Senior School Reads for the Holidays 2024-2025

Percy Jackson returns. Now a high school senior, Percy wants nothing more than to leave his old life behind and attend New Rome University in California with his love, Annabeth.

 In order to fulfill his dream, however, Percy requires three godly letters of recommendation—and the price is completing one heroic quest for each.

With graduation on the horizon, Percy faces new challenges. 

This could be the most feminist novel of this universe: Percy reckons with several prominent women from ancient myth whose lives were ruined by men. 

Book 3 from the In Every Generation series.

Inspired by: Buffy, the vampire slayer. Frankie Rosenberg, the world's first Slayer-Witch, finds herself fighting evil alone as the threat of Darkness grows, she must lead the charge to reunite the fragmented Scooby gang, save the slayers, and defeat the Darkness.

Book 3 of Rosetta Academy.

Still recovering from her recent breakup, Daphne Elizabeth intends to finish her senior year at Rosetta Academy with her head down and heart shuttered, but when students begin to fall into a deep sleep, she teams up with the swoony new student to find the source of the spell and stop it before it is too late.

A young girl learns of her grandmother and great-aunt's involvement in the Dutch Resistance during World War II in this intense story of family, history, resilience, and hope from acclaimed author Liz Kessler.

When eleven-year-old Hank's mother does not come home after a week, he and his toddler sister, Boo, seek out the stranger listed as their emergency contact, even though it means social workers, a new school, and having to answer questions about his mom that he has been trying to keep secret.

Mallory Marsh is an expert at molding into whatever other people want her to be. Her true thoughts and feelings only come out in her sci-fi webcomic, which she publishes anonymously as Dr. BotGirl. But juggling all the versions of herself gets tricky....

In this semi-autobiographical collection of poems, Renee Watson writes about her experience growing up as a young Black girl at the intersections of race, class, and gender.

After the death of her father, Temperance assumes the lamplighter position in her coastal whaling village and drives away the unnatural fog that descends each night, but when two girls go missing and authorities doubt her abilities, Temperance uncovers dark truths and faces a choice between silence and risking her own and her sister's fate among the vanished.

BOOK 1.

Percy Jackson meets The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy in this fantastical adventure about Ava, who attends a boarding school for the descendants of Greek monsters and uncovers a terrible secret that could change the world forever.

Book 1

The day that Christopher saved a drowning baby griffin from a hidden lake would change his life forever.

Two years after a tragedy saddles him with viral fame, twelve-year-old Simon O'Keeffe and his family move to Grin And Bear It, Nebraska, where the internet and cell phones are banned so astrophysicists can scan the sky for signs of alien life, and where, with the help of two new friends, a puppy, and a giant radio telescope, Simon plans to restart the narrative of his life.

Two high school seniors anticipate a big change in their relationship.

This rich, tender story captures the range of emotions surrounding emerging love and what they mean in the lives of young people. 

Book 3 of Lightlark series

Back in Grim's castle on Nightshade, Isla is reeling in the wake of a brutal battle and the devastating truths it exposed. Her future--and the fate of the world--now hinge on a heart split in two.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of House of Salt and Sorrows comes a new dark retelling of the fairytale “Godfather Death.” Get lost in an atmospheric and spooky tale about a girl beholden to her godfather. Cursed with the ability to know the cures for every ailment, Hazel also knows when death is inevitable. So, when she falls in love with the son of a dying king, she must decide whether to let fate take its course or put herself at risk by thwarting Death.

A  Heartstopper novella.

Reuniting Tori Spring, her little brother Charlie, and Charlie's boyfriend Nick, this novella sees the Spring siblings brave a particularly difficult festive season.

This set contains Ruta Sepetys’s award-winning and gripping historical fiction novels — Between Shades of Gray, Out of the Easy, Salt to the Sea, and The Fountains of Silence. Sepetys writes accessibly but beautifully about the harsh costs of war beyond the battlefield. Though targeted at young adults, her work has amassed fans of all ages, making this set perfect for sharing among book lovers.

Book 2 - Ivory Key Duology

In this thrilling, action-packed sequel and conclusion to the critically acclaimed Ivory Key duology, royal siblings Vira, Ronak, Kaleb, and Riya battle vengeful enemies, centuries-old mysteries, and their own personal demons in order to save their country from ruin.

The New York Times bestselling author of the American Royals series invites you to visit 19th-century Europe amid the glamour and intrigue of the Victorian era. In this historical romance inspired by true events, three princesses struggle to find love--and end up vying for the hearts of two future kings.

Book 2 from House of Marionne series

Sequel to: House of Marionne. Told in multiple points of view, Quell confronts hidden secrets as she tries to find her mother, while assassin Jordon faces the dilemma of protecting the source of all magic by potentially destroying the girl he once loved, as their conflicting loyalties threaten the future of magic.

WINNER OF THE GILLER PRIZE 

A breathtaking and ineffable new novel from author Anne Michaels--a novel of love and loyalty across generations, at once sweeping and intimate.

In 1962, an Indigenous Mi'kmaq family is in Maine to pick summer blueberries when their youngest child, four-year-old Ruthie, disappears. Her six-year-old brother, Joe, saw her last. Told in alternating, first-person chapters from Joe and a narrator called Norma, the novel follows the painful reverberations of Ruthie's disappearance across five decades.

A moving story about grief, love, and family

Winner of the 2024 Bookmark Festival Book of Year

Unfolding in the 1840s in the final stages of the infamous Scottish Clearances--which saw whole communities of the rural poor driven off the land in a relentless program of forced evictions--this singular, beautiful, deeply surprising novel explores the differences and connections between us, the way history shapes our deepest convictions, and how the human spirit can survive despite all odds.

A man lunges in front of a car. An elderly woman silently drowns herself. A corpse sits up in its coffin and speaks. On this reservation, not all is what it seems, in this new spine-chilling mythological horror from the author of Sisters of the Lost Nation.

Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game.

Sam and Sadie--two college friends, often in love, but never lovers--become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before.

A woman stands up on a plane, and predicts when everyone will die. Everyone laughs it off until it starts to come true.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.

Winner of the 2024 Hawthornden Prize

An eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.

National Book Award for Fiction

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

MS

A laugh-out-loud game of challenging “Would You Rather?” questions for teens.

ADULT

GRAPHIC VERSION

This illustrated graphic novel follows Peter Wohlleben as its main character, revealing the secret network of the forest and sharing struggles and triumphs from his career protecting trees.

The book offers scientific insights and pearls of wisdom gained from Peter's decades of observing forests, including how trees impact weather and climate, how they communicate....

MS

VOLUME 1

From learning to make fire and using the stars as guides to cooking meals in microwaves and landing on the moon, prepare to uncover the secrets and superpowers of how we evolved from our first appearances millions of years ago.

YA

When a high school student started a private Instagram account that used racist and sexist memes to make his friends laugh, he thought of it as "edgy" humor. Over time, the edge got sharper. Then a few other kids found out about the account. Pretty soon, everyone knew.

In the end, no one was laughing. And everyone was left asking: Where does accountability end for online speech that harms? And what does accountability even mean?

ADULT

Judge, senator, and activist. Father, grandfather, and friend. This is Murray Sinclair’s story—and the story of a nation—in his own words, an oral history that forgoes the trappings of the traditionally written memoir to center Indigenous ways of knowledge and storytelling.

ADULT

This New York Times Bestseller brings to life the pivotal five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War in this riveting reexamination of a nation in tumult.

ADULT

Harari, author Sapiens, elegantly guides readers through the earliest examples of written records on stone tablets all the way through the advent of social media and the increasing concerns over AI.

ADULT

In this intrepid memoir, Russian political dissident Navalny, who died under suspicious circumstances last February, recaps his career fighting against what he depicts as a kleptocratic bureaucracy.

ADULT

Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she canthrough an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide. Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.

ADULT

A searing, deeply personal account of enduring--and surviving--an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him

YA

YA

ADULT

YA

ADULT

YA

MS

MS

ALL

MS