2025 YALSA Teens' Top Ten Books: Home

When eighteen-year-old Mallory begrudgingly agrees to return to chess in one last charity tournament, her surprise upset against Nolan Sawyer, the reigning world champ and bad boy of the chess world, sets her on an world win adventure as she rediscovers her passion for the game.

When the town threatens to close their crumbling middle school and Greg realizes he'd have to go to a different school than his best friend, he rallies his classmates to save their school before it's shuttered for good.

An emotional companion novel to If He Had Been with Me (2013), that gives Finn a voice in the events preceding his fatal car accident, and follows his soulmate, Autumn, and friend, Jack, in their grief.

Jameson and Grayson Hawthorne are each pulled into a different high-stakes game, where they must decide who they want to be and what they will sacrifice to win.

When fifteen-year-old Bella's latest blackout lands her in the hospital, she enters rehab to confront her addiction to alcohol.

Prince Oak must find a way to stop a war between Elfhame and North.

A teen girl searches for the truth behind her mother's shocking disappearance and even more shocking reappearance during the filming of a true crime documentary.

Told in their separate voices, six Muslim teens are falsely accused of an alleged attack on a Los Angeles beach and must trust or turn their backs on each other to prove their innocence.

Set in an alternate Victorian England where mediums control the dead, sixteen-year-old autistic transgender boy Silas must expose a power-hungry secret society while confined to a cruel finishing school designed to turn him into the perfect wife.

Viola Reyes is fed up—her tabletop campaign was rejected, her best friend wants her to be more "likable," and her slacker Student Body President, Jack Orsino, is making her job as VP miserable. Her escape is the MMORPG Twelfth Knight, where she plays as a confident male knight named Cesario to avoid the usual online harassment. But when an injured Jack joins the game as Duke Orsino, Vi is shocked to find their in-game alter egos unexpectedly—and awkwardly—compatible.