realistic fiction

Elizabeth Acevedo

X has loved writing down her thoughts from an early age. Unfortunately, she doesn't get to share them with her family, due to her mother's strict dedication to making sure X is focused on being a good Catholic girl. When X starts questioning her faith and realizes her brother is hiding his own secrets from their mother, she starts figuring out how she can stand up for herself and her beliefs.

Samira Ahmed

When 16-year-old Telemachos and his two best friends leave their life of privilege to undertake a quest to find Telemachos' father Odysseus, they learn much along the way about what it means to be a man and a king.

Deb Caletti

A guy in a parking lot leers at her, and Annabelle Agnelli takes off running. Eleven miles later, she stops, only to realize that running is exactly what she needs to do. Not just an impromptu, panic-stricken bolt, but an outlandishly extreme run that will take her from Seattle to Washington, D.C. It might help with her PTSD, and it might help her come to terms with her body. It will surely give her time to mourn the terrible losses of the previous year, and atone for the role she was never meant to play. This remarkable book traces Annabelle's cross-country adventure while gradually peeling apart the events that led to the trauma she's running from.

Gloria Chao

Struggling with guilt stemming from her parents' cultural expectations about her future as a proper wife and doctor, a 17-year-old Taiwanese-American college freshman hides the truth about her germ phobia and her crush on a Japanese classmate before reconnecting with her brother, who is estranged from the family for dating the wrong woman.

Jay Coles

As Marvin, his twin brother, Tyler, and their best friends exit a convenience store, they are caught in the commotion surrounding a police chase. After the cop viciously beats one of the young men he was pursuing, he draws a gun on Marvin and his group, threatening to shoot as he yells racial hostilities. Guns appear once more when Marvin and Tyler attend a house party and a shooting breaks out, drawing the police. Amidst the chaos, Marvin loses track of his brother, who never comes home. Days afterward, detectives visit Marvin's house and inform him and his mother that Tyler was killed in a gang-related incident; but later, a video surfaces that shows a cop murdering Tyler, proving the detectives' claims false. In the aftermath of Tyler's murder, Marvin must grapple with his grief while also dealing with the social and racial outrage his brother's death sparks. Coles' story offers a glimpse into the injustices, struggles, and pain of being a black male in America.

Eric L. Gansworth

In 1980 life is hard on the Tuscarora Reservation in upstate New York, and most of the teenagers feel like they are going nowhere: Carson Mastick dreams of forming a rock band, and Maggi Bokoni longs to create her own conceptual artwork instead of the traditional beadwork that her family sells to tourists-but tensions are rising between the reservation and the surrounding communities, and somehow in the confusion of politics and growing up Carson and Maggi have to make a place for themselves.

John Green

High-school junior Aza has an obsessive fear of being infected with the bacteria Clostridium difficile ("C. diff"), which can be fatal. Her fear has become obsession, plaguing her with "intrusives," thoughts that take over her mind, making her feel that she is not the author of her own life. She does, however, have a life: her father is dead; her mother is a teacher; her best friends are Mychal, a gifted artist, and Daisy, a well-known Star Wars fan-fiction author. To their trio is added Davis, whom Aza had known when they were 11. Davis' billionaire father has decamped, pursued by the police, leaving Davis and his younger brother parentless (their mother is dead) and very much on their own. How will the friends cope with all this? And how will Aza cope with her own problems?

Jenny Hubbard

Sent to an Amherst, Massachusetts, boarding school after her ex-boyfriend shoots himself, seventeen-year-old Emily expresses herself through poetry as she relives their relationship, copes with her guilt, and begins to heal.

A. E. Kaplan

Rejected by every Ivy League and safety college she applies to, a top-scoring high achiever worries that her hard work and her mother's sacrifices have been for nothing and grapples with an increasingly uncertain future while struggling to understand what went wrong.

Adib Khorram

Darius Kellner has more than his share of teen troubles to manage: racist bullies, clinical depression, complications with his father, and feeling like a misfit. So he does not expect much when his family travels to Iran to visit his maternal grandparents. Darius is a keen observer of life and very much aware of his emotional mechanisms. He is loving, sensitive, and a connoisseur of tea: steeping, drinking, sharing with family. He views the world through analogies to Star Trek and the Lord of the Rings trilogy in ways that are sometimes endearing and other times cumbersome. The trip to Iran opens new places of tenderness as Darius connects with people, places, and history that feel simultaneously familiar and new

Emma Mills

Small-town life is anything but suffocating for Sophie, who spends most of her time with her four best friends and worries about leaving home for college. In most ways, Acadia, Illinois, is a typical small town. Its one claim to fame is Megan Pleasant, a country singer-songwriter who made it big with sweet songs about her hometown, before turning on it in her latest record. Sophie's stuck on a mission to get Megan to return home to play a benefit that will solve the Acadia Marching Band's financial problems, but that's just one of the quests she and her friends undertake through a summer of change, adventure, and heartbreak

Emily X.R. Pan

Leigh shatters after her mother's suicide-who wouldn't?-but when a huge, beautiful red bird appears and calls her name in her mother's voice, she doesn't think she's hallucinating; she's sure the bird is actually her mother, and not "some William Faulkner stream-of-consciousness metaphorical crap." When the bird brings Leigh a box of letters and photos from her mother's childhood in Taiwan, she convinces her white father to take her to Taipei to meet her mother's estranged parents for the first time. There she digs into her family's past, visiting her mother's favorite places and keeping an eye out for the bird, which grows ever more elusive the longer Leigh searches

Benjamin Alire Saenz

Having believed he was happy with his place in the loving Mexican-American family he shares with his adoptive gay father, Sal turns angry and uncertain when his senior year arrives and he realizes that he wants to know more about his biological origins.

A.J. Steiger

At 17, Alvie bears more responsibility with less support than many adults. She lives alone, holds a full-time job caring for animals at a zoo, and is navigating the legal system to gain full emancipation. And she does all of this as a person with autism spectrum disorder. When circumstance brings Stuart into Alvie's life, she sees their connection as an opportunity to experience sex and to fulfill her social worker's advice to form friendships; but it fosters stronger and more complicated feelings for Stuart.