Thrilling Supernatural Adventures for Teens

Try these books if you're looking for:
  • Teen books
  • Adventure
  • Supernatural books
The Named
By Marianne Curley
YA F CURLEY
As one of the Named, 16-year-old Ethan is charged with secretly protecting history from the Order of Chaos, an evil group that seeks to alter the past to achieve ultimate power in the present. Ethan is given orders to train his first apprentice, 15-year-old Isabel Becket, in a few short weeks. Soon, though, history and lives are at stake.

The Secret Hour
By Scott Westerfeld
YA F WESTERFE
Strange things happen at midnight in the town of Bixby, Oklahoma. Time freezes. Nobody moves. For one secret hour each night, the town belongs to the dark creatures that haunt the shadows. Only a small group of people know about the secret hour. But Jessica Day is not like the other “Midnighters.” The dark creatures sense a hidden power in Jessica, and they're determined to stop her before she can use it.

City of Bones
By Cassandra Clare
YA F CLARE
When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray witnesses a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons, the body disappears into thin air. It's hard to call the police when the murderers are invisible to everyone else and when there is nothing--not even a smear of blood--to show that a boy has died. Or was he a boy? This is Clary's first meeting with the Shadowhunters, warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons. Soon, Clary is pulled into their world when her mother disappears and Clary herself is attacked by a demon.

The Hunger Games
By Suzanne Collins
YA F COLLINS
In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she steps forward to take her sister's place in the Games. But Katniss has been close to dead before — and survival, for her, is second nature. (This doesn’t have any supernatural elements but it sure is thrilling!)

Historical Fiction with a Romantic Slant

Try these books if you're looking for:
  • Historical fiction
  • Romance
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
By Mary Ann Shaffer
F SHAFFER
In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation.

The Apothecary’s Daughter
By Julie Klassen
F KLASSEN
Yearning for more adventure in her life and longing to know the truth behind her mother's disappearance, Lillian Haswell, the daughter of the local apothecary, seizes the opportunity when a distant aunt offers to educate her as a lady in London.

Treasures of the North
By Tracie Peterson
F PETERSON
Torn between her desire to obey her parents and her fear of the man they've arranged for her to marry, young Grace opts to leave Chicago for the untamed Alaskan frontier.

A Spy in the House
By Y. S. Lee
YA F LEE
Rescued from the gallows in 1850s London, young orphan and thief Mary Quinn is offered a place at Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls where she is trained to be part of an all-female investigative unit called The Agency and, at age seventeen, she infiltrates a rich merchant's home in hopes of tracing his missing cargo ships.

Out of the Dust
By Karen Hesse
YA F HESSE
In a series of poems, fourteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family’s wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

Well-written Genre Blending Novels

Try these books if you're looking for:
  • Genre blending books
  • Read-alikes for Jasper Fforde or Neil Gaiman
The Fifth Elephant
By Terry Pratchett
SCIFI PRATCHET
Satirical SCIFI/Fantasy novels, Pratchett’s Discworld series has more than 30 books which don’t really need to be read in order. A new visit to the satiric Discworld involves a search for the missing elephant from the five who support Discworld on their backs, as a stolen scone, a dwarf coronation, and ruby tights get into the act.

Bellwether
By Connie Willis
SCIFI WILLIS
Sandra Foster, a statistician trying to predict fads and trends, meets Bennett O'Reilly, a chaos theory scientist, who may provide her with the key.

Ella Minnow Pea
By Mark Dunn
F DUNN
Recounts what happens when the citizens of an island must rely on all their ingenuity to communicate in an increasingly limited language when the government progressively bans letters from the alphabet.

His Majesty’s Dragon
By Naomi Novik
SCIFI NOVIK
The Temeraire series is a blend of Historical Fiction and Fantasy. When the HMS Reliant captures a French ship and its priceless cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, Captain Will Laurence is swept into an unexpected kinship with an extraordinary creature and joins the elite Aerial Corps as a master of the dragon Temaraire, in which role he must match wits with the powerful dragon-borne forces of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Storm Front
By Jim Butcher
SCIFI BUTCHER
The Dresden Files series is a Mystery detective story set in a Fantasy world. A modern-day mage and consultant to the police finds his stale life suddenly enlivened by the presence of a rival in the black arts.

Teen Action and Adventure

Try these books if you're looking for:
  • Action
  • Adventure
  • Teen fiction
A Spy in the House
By Y. S. Lee
YA F LEE
Rescued from the gallows in 1850s London, young orphan and thief Mary Quinn is offered a place at Miss Scrimshaw's Academy for Girls where she is trained to be part of an all-female investigative unit called The Agency and, at age seventeen, she infiltrates a rich merchant's home in hopes of tracing his missing cargo ships.

Ruins of Gorlan
By John Flanagan
YA F FLANAGAN
When fifteen-year-old Will is rejected by battleschool, he becomes the reluctant apprentice to the mysterious Ranger Halt, and winds up protecting the kingdom from danger.

Death Cloud
By Andy Lane
YA F LANE
In 1868, with his army officer father suddenly posted to India and his mother mysteriously "unwell," fourteen-year-old Sherlock Holmes is sent to stay with his eccentric uncle and aunt in their vast house in Hampshire, where he uncovers his first murder and a diabolical villain.

Keeper of the Grail
By Michael P. Spradlin
YA F SPRADLIN
In 1191, fifteen-year-old Tristan, a youth of unknown origin raised in an English abbey, becomes a Templar Knight's squire during the Third Crusade and soon finds himself on a mission to bring the Holy Grail to safety.

Sebastian Darke: Prince of Fools
By Philip Caveney
YA F CAVENEY
Accompanied by his sardonic buffalope Max, seventeen-year-old Sebastian Darke meets a spoiled princess and a diminutive soldier who aid in his quest to become court jester to the evil King Septimus.

Modern Classics

Try these books if you're looking for:
  • Modern classics
  • Excellent writing
  • Emphasis on style and story

The Forgotten Garden
By Kate Morton
F MORTON
Abandoned on a 1913 voyage to Australia, Nell is raised by a dock master and his wife who do not tell her until she is an adult that she is not their child, leading Nell to return to England and eventually hand down her quest for answers to her granddaughter.

Lonesome Dove
By Larry McMurtry
F MCMURTRY
Former Texas Rangers leave their unsuccessful cattle business when they hear of good opportunities in newly opened territory.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
By Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
F SHAFFER
In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation.

Tamar
By Mal Peet
F PEET
In England in 1995, fifteen-year-old Tamar, grief-stricken by the puzzling death of her beloved grandfather, slowly begins to uncover the secrets of his life in the Dutch resistance during the last year of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and the climactic events that forever cast a shadow on his life and that of his family.
A Year of Wonders
By Geraldine Brooks
F BROOKS
Young Anna Frith, a vicar's maid, is faced with the loss of her family, the disintegration of her local community, and a passionate, illicit love as she and her village confront the horrors of the plague, in a historical novel based on real-life events in seventeenth-century England.