, D.C. in hopes of learning why Boaz is completely withdrawn.
By Laura Resau and María Virginia Farinango.
Living in a village in Ecuador, a Quechua Indian girl is sent to work as an indentured servant for an upper class "mestizo" family.
By Bettina Restrepo.
Nora, a fifteen-year-old Mexican girl, faces the challenges of being an illegal immigrant in Texas when she and her mother cross the border in search of Nora's father.
By Beth Revis.
Teenaged Amy, a cryogenically frozen passenger on the spaceship Godspeed, wakes up to discover that someone may have tried to murder her.
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 René Saldana, Jr.
Three Mexican American teenagers in a small-town in Texas struggle with difficulties at home and at school as they try to attain the elusive status of adulthood.
By Elizabeth Scott.
When her older, "perfect" sister Tess has a car accident that puts her in a coma, seventeen-year-old Abby, who has always felt unseen in Tess's shadow, plans to bring her back with the help of Eli, a gorgeous boy she has met at the hospital, but her plans go awry when she learns some secrets about both Tess and Eli, enabling her to make some decisions about her own life.
By Marcus Sedgwick.
Sixteen-year-old Rebecca moves with her father from London to a small, seaside village, where she befriends another motherless girl and they spend the summer together exploring the village's sinister history.
By Ruta Sepetys.
In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil. Based on the author's family, includes a historical note.
By Robert Sharenow.
In 1936 Berlin, fourteen-year-old Karl Stern, considered Jewish despite a non-religious upbringing, learns to box from the legendary Max Schmeling while struggling with the realities of the Holocaust.
By Natalie Standiford.
Upon learning on Christmas Day that their rich and imperious grandmother may soon die and disown the family unless the one who offended her deeply will confess, each of the three Sullivan sisters sets down her offenses on paper.
By Jessica Warman.
By weaving through her memories and watching the family and friends she left behind, eighteen-year-old Liz Valchar solves the mystery of how her life ended in the Long Island Sound.
By Daisy Whitney.
When Alex, a junior at an elite preparatory school, realizes that she may have been the victim of date rape, she confides in her roommates and sister who convince her to seek help from a secret society, the Mockingbirds.
By Lili Wilkinson.
Sixteen-year-old Ava does not know who she is or where she belongs, but when she tries out a new personality--and sexual orientation--at a different school, her edgy girlfriend, potential boyfriend, and others are hurt by her lack of honesty.
By Carol Lynch Williams.
As her mother's mental illness spins terrifyingly out of control, thirteen-year-old Lacey must face the truth of what life with her mother means for both of them.
By Gabrielle Williams.
When superstitious eighteen-year-old John "Beatle" Lennon, who is dating the best friend of his twin sister, meets Destiny McCartney, their instant rapport and shared quirkiness make it seem that their fate is written in the stars.
By by Katie Williams.
When the body of a classmate is discovered in the woods, sixteen-year-old Evie's lies wind up involving her with the girl's best friend, trying to track down the killer.
By by Tim Wynne-Jones.
Two teenagers who are living on the streets and barely getting by become involved in a complicated criminal plot, and make an unexpected connection with each other.
