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Contemporary YA Fiction Featuring Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll (Edgy Stuff) Book List

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Nothing gets people more riled up about contemporary YA fiction than books that tackle the tough stuff and tackle it in a manner that’s frank. As much as we want to believe teens live happy and easy lives, that’s far from the truth. The books below aren’t afraid to wrestle with the tough issues and present them in honest, painful, and sometimes downright chilling ways. Sometimes, they’re tackled with levity, too. 

These books are important not only to know but to read and to share. Shying away from “dark” books is the same as shying away from the “dark” challenges that teens — that people — face every single day. This list is lengthy, but I didn’t want to cut out important topics in the interest of space. And since I know I won’t hit everything, feel free to add additional titles in the comments. 

All titles below were published between 2010 and today, and all descriptions come from WorldCat. I’ve tried to note what tough topics they cover and organize them accordingly.

Sex, Sexuality, and Teen Pregnancy


Beautiful Music for Ugly Children by Kirstin Cronn-Mills: Gabe has always identified as a boy, but he was born with a girl’s body. With his new public access radio show gaining in popularity, Gabe struggles with romance, friendships, and parents–all while trying to come out as transgendered. An audition for a station in Minneapolis looks like his ticket to a better life in the big city. But his entire future is threatened when several violent guys find out Gabe, the popular DJ, is also Elizabeth from school. 

The Best and Hardest Thing by Pat Brisson: When she is a sophomore in high school, Molly gets rid of her good-girl image but ends up becoming pregnant and having to make some difficult decisions.

Boyfriends with Girlfriends by Alex Sanchez: When Lance begins to date Sergio, who’s bisexual, he’s not sure that it’ll work out, and when his best friend Allie, who has a boyfriend, meets Sergio’s lesbian friend, she has unexpected feelings which she struggles to understand.

Crossing Lines by Paul Volponi: High school senior Adonis struggles to do the right thing when his fellow football players escalate their bullying of a new classmate, Alan, who is transgendered.
Forbidden by Tabitha Suzuma: Sixteen-year-old Maya and seventeen-year-old Lochan tell, in their separate voices, of their confusion and longing as they fall in love with one another after years of functioning as parents to three younger siblings due to their alcoholic mother’s neglect.
Hooked by Catherine Greenman: After their relationship survives Will going to college, their love is tested again when Thea realizes she is pregnant.

How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr: Told from their own viewpoints, seventeen-year-old Jill, in grief over the loss of her father, and Mandy, nearly nineteen, are thrown together when Jill’s mother agrees to adopt Mandy’s unborn child but nothing turns out as they had anticipated.

I am J 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.

In Too Deep by Amanda Grace: Trying to make her best friend Nick jealous, high school senior Sam becomes involved in a terrible lie that spirals out of control.

Jersey Angel by Beth Ann Bauman: Shapely seventeen-year-old Angel Cassonetti, who lives with her younger siblings and single mother in a house at the Jersey Shore, finds it hard to stay away from ex-boyfriend Joey Sardone.

Kiss It by Erin Downing: Small-town Minnesotan Chastity (Chaz) Bryan wants nothing more than to get some sexual experience before she graduates from high school and moves away, but when she meets an intriguing boy visiting from North Carolina over Christmas break, her tough-girl facade slowly breaks down.

Kiss the Morning Star by Elissa Janine Hoole: The summer after high school graduation and one year after her mother’s tragic death, Anna and her long-time best friend Kat set out on a road trip across the country, armed with camping supplies and a copy of Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, determined to be open to anything that comes their way.

The Lighter Side of Life and Death by CK Kelly Martin: After the last, triumphant night of the school play, fifteen-year-old Mason loses his virginity to his good friend and secret crush, Kat Medina, which leads to enormous complications at school just as his home life is thrown into turmoil by his father’s marriage to a woman with two children.

Love Drugged by James Klise: Fifteen-year-old Jamie is dismayed by his attraction to boys, and when a beautiful girl shows an interest in him, he is all the more intrigued by her father’s work developing a drug called Rehomoline.

Pieces of Us by Margie Gelbwasser: Four teenagers from two families–sisters Katie and Julie and brothers Alex and Kyle–meet every summer at a lakeside community in upstate New York, where they escape their everyday lives and hide disturbing secrets.

Pregnant Pause 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.

Purity by Jackson Pearce: Sixteen-year-old Shelby finds it difficult to balance her mother’s dying request to live a life without restraint with her father’s plans for his “little princess,” which include attending a traditional father-daughter dance that culminates with a ceremonial vow to live “whole, pure lives.”

Shut Out by Kody Keplinger: Fed up with the increasingly violent rivalry between the football and soccer teams at Hamilton High, Lissa and other players’ girlfriends go on strike, but the girls will succeed only if their libidos can be controlled longer than the boys’ can. 

 



Every Little Thing in the World by Nina de Gramont: Before she can decide what do about her newly discovered pregnancy, sixteen-year-old Sydney is punished for “borrowing” a car and shipped out, along with best friend Natalia, to a wilderness camp for the next six weeks.

My Book of Life by Angel by Martine Leavitt (also abuse and drug abuse): 16-year-old Angel struggles to free herself from the trap of prostitution in which she is caught.

Mental and Physical Illness


Cancer


All These Lives by Sarah Wylie: Convinced that she has nine lives after cheating death twice as a child, sixteen-year-old Dani tries to forfeit her remaining lives in hopes of saving her twin sister, Jena, whose leukemia is consuming their family.

I’m Not Her by Janet Gurtler: Brainy Tess Smith is the younger sibling of the beautiful, popular, volleyball-scholarship-bound Kristina. When Kristina is diagnosed with bone cancer, it drastically changes both sisters’ lives. Sometimes the things that annoy us the most about our siblings are the ones we’d miss the most if we lost them.

Never Eighteen by Megan Bostic: Seventeen-year-old Austin, aware that life is short, asks his best friend and secret love, Kaylee, to take him to visit people and places in and around Tacoma, Washington, so that he can try to make a difference in the time he has left.

Radiate by Marley Gibson: Just after making the varsity cheerleading squad the summer before her senior year of high school in Maxwell, Alabama, Hayley Matthews learns she has an aggressive form of cancer in her leg, and she turns to her family, her cheerleading, and her Christian faith to sustain her through her treatment.

Send Me A Sign by Tiffany Schmidt: Superstitious before being diagnosed with leukemia, high school senior Mia becomes irrationally dependent on horoscopes, good luck charms, and the like when her life shifts from cheerleading and parties to chemotherapy and platelets, while her parents obsess and lifelong friend Gyver worries.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green: Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.



Me & Earl & The Dying Girl by Jesse Andrews: Seventeen-year-old Greg has managed to become part of every social group at his Pittsburgh high school without having any friends, but his life changes when his mother forces him to befriend Rachel, a girl he once knew in Hebrew school who has leukemia.

Disordered Eating and Weight Issues




Never Enough by Denise Jaden: Sixteen-year-old Loann admires and envies her older sister Claire’s strength, popularity, and beauty, but as Loann begins to open up to new possibilities in herself, she discovers that Claire’s all-consuming quest for perfection comes at a dangerous price.
Skinny by Donna Cooner: After undergoing gastric-bypass surgery, a self-loathing, obese teenaged girl loses weight and makes the brave decision to start participating in high school life, including pursuing her dream of becoming a singer and finding love.

Zoe Letting Go by Nora Price: Zoe goes to a facility to help cure her anorexia as she comes to terms with the loss of her friend and her own identity.

The Stone Girl by Alyssa Sheinmel: Zoe goes to a facility to help cure her anorexia as she comes to terms with the loss of her friend and her own identity.

Bullying


Butter by Erin Jade Lange (also fits under weight issues): Unable to control his binge eating, a morbidly obese teenager nicknamed Butter decides to make live webcast of his last meal as he attempts to eat himself to death.

Cracked by KM Walton: When Bull Mastrick and Victor Konig wind up in the same psychiatric ward at age sixteen, each recalls and relates in group therapy the bullying relationship they have had since kindergarten, but also facts about themselves and their families that reveal they have much in common.

Everybody Sees the Ants by AS 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.

Keep Holding On by Susane Colasanti: Bullied at school and neglected by her poor, self-absorbed, single mother at home, high school junior Noelle finally reaches the breaking point after a classmate commits suicide.

Leverage by Joshua 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.

Some Girls Are by Courtney Summers: Regina, a high school senior in the popular–and feared–crowd, suddenly falls out of favor and becomes the object of the same sort of vicious bullying that she used to inflict on others, until she finds solace with one of her former victims.

Unlocked by Ryan G Van Cleave: While trying to impress a beautiful, unattainable classmate, fourteen-year-old Andy discovers that a fellow social outcast may be planning an act of school violence.

Speechless by Hannah Harrington: After her behavior causes her to lose her popular friends and results in one person being hospitalized, Chelsea takes a vow of silence.

Physical and Sexual Abuse (Including Hate Crime)




34 Pieces of You by Carmen Rodrigues: After Ellie dies of a drug overdose, her brother, her best friend, and her best friend’s sister face painful secrets of their own when they try to uncover the truth about Ellie’s death.

Bitter End 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.

But I Love Him by Amanda Grace: Traces, through the course of a year, Ann’s transformation from a happy A-student, track star, and popular senior to a solitary, abused woman whose love for the emotionally-scarred Connor has taken away everything–even herself. 

Exposed 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.

Glimpse by Carol Lynch Williams: Living with their mother who earns money as a prostitute, two sisters take care of each other and when the older one attempts suicide, the younger one tries to uncover the reason.

LIE 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.

Live Through This by Mindi Scott: From the outside, fifteen-year-old Coley Sterling’s life seems imperfect but normal, but for years she has buried her shame and guilt over a relationship that crossed the line and now that she has a chance at having a real boyfriend, Reece, the lies begin to unravel.

The Mockingbirds 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.

Shine 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.



Split by Swati Avasthi:  A teenaged boy thrown out of his house by his abusive father goes to live with his older brother, who ran away from home years ago to escape the abuse.

Trafficked by Kim Purcell: A seventeen-year-old Moldovan girl whose parents have been killed is brought to the United States to work as a slave for a family in Los Angeles.

What Happens Next by Colleen Clayton: The stress of hiding a horrific incident that she can neither remember nor completely forget leads sixteen-year-old Cassidy “Sid” Murphy to become alienated from her friends, obsess about weight loss, and draw close to Corey “The Living Stoner” Livingston.

Stay by Deb Caletti: In a remote corner of Washington State where she and her father have gone to escape her obsessive boyfriend, Clara meets two brothers who captain a sailboat, a lighthouse keeper with a secret, and an old friend of her father who knows his secrets.

Mental Illness, Including Depression, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and More




By the Time You Read This, I’ll Be Dead by Julie Anne Peters: High school student Daelyn Rice, who’s been bullied throughout her school career and has more than once attempted suicide, again makes plans to kill herself, in spite of the persistent attempts of an unusual boy to draw her out.
Compulsion 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.
Crazy by Amy Reed: Connor and Izzy, two teens who met at a summer art camp in the Pacific Northwest where they were counsellors, share a series of emails in which they confide in one another, eventally causing Connor to become worried when he realizes that Izzy’s emotional highs and lows are too extreme.

Dirty Little Secrets by CJ Omololu: When her unstable mother dies unexpectedly, sixteen-year-old Lucy must take control and find a way to keep the long-held secret of her mother’s compulsive hoarding from being revealed to friends, neighbors, and especially the media.

Drowning Instinct by Ilsa J Bick: An emotionally damaged sixteen-year-old girl begins a relationship with a deeply troubled older man.

The Girls of No Return by Erin Saldin: A troubled sixteen-year-old girl attending a wilderness school in the Idaho mountains must finally face the consequences of her complicated friendships with two of the other girls at the school.

Harmonic Feedback by Tara Kelly: When Drea and her mother move in with her grandmother in Bellingham, Washington, the sixteen-year-old finds that she can have real friends, in spite of her Asperger’s, and that even when you love someone it does not make life perfect.

Life is But a Dream by Brian James: When fifteen-year-old Sabrina meets Alec at the Wellness Center where she is being treated for schizophrenia, he tries to persuade her that it is the world that is crazy, not them, and she should defy her doctors rather than lose what makes her creative and special.

The Opposite of Hallelujah by Anna Jarzab: For eight of her sixteen years Carolina Mitchell’s older sister Hannah has been a nun in a convent, almost completely out of touch with her family–so when she suddenly abandons her vocation and comes home, nobody knows quite how to handle the situation, or guesses what explosive secrets she is hiding.

Perfect Escape by Jennifer Brown: Seventeen-year-old Kendra, living in the shadow of her brother’s obsessive-compulsive disorder, takes a life-changing road trip with him.

Something Like Normal by Trish Doller: When Travis returns home from Afghanistan, his parents are splitting up, his brother has stolen his girlfriend and car, and he has nightmares of his best friend getting killed but when he runs into Harper, a girl who has despised him since middle school, life actually starts looking up.

Things I Shouldn’t Think (formerly The Babysitter Murders) by Janet Ruth Young: Imaginative Massachusetts seventeen-year-old Dani Solomon confesses she has been troubled by thoughts of harming Alex, the little boy she loves to babysit, triggering gossip and a media frenzy that makes “Dani Death” the target of an extremist vigilante group.

Substance Abuse


Beneath a Meth Moon by Jacqueline Woodson: A young girl uses crystal meth to escape the pain of losing her mother and grandmother in Hurricane Katrina, and then struggles to get over her addiction.

Clean by Amy Reed: A group of teens in a Seattle-area rehabilitation center form an unlikely friendship as they begin to focus less on their own problems with drugs and alcohol by reaching out to help a new member, who seems to have even deeper issues to resolve.

Narc by Crissa-Jean Chappell: When his little sister is caught with a bag of weed, seventeen-year-old Aaron Foster takes the fall. To keep the cops from tearing his family apart, Aaron agrees to go undercover and help bust the dealer who’s funneling drugs into his Miami high school. But making friends with the school’s biggest players isn’t easy for a waste-case loner from the wrong part of town.

Out of Reach by Carrie Arcos: Accompanied by her brother’s friend, Tyler, sixteen-year-old Rachel ventures through San Diego and nearby areas seeking her brother, eighteen-year-old Micah, a methamphetamine addict who ran away from home.

Recovery Road 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.

The Rivals by Daisy Whitney: Alex’s role in the Mockingbirds, an underground student justice system at her elite boarding school, is challenged when she tries to stop a group of students using prescription drugs to help other students cheat, as school officials turn a blind eye to the wrongdoing.

Additional Titles: Two on Technology and Two on Suicide


Note: I want to include many more suicide-related titles, but many of them are related much more to grief than suicide (including, I’d argue, the two here). I plan on writing a lengthy booklist on grief titles in the future.


Going Underground by Susan Vaught: Interest in a new girl and pressure from his parole officer cause seventeen-year-old Del, a gravedigger, to recall and face the “sexting” incident three years earlier that transformed him from a straight-A student-athlete into a social outcast and felon.

Saving June by Hannah Harrington: After her sister’s suicide, Harper Scott takes off for California with her best friend Laney to scatter her sister’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean.



Try Not to Breathe by Jennifer R Hubbard: The summer Ryan is released from a mental hospital following his suicide attempt, he meets Nicki, who gets him to share his darkest secrets while hiding secrets of her own.

Want to Go Private? by Sarah Darer Littman: Insecure about the changes high school brings, Abby ignores advice from her parents and her only friend to “make an effort” and, instead, withdraws from everyone but with Luke, who she met online.



Guest Post: Blake Nelson on Sex in Contemporary YA Fiction

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More Love, Less Sex by Blake Nelson

When I was in college and I realized I was going to be a writer, I would go downstairs at the end of my day and watch MTV in the dorm lounge and write in my journal.   I would write what happened that day, and also, would occasionally write “scenes” or describe people, or write strings of dialogue for practice.   One day, I had the thought that I would have to write sex scenes eventually when I someday wrote a whole novel.   So I tried writing one.  It was very difficult.  I couldn’t really do it.   It was too embarrassing and I found I didn’t really want to go into it, I didn’t feel comfortable using the words involved.   It was really weird because all my favorite authors wrote about sex.  This was the 80s and all literature, serious and genre, seemed to have lavish descriptions of all kind of sexual situations in them.  I guess I was slightly grossed out by them, but I also felt, it was a necessary thing.  It was cool and interesting and showed if you were brave enough as a writer to “go there”.  
So I kept writing sex scenes though I never really got great at it, I thought I could hold my own.

I got my first chance to prove my abilities in GIRL my first novel that I thought of as an adult novel at the time I wrote it.  Since it would go to an adult publisher and since I was trying to tell truthfully what it was like to be a teenaged girl, I felt like it had to have sex scenes in it and so it did.  But I was still pretty young and inexperienced as a writer and as a sexual person, and so now looking back I think most of the actual sex scenes were not my best, and some of them were confusing.  Everyone thought Andrea, the main character, had had an orgasm her first time, but in fact, I was just trying to describe the general exhilaration of the situation.  So I learned a few lessons about that.  
But other sex-related things in GIRL I thought were great.  Like the scenes where guys are pretty horrible about sex and pushy and crude.  At one point one of her boyfriends is grinding against her in a car.  And her reaction to that gave the book a realism that really worked.  

Anyway, I wrote a couple more adult books with lots of sex scenes, as did everyone else as the 90s progressed.   Then, around 2000 when I started writing Young Adult books, without really thinking, I just kept including sex scenes.   I thought: well the world has evolved, YA is getting more sophisticated, the kids can handle it.   They probably appreciate someone telling the truth about such things.   
But then TWILIGHT came and I realized that actually the pendulum was swinging the other way.   Kids actually preferred less sex.  Younger girls especially.  Does a 13 year old girl really want to hear the gory details of that stuff?  Some of them do, but a lot of them probably don’t.   Plus, in a world that was by 2000 so saturated in sex and sexual images and descriptions etc. the really interesting artistic choice might be to go the other way.  And talk about pure love, idealistic love, as opposed to the jaded sexual love that had been so popular as I was growing up.  In fact:  I had kind of preferred that myself, but the world around me had seemed to require sex in novels.

So then gradually I started to scale it back. But then I found in some of my books, like RECOVERY ROAD, it was so important to show how the two characters related to each other sexually, I had to put it in. One scene especially, where the two kids, who are deeply in love, but can’t seem to stay together, grab each other and have a wild uncontrollable encounter in a car that neither could help.  They both have addictive personalities anyway, and so this scene makes total sense.  It really had to happen and it feels like it has to happen and it is one of the best and most moving scenes in the book.  
My favorite sex scenes in a book that is not my own are in KING DORK.  There is something about teen sexuality that is often very funny and awkward and I love how Frank Portman handled it in that book.

One thing I think is that of course teenagers are always interested in sex and in talking about it and hearing about it.  But it might be that they prefer to do that among themselves and to not have adults (teachers or writers) telling them about it.
If it was just a matter of parents and teachers not wanting so much sex, I might resist. But I think the actual kids might prefer it.  The culture itself, the zeitgeist or whatever, seems to want to pull back from saturating young people with explicit sex.  And I’m kind of onboard with that.

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Blake Nelson is the author of RECOVERY ROAD and the most recently, DREAM SCHOOL, the sequel to his groundbreaking first novel GIRL.

Contemporary YA Fiction Featuring Memorable Settings Book List

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Memorable settings in contemporary YA take a number of shapes — sometimes it’s the actual where of the story taking place and sometimes, it’s more about the atmosphere surrounding the where of the story’s place. I’ve rounded up some of the memorable settings I’ve read in the last couple of years, but I’d love to hear any other titles you think make good use of setting.

I’ve purposely left out all books featuring road trips because I’ve already posted an extensive booklist of road trip books this year.

All of these books were published between 2010 and today, and all descriptions come from WorldCat. I’ve tried to note what the setting is, too, to give an idea of why it stands out.

The Princesses of Iowa by M Molly Backes (Iowa): After being involved in a drunk driving accident in the spring, Paige Sheridan spends the summer in Paris as an au-pair and then returns to her suburban Iowa existence for her senior year of high school, where she begins to wonder if she wants more out life than being popular, having a handsome boyfriend and all the latest clothes, and being a member of the social elite.

Narc by Crissa-Jean Chappell (Miami): When his little sister is caught with a bag of weed, seventeen-year-old Aaron Foster takes the fall. To keep the cops from tearing his family apart, Aaron agrees to go undercover and help bust the dealer who’s funneling drugs into his Miami high school. But making friends with the school’s biggest players isn’t easy for a waste-case loner from the wrong part of town.

Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach: Just before his sixteenth birthday, Felton Reinstein has a sudden growth spurt that turns him from a small, jumpy, picked-on boy with the nickname of “Squirrel Nut” to a powerful athlete, leading to new friends, his first love, and the courage to confront his family’s past and current problems.

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins (Paris): 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.

Brooklyn, Burning by Steve Brezenoff (Brooklyn/Greenpoint): Sixteen-year-old Kid, who lives on the streets of Brooklyn, loves Felix, a guitarist and junkie who disappears, leaving Kid the prime suspect in an arson investigation, but a year later Scout arrives, giving Kid a second chance to be in a band and find true love.

Don’t Breathe A Word by Holly Cupala (Capitol Hill, Seattle): Joy Delamere is suffocating from severe asthma, overprotective parents, and an emotionally-abusive boyfriend when she escapes to the streets of nearby Seattle and falls in with a “street family” that teaches her to use a strength she did not know she had.

Like Mandarin by Kirsten Hubbard (rural Wyoming): When shy, awkward fourteen-year-old Grace Carpenter is paired with the beautiful and wild Mandarin on a school project, an unlikely, explosive friendship begins, but all too soon, Grace discovers that Mandarin is a very troubled, even dangerous, girl.

Second Chance Summer by Morgan Matson (Poconos, Pennsylvania): Taylor Edwards’ family might not be the closest-knit–everyone is a little too busy and overscheduled–but for the most part, they get along just fine. Then Taylor’s dad gets devastating news, and her parents decide that the family will spend one last summer all together at their old lake house in the Pocono Mountains. Crammed into a place much smaller and more rustic than they are used to, they begin to get toknow each other again. And Taylor discovers that the people she thought she had left behind haven’t actually gone anywhere. Her former best friend is still around, as is her first boyfriend…and he’s much cuter at seventeen than he was at twelve. As the summer progresses and the Edwards become more of a family, they’re more aware than ever that they’re battling a ticking clock. Sometimes, though, there is just enough time to get a second chance–with family, with friends, and with love.

Frost by Marianna Baer (Frost House at a remote boarding school): When Leena Thomas gets her wish to live in an old Victorian house with her two closest friends during their senior year at boarding school, the unexpected arrival of another roommate–a confrontational and eccentric classmate–seems to bring up old anxieties and fears for Leena that may or may not be in her own mind.

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by Jennifer E Smith (airplane): Hadley and Oliver fall in love on the flight from New York to London, but after a cinematic kiss they lose track of each other at the airport until fate brings them back together on a very momentous day.

Unbreak My Heart by Melissa Walker (boat): Taking the family sailboat on a summer-long trip excites everyone except sixteen-year-old Clementine, who feels stranded with her parents and younger sister and guilty over a falling-out with her best friend.

Where Things Come Back by John Corey Whaley (rural Arkansas): Seventeen-year-old Cullen’s summer in Lily, Arkansas, is marked by his cousin’s death by overdose, an alleged spotting of a woodpecker thought to be extinct, failed romances, and his younger brother’s sudden disappearance.

Amelia Anne is Dead and Gone by Kat Rosenfield (small town Appalachia): Unveils the details of a horrific murder, its effects on permanent and summer residents of the small Appalachian town where the body is discovered, and especially how the related violence shakes eighteen-year-old Becca’s determination to leave home as soon as possible.

Shine by Lauren Myracle (small town southern US): 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.

Dreamland Social Club by Tara Altebrando (Coney Island): 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.

Stolen by Lucy Christopher (rural Australia): 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.
The Girls of No Return by Erin Saldin (rural Idaho school): A troubled sixteen-year-old girl attending a wilderness school in the Idaho mountains must finally face the consequences of her complicated friendships with two of the other girls at the school.
Wanted by Heidi Ayarbe (Carson City, Nevada): Seventeen-year-old Michal Garcia, a bookie at Carson City High School, raises the stakes in her illegal activities after she meets wealthy, risk-taking Josh Ellison.
Please feel free to add your favorite contemporary titles published in the last two years to the comments that feature great settings — the more interesting, the better! 

Guest Post: Molly Backes on Setting and Why it Matters in Contemporary YA Fiction

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Why Setting Matters (or “Where You At?”) by Molly Backes



Setting matters in fiction because it matters in life. I wrote the early drafts of The Princesses of Iowa in a little house in the mountains of New Mexico, halfway between Albuquerque and Moriarty. When I looked out my windows, I saw scratchy Russian thistle, the blue-violet slopes silhouetted against the sky, the fat roadrunner that lived in my backyard, the occasional coyote. But on the page, I tried to recreate the Midwestern landscape of my youth: red barns against fields of bright yellow soybeans, bittersweet vines wrapped around sagging farm fences, the wide blue Iowa sky. 

Setting – where we are, where we come from, when we are, when we’ve come from – shapes us. Part of the fun of writing The Princesses of Iowa was taking familiar characters and relationships (the high school mean girls) and transposing them into a world I recognized as my own. I once overheard my agent describe my book as “Gossip Girls of Iowa.” At first I was horrified, but then I fell in love with the idea. Because we all know the mean girls in New York and California, the mean girls with money and power, with designer clothes and private schools and fancy cars. We see them on TV and in the movies all the time. But those girls don’t live in my world. In my world, the rich girl doesn’t get a BMW on her 16thbirthday, she gets a brand new Subaru. Where I come from, to be financially successful, you don’t have to be the CEO of a global corporation; being the town’s orthodontist puts you at the top of the economic food chain.  

For me, a large part of the appeal in reading contemporary fiction is coming across that perfect detail – something you’ve noticed, or heard, or felt in your own life, something you may not have even put words to, or something you believed no one else has ever noticed – and saying, “Yes! Yes, that’s exactly how it is!” It’s reassuring, that moment of recognition; it validates your own experience and affirms that you’re not alone in the way you experience the world. 


The joy of writing contemporary fiction is in the opportunity – and the challenge – to find those unique details, to capture the world as you experience it. And – if you’re doing it right – setting isn’t just descriptions of pretty landscapes; it pushes action, and reveals character. 

Every character comes from somewhere, and every character has a prism of assumptions — cultural, regional, religious, political, familial, social — and emotions through which she views the world. Her assumptions shape the way she sees, how she makes her metaphors, how she speaks, how she reacts, what (and who) she admires, what she loves. Her emotions determine the things she notices and how she processes them.

For instance, take two women at a small-town fair. One is in her late seventies, and she’s there because she wants to revisit the place she met her late husband. Her joints hurt, she’s a little cranky, and she grew up in a time when children were taught to be seen and not heard. The way she describes the fair will be filtered through her prism: it is loud and garish, it’s not what it used to be, it’s shabby and small where it used to be magnificent, it’s too hot, it’s vulgar, it’s lonely. Everything she describes, every interaction she has, and every emotional reaction she has reveals her character, because everything she says and notices is filtered through her unique worldview.

The other woman is fourteen, just a girl, who’s spent the summer between eighth and ninth grade selling produce at a roadside farmstand. She’s tan and strong and friendly, with enough cash in her pocket to ride every single ride. For her, the fair is full of possibility: it’s the social scene of the summer, the one time all summer that the teens of the town are all in the same place at the same time. She’s changed, and she can’t wait to see if anyone notices. To her, the hum of the crowd is intoxicating, and in it she hears all the conversations she might have, with newly-interesting boys who never noticed her before. The rides look thrilling and the lights enticing. And because she’s spent the summer hauling produce, she compares the unfamiliar colors and shapes of the fair to the familiar ones of the vegetables. The funhouse is the purplish black of a ripe Black Bell eggplant, and the sweaty tendrils of her hair stick to her face like corn silk.

Everything they notice, everything they say, the way they move and how they interact with the setting — it all reveals character.


With each draft, we have to pay close attention to these details, because often they reveal more about our characters than we know ourselves. And if done well, all these tiny details, many of which will go virtually unnoticed by readers, add up to a greater whole — a living, breathing, complicated person with a history and a future, someone who will live on in your reader’s mind long after he finishes your book.


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M. Molly Backes is the author of The Princesses of Iowa (Candlewick) and is the assistant director of StoryStudio Chicago, a creative writing studio. She lives in Chicago, where she stops to pet every dog she sees. Follow her on Twitter @mollybackes or stalk her on her block at mollybackes.blogspot.com.

Contemporary YA Fiction Featuring Sports Book List

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Looking for a good contemporary book featuring sports and athletics in some capacity? Here’s a nice, solid list of titles to check out. As has been the theme all week, these books are all published between 2010 and today, and all descriptions come from WorldCat. If you’ve got a title you’d like to add, drop it in the comments. 

Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach: Just before his sixteenth birthday, Felton Reinstein has a sudden growth spurt that turns him from a small, jumpy, picked-on boy with the nickname of “Squirrel Nut” to a powerful athlete, leading to new friends, his first love, and the courage to confront his family’s past and current problems.

Boy21 by Matthew Quick: Finley, an unnaturally quiet boy who is the only white player on his high school’s varsity basketball team, lives in a dismal Pennsylvania town that is ruled by the Irish mob, and when his coach asks him to mentor a troubled African American student who has transferred there from an elite private school in California, he finds that they have a lot in common in spite of their apparent differences.

Stealing Parker by Miranda Kenneally: Parker Shelton pretty much has the perfect life. She’s on her way to becoming valedictorian at Hundred Oaks High, she’s made the all-star softball team, and she has plenty of friends. Then her mother’s scandal rocks their small town and suddenly no one will talk to her. Now Parker wants a new life.

The Final Four by Paul Volponi: Four players at the Final Four of the NCAA basketball tournament struggle with the pressures of tournament play and the expectations of society at large.

Anything But Ordinary by Lara Avery: A slight error left Olympic diving-hopeful Bryce Graham in a five-year coma and now, at at twenty-two, she must adjust to a world that went on without her and to visions that may or may not be real.

Audition by Stasia Ward Kehoe: When sixteen-year-old Sara, from a small Vermont town, wins a scholarship to study ballet in New Jersey, her ambivalence about her future increases even as her dancing improves.

Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip by Jordan Sonnenblick: After an injury ends former star pitcher Peter Friedman’s athletic dreams, he concentrates on photography which leads him to a girlfriend, new fame as a high school sports photographer, and a deeper relationship with the beloved grandfather who, when he realizes he is becoming senile, gives Pete all of his professional camera gear.

Leverage by Joshua 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.

Playing Hurt by Holly Schindler: Chelsea Keyes, a high school basketball star whose promising career has been cut short by a terrible accident on the court, and Clint Morgan, a nineteen-year-old ex-hockey player who gave up his sport following a game-related tragedy, meet at a Minnesota lake resort and find themselves drawn together by the losses they have suffered.

Catching Jordan by Miranda Kenneally: What girl doesn’t want to be surrounded by gorgeous jocks day in and day out? Jordan Woods isn’t just surrounded by hot guys, though. She leads them as the captain and quarterback of her high school football team. They all see her as one of the guys, and that’s just fine. As long as she gets her athletic scholarship to a powerhouse university. But now there’s a new guy in town who threatens her starting position…suddenly she’s hoping he’ll see her as more than just a teammate.

Head Games by Keri Mikulski: Basketball star Taylor, who doubts that she is attractive due to her height, reluctantly agrees to participate in a fashion show, an event complicated by her divided feelings about two boys and about her team’s preparations for the playoffs.

The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen: When a school bus accident leaves sixteen-year-old Jessica an amputee, she returns to school with a prosthetic limb and her track team finds a wonderful way to help rekindle her dream of running again.

Bunheads by Sophie Flack: Hannah Ward, nineteen, revels in the competition, intense rehearsals, and dazzling performances that come with being a member of Manhattan Ballet Company’s corps de ballet, but after meeting handsome musician Jacob she begins to realize there could be more to her life.

Compulsion 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. 

Crossing Lines by Paul Volponi: High school senior Adonis struggles to do the right thing when his fellow football players escalate their bullying of a new classmate, Alan, who is transgendered.

Jersey Tomatoes are the Best by Maria Padian: When fifteen-year-old best friends Henry and Eve leave New Jersey, one for tennis camp in Florida and one for ballet camp in New York, each faces challenges that put her long-cherished dreams of the future to the test.
Queen of Secrets by Jenny Meyerhoff: Fifteen-year-old Essie Green, an orphan who has been raised by her secular Jewish grandparents in Michigan, experiences conflicting loyalties and confusing emotions when her aunt, uncle, and cousin move back from New York, and her very religious cousin tries to fit in with the other football players at Essie’s high school, one of whom is Essie’s popular new boyfriend.
Shutout by Brendan Halpin: Fourteen-year-old Amanda and her best friend Lena start high school looking forward to playing on the varsity soccer team, but when Lena makes varsity and Amanda only makes junior varsity, their long friendship rapidly changes.

Center Field by Robert Lipsyte: Mike lives for baseball and hopes to follow his idol into the major leagues one day, but he is distracted by a new player who might take his place in center field, an ankle injury, problems at home, and a growing awareness that something sinister is happening at school.

Perfected by Girls by Alfred Martino: Melinda Radford has difficulty everyday because she is on the boys wrestling team.