The Most Exciting YA Books to Read This Fall
by Laura Lambert
It’s been years since I’ve been in school, but I feel a season older every fall. If I’m lucky, a season wiser. And most definitely, a season hungrier for something new for the bedside table.
This fall’s YA releases offer plenty to choose from — sequels and new installments by beloved authors, exciting debuts, adventure, fantasy, thrillers, coming-of-age stories, and more. Here are the most exciting young adult books to read this fall.
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Miss Peregrine's Museum of Wonders
Available from:Fans of the Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children books, rejoice — this capstone to the six-book series offers a new way to engage with the inhabitants and the history of the peculiar world. Even the most dedicated fans might learn something new. Says author Ransom Riggs, “[I]t might be the most fun I’ve had writing a book. Or, should I say, the most fun Miss Peregrine has ever had writing a book.”
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Secrets So Deep
Available from:In this YA mystery by the bestselling author of Dark and Shallow Lies, 17-year-old Avril returns to the seaside town where her mother drowned, Whisper Cove on Long Island Sound. While attending an acting camp, she meets Cole Culver, the son of her mother’s best friend from college. As they grow together, they also get closer to the truth about what happened to Avril’s mother. Kirkus calls the book “sorrowful, haunting, and romantic; a true page-turner.”
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How To Succeed in Witchcraft
Available from:Pitched as Booksmart meets The Craft, Aislinn Brophy’s debut features Shay Johnson, an overachieving, biracial witch desperate to win a full-ride scholarship to college. But she runs afoul of an inappropriate drama teacher on the scholarship committee. Oh, and there’s a whip-smart queer romance, too.
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Soul of the Deep
Available from:Simi’s story continues in this much-anticipated sequel to the bestseller, Skin of the Sea, a YA fantasy re-imagining of The Little Mermaid. Now in service to the god Olokun, Simi watches as her world falls under dark forces and realizes she must break her promise to save it. Kirkus calls it a “deeply satisfying dive into magic and mystery.”
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Well, That Was Unexpected
Available from:Known for her YA thrillers, The Obsession and The New Girl, and mysteries, Dial A for Aunties and Four Aunties and a Wedding, prolific author Jesse Sutanto shifts to YA romance with Well, That Was Unexpected. It’s her first book set in her homeland, Indonesia. In it, high school junior Sharlot Citra finds herself halfway around the world in Jakarta and set up, under contrived circumstances, with a boy named George Clooney Tanuwijaya, a son of the second-richest family in Indonesia.
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A Scatter of Light
Available from:A Scatter of Light is not a sequel, but it has a thread linking the coming-of-age story of Aria Tang West, set in 2013, to the queer 1950s landscape of San Francisco in Lo’s much-loved debut, Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Despite living when marriage equality is the law of the land, Aria still has much to learn about queer culture — and herself.
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Pretty Dead Queens
Available from:This YA mystery thriller’s title is rather literal. When 17-year-old Cecelia Ellis arrives at her grandmother’s home on the California coast, the homecoming queen gets murdered. And she’s not the first high school royal to die in that town.
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Maybe An Artist, A Graphic Memoir
Available from:Liz Montague was just 22 years old, a senior in college, when she became one of the first Black female cartoonists to get published in The New Yorker. This humor-filled graphic memoir tells her story — that of a young, dyslexic Black girl in a predominantly white New Jersey suburb — and how she found herself as an artist.
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The Art of Insanity
Available from:For 18-year-old Natalie Cordova, senior year is about keeping secrets, especially about her bipolar diagnosis and the suicide attempt that preceded it. But it’s more complicated than you’d think. In The Art of Insanity, Christine Webb gives a warm, clear-eyed, and uplifting view of teens living with mental illness.
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Henry Hamlet's Heart
Available from:In this “charming queer romance” (per Kirkus), best friends and classmates at a school for boys, Henry Hamlet and Lennon Cane discover that their connection goes deeper than friendship after a game of truth or dare.
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We Are All We Have
Available from:It’s 2019, and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement knocks on Rani’s door and arrests her mother — a Pakistani woman seeking asylum in the US with her two children after her husband, a journalist, went missing. Set amidst Trump-era immigration policies, We Are All We Have tells Rani’s story as she embarks on a road trip, undocumented and alone, in search of freedom — and home.
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Friends Like These
Available from:At the big end-of-summer beach party for rising seniors in a small California town, a viral video prank goes horribly wrong — and ends with a dead body. That’s how Jake Healy and his girlfriend Jessica Sanchez find themselves in the middle of a national media storm and police investigation in Jennifer Lynn Alvarez’s latest YA thriller.
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Nubia: The Awakening
Available from:In a much-anticipated YA debut, actor Omar Epps, along with writer Clarence Haynes, tells the story of three teens — Zuberi, Uzochi, and Lencho — children of refugees from a fallen utopian island called Nubia off the coast of West Africa. The trio navigates a fantastical, futuristic New York City, where the elite look down on the flood-riddled lower Manhattan from a tech-driven sky city called Up High. When the teens discover their nascent powers, everything changes.
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The Q
Available from:What is the Q? It’s a post-pandemic quarantine zone in what was once Austin, Texas. Maisie Rojas has lived there her whole life. When Lennon Pierce, the president’s son, gets dumped in the Q by kidnappers, it’s up to her to keep him safe and get him out before he gets infected.
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Caste (Adapted for Young Adults)
Available from:Now adapted for young adults, Isabel Wilkerson’s best-selling book asks us to rethink what we know about racism — and to think instead about caste. “[Caste] predates the idea of race,” Wilkerson tells NPR. It "is the term that is more precise [than race]; it is more comprehensive, and it gets at the underlying infrastructure that often we cannot see, but that is there undergirding much of the inequality and injustices and disparities that we live with in this country."
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Five Survive
Available from:From the best-selling author of A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder comes a crime thriller about six friends on an RV road trip who break down in the middle of nowhere under suspicious circumstances. Here’s the math: Eight hours, six friends, and five survivors.
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