This list is published annually by School Library Journal.
fiction
Abbott, Megan E. The Fever. A small town comes unraveled after a young teen has a frightening, unexplained seizure in her high school class and rumors of a hazardous illness quickly move through the school and the community, spreading hysteria and destroying friendships and families.
Bertino, Marie-Helene. 2 A.M. at The Cat’s Pajamas: a novel. Traces the unlikely bond between a precocious nine-year-old jazz singer, a divorced teacher hoping to reunite with her high-school sweetheart, and a club owner facing the imminent loss of his Philadelphia business.
Brown, Pierce. Red Rising. A tale set in a bleak future society torn by class divisions follows the experiences of secret revolutionary Darrow, who after witnessing his wife’s execution by an oppressive government joins a revolutionary cell and attempts to infiltrate an elite military academy.
Cantero, Edgar. The Supernatural Enhancements: a novel. Inheriting an eerie estate in the Virginia woods, a skeptical man wonders about his family member’s suicide and realizes that the house harbors both ghosts and terrible secrets, in a story told through journal entries, scrawled notes, and security footage.
Doerr, Anthony. All the Light We Cannot See. A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast.
Francis, Patry. The Orphans of Race Point. When priest Gus Silva, the man she has never stopped loving, is charged with murder, Hallie Costa, who has known Gus since childhood, must not only free him from prison, but from the curse of his past.
Grossman, Lev. The Magician’s Land. Visiting his magical college after being cast out of the secret land of Fillory, Quentin Coldwater, accompanied by brilliant undergraduate Plum, encounters desperate practitioners of gray magic before discovering a sorcery masterwork that could dissolve the boundaries between Fillory and Earth.
Henríquez, Cristina. The Book of Unknown Americans. Moving from Mexico to the United States when their daughter suffers a near-fatal accident, the Riveras confront cultural barriers, their daughter’s difficult recovery, and her developing relationship with a Panamanian boy.
Landis, Dylan. Rainey Royal. Living in a decaying 1970s brownstone with her cultish jazz musician father, 14-year-old Rainey endures unwanted advances from her father’s friend while pursuing her own creative ambitions and struggling to build a substitute family.
Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. A story of the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family explores the fallout of the drowning death of Lydia Lee, the favorite daughter of a Chinese-American family in 1970s Ohio.
Racculia, Kate. Bellweather Rhapsody. A high school music festival goes awry when a young prodigy disappears from a hotel room that was the site of a famous murder/suicide fifteen years earlier, in a whip-smart novel sparkling with the dark and giddy pop culture pleasures of The Shining, Agatha Christie, and Glee.
Scalzi, John. Lock In. When a new virus causes one percent of the population to become completely paralyzed in body but not in mind, the United States pursues a scientific initiative to develop a virtual-reality world for victims, with unexpected consequences.
Schroeder, Karl. Lockstep. Awakening after thousands of years to discover that the decimated planet he was orbiting has become a thriving empire, seventeen-year-old Toby McGonigal reconnects with his family, including a tyrannical and power-crazed brother.
Schrag, Ariel. Adam. When Adam Freedman — a skinny, awkward, inexperienced teenager from Piedmont, California — goes to stay with his older sister Casey in New York City, he is hopeful that his life is about to change. And it sure does.
Vandermeer, Jeff. Annihilation. Describes the twelfth expedition to Area X, a region cut off from the continent for decades, by a group of intrepid women scientists who try to ignore the high mortality rates of those on the previous eleven missions.
Weir, Andy. The Martian. Stranded on Mars by a dust storm that compromised his space suit and forced his crew to leave him behind, astronaut Watney struggles to survive in spite of minimal supplies and harsh environmental challenges that test his ingenuity in unique ways.
nonfiction
Aptowicz, Cristin O’Keefe. Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: a true tale of intrigue and innovation at the dawn of modern medicine. A portrait of the brilliant and eccentric medical innovator who revolutionized American surgery and founded America’s most famous medical oddities museum describes his advocacy for clean and compassionate patient care in spite of his numerous detractors.
Bernstein, Nell. Burning Down the House: The End of Juvenile Prison. Presents a look at the juvenile justice system, describing the violence and physical abuses that pervade detention centers and advocating the need for reform so that juveniles can receive the rehabilitation they need to change their lives.
Brockmeier, Kevin. A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip: a Memoir of Seventh Grade. Traces the author’s experiences in the most difficult year of his life in 1980s Little Rock, describing how he endeavored to grow beyond his sensitive nature to gain new friends, have a first kiss, and explore early literary ambitions.
Duffy, Chris. Above the Dreamless Dead: World War I in Poetry and Comics. Presents graphic novel adaptations of twenty works of trench poetry from World War I, including pieces from such poets as Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, and Isaac Rosenberg.
Rakoff, Joanna Smith. My Salinger Year. A memoir about literary New York in the late nineties, a pre-digital world on the cusp of vanishing, where a young woman finds herself entangled with one of the last great figures of the century.
Zusman, Angela. The Griots of Oakland: Voices from the African American Oral History Project. A project of the Center for Healthy Schools and Communities and the Oakland Unified School District’s Office of African American Achievement and Story for All.