The Ultimate List of YA Book Lists

Written by: Kelly on December 31, 2018.

The Massive Mega List of Young Adult Book Lists (AKA: Any Kind of YA Book List You Could Desire)

Kelly Jensen and Kimberly Francisco have been writing for STACKED books (stackedbooks.org) for nearly ten years and both of us are trained librarians. We make a lot of young adult book lists, and know how useful they are for collection development and reader’s advisory purposes. More than that, they’re useful for readers itching for a good book.

The best way to navigate this list is by doing a keyword search. It’s Kelly’s hope as curator to eventually develop a basic spreadsheet to make searching even easier.

This list was updated December 2018.

The Ultimate Guide to YA Book Lists

Get Genrefied Series

All of these lists focus on specific genres or subgenres within YA fiction and were created by Kelly Jensen and Kimberly Francisco at STACKED. They each talk about the defining characteristics of the genre (or format!), followed by a big book list, and other websites and blogs to explore that delve even further into the specified genre. This series ended in mid-2015, so more recent titles may not be listed, but this is a goldmine for back list titles!

Beyond the Bestsellers

At Book Riot, Kelly Jensen ran a series called “Beyond the Bestsellers,” offering suggestions of lesser-known titles to read after you’ve read a well-known, bestselling YA book or author. This series was revisited in 2018 and will continue being updated.

3 On A YA Theme

Also at Book Riot, Kelly Jensen has been writing a weekly column called “3 On A YA Theme” for many years. It takes one theme and highlights at least three books that fit. Kelly discontinued writing the series in early 2018, handing it over to Tirzah Price (and her lists are excellent, too!).

As this has been a long-running series, older posts feature older titles and may not have the most current titles listed. Many of these lists are ripe for revisiting, and many are goldmines for backlist reads.

Other YA Book Lists

These thematic lists come from both Book Riot and from STACKED, and they’re authored by Kelly Jensen or Kimberly Francisco, unless otherwise noted. Some are very current, while others are older and feature backlist titles exclusively.