What's New in Young Adult Novels? 2025

 

The latest revision of my book What's New in Young Adult Novels? and Ideas for Classroom Use 2025 is now available. Just click on the blue book icon in the upper right corner of this page and it will take you to Lulu.com where you can purchase this book.  I would again like to thank NetGalley for providing ARCs of many of the new young adult novels that I review. Before I leave the books I reviewed in 2025, I would like to recommend mysteries by three well-known young adult authors.  When We Were Monsters by Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places) is a psychological thriller about eight students at an elite boarding school who are chosen for a storytelling workshop with a visiting author, who happens to have attended the workshop when a friend was murdered.  The author gained fame and fortune by writing about the murder. Sisters in the Wind by Angeline Boulley (Firekeeper's Daughter) tells the story of a Native American girl whose adoptive father hid her heritage from her. When she is injured in a pipe bombing right as she is leaving town, she attempts to uncover his motives during her recovery.  We Fell Apart by e. Lockhart is the third book in the We Were Liars series. In this book a young woman flies to Martha's Vineyard to meet her father who is a famous artist and to accept his painting of her that's worth millions. 

In When We Were Monsters Effy and Arlo, who have a messy romantic history, and six other students from their boarding school are chosen for an exclusive storytelling workshop with a famous writer, director, actress, Meredith Graffam. One will be chosen to have their story filmed, produced or published. Graffam attended the workshop when she was a budding artist and her best friend, who attended with her, was murdered. She wrote about the experience and brought the killer to justice. However, Graffam insists that good writers are risk takers and challenges them to complete life threatening tasks.  The students must decide if the reward is worth losing their lives. As competitors are supposedly sent home one by one, the remaining students begin to realize that there is more to the story than it would seem.

Sisters in the Wind explores the foster-care system and the Indian Child Welfare Act. After her father dies, Ojibwe Lucy Smith spends the rest of her childhood in the foster system. When Potawatomi former FBI attorney Jamie approaches Lucy at work during her diner shift, claiming to help reconnect people with their Indigenous heritage, she rejects his offer. But after she’s injured in a suspicious pipe bomb explosion while trying to leave town, she’s forced to rely on Jamie and his friend Daunis during her recovery. Alternating chapters between the present and her childhood shed light on the fact that her father hid her native American heritage from her. She should have been protected by the Indian Child Welfare Act. The failings of the foster care system, in particular, the illegal baby factories that many group homes facilitate are revealed. 

We Fell Apart introduces gamer Matilda Klein, who receives a letter from world-renowned artist Kinsley Cello, who is supposedly her father. Her self-absorbed mother has just left for Mexico with her latest boyfriend, and Matilda is just counting down the days until she leaves for college, so she picks up and flies to Martha’s Vineyard to meet Kinsley. When she arrives, she is greeted by Kinsley’s wife June, their son and Matilda’s half brother Meer, Brock, a former child actor, and Tatum, who seems to be holding the motley group together, but no Kingsley. Matilda has been lured there by the promise of a Kinsley painting of her worth millions. As she whiles away the summer, she begins to learn secrets about her father that could change everything. 

YA Novels Explore the Multiverse

 Life in the multiverse, a hypothetical group of multiple universes, is a hot new topic in YA novels. The multiverse stories can use a variety of plot devices. e. lockhart's new novel Again and Again, follows the "ground hog day" approach, where the main character Adelaide experiences her relationship with a new love interest over and over with variations each time.  Patrick Ness's Burn employs a "wormhole" between universes in a story set in the Cold War era where a dragons versus human conflict is about to break out. Now and When by Sarah Bennett Wealer is a take off on the "butterfly effect" when the main character sees the future on her social media site and begins manipulating the present to change the future.

In Again and Again Adelaide Buchwald spends the summer following her junior year at Alabaster Prep experiencing a recent breakup, her brother Toby's opioid addiction and a new attraction to Jack in various timelines.  She meets Jack while walking five dogs for teachers at the prep school.  She has never forgotten his writing her a poem at a party two years ago.  The narrative explores various possibilities as to how their relationship will progress.  At the same time, she is working on a set design for Sam Shephard's Fool for Love,  mourning her lost love and reconnecting with her brother.  The question of reality versus imagination is not always easy for the reader to determine but is worth the work. 

Burn is a mashup of historical and science fiction which begins in 1957 in Frome, Washington.  Amid tensions of the Cold War, bi-racial Sarah Dewhust and her father hire a new worker for their failing farm.  The catch: the hired hand, Kazimir, is a centuries-old Russian blue dragon, who has knowledge of a prophecy involving Sarah and an upcoming war between humans and dragons.  Meanwhile in Canada, an assassin raised by the Believers, a religious cult that worships dragons, is headed south to kill her with two FBI agents in pursuit, seeking to stop what the cult has planned. Sarah and her friend Jason Inagawa, who just returned from an internment camp, seek Kazimir's protection from the perceived threat, when they are thrown into an alternate universe where things are similar, yet completely different. In this action-packed thriller, elements of prejudice and the fears of the Cold War era are explored amidst a genre-defying title of political intrigue and dragons!

Now and When introduces Skyler Finch who finds her nemesis Truman Alexander an incredibly annoying Know-it-all; so when her phone starts sending her notifications from the future, she is shocked to see herself married to Truman.  She decides she cannot let that happen and begins trying to change the future by manipulating the present. Although Skyler seems to have it all, academic success, happily married parents, and a perfect boyfriend, she is concerned by a threat to demolish a beloved community space and her best friend Harper's suicidal tendencies.  As she tries to change the future, she disturbs the present and ends up enlisting Truman's help to undo the harm she has done.  As she stumbles toward a solution, she finds that letting things play out on their own may not be so bad after all.