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Books for Teens

Suggested Books

The DC Public Library and the D.C. Public Schools have teamed up to suggest books you might enjoy. The lists include a variety of books for seventh to 12th graders, to satisfy every reading interest.

Award Winners

Find an award-winning book to read by visiting the links below. Please note that the library may not always have every title available. Award lists are updated annually.

Suggested Books for Seventh Grade

  • I Am the Darker Brother  by Arnold Adoff
  • Chains  by Laurie Halse Anderson
  • Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World  by Jennifer Armstrong
  • Rules of the Road  by Joan Bauer
  • Bowman’s Store: A Journey to Myself  by Joseph Bruchac
  • The Dark Is Rising  by Susan Cooper
  • I Am the Cheese  by Robert Cormier
  • A Girl Named Disaster  by Nancy Farmer
  • Phineas Gage   by John Fleischman
  • Seedfolks   by Paul Fleischman
  • Escape!: The Story of the Great Houdini  by Sid Fleischman
  • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery  by Russell Freedman
  • Tales of the Greek Heroes   by Roger Lancelyn Green
  • Running Out of Time   by Margaret Peterson Haddix
  • The Endless Steppe  by Esther Hautzig
  • Penny from Heaven   by Jennifer L. Holm
  • Totally Joe   by James Howe
  • The Dream Keeper and Other Poems   by Langston Hughes
  • The Diary of Latoya Hunter  by Latoya Hunter
  • Top Secret: A Handbook of Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing  by Paul B. Janeczko
  • Red Scarf Girl   by Ji-li Jiang
  • The Color of My Words  by Lynn Joseph
  • Angels of Mercy: The Army Nurses of World War II  by Betsy Kuhn
  • Hattie Big Sky   by Kirby Larson
  • Facing the Lion: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna   by Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton
  • Rules   by Cynthia Lord
  • Travel Team  by Mike Lupica
  • Hero-Type  by Barry Lyga
  • The Great Fire  by Jim Murphy
  • Journey to Jo’burg: A South African Story   by Beverley Naidoo
  • Zel  by Donna Jo Napoli
  • We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball  by Kadir Nelson
  • Habibi  by Naomi Shihab Nye
  • Thunder Rolling in the Mountains   by Scott O’Dell and Elizabeth Hall
  • Rosa Parks: My Story  by Rosa Parks
  • The Last Book in the Universe  by Rodman Philbrick
  • The Golden Compass  by Philip Pullman
  • Walking to the Bus-Rider Blues  by Harriette Gillen Robinet
  • Esperanza Rising  by Pamela Muñoz Ryan
  • Small Steps  by Louis Sachar
  • The Wednesday Wars  by Gary D. Schmidt
  • Guys Write for Guys Read   by Jon Scieszka
  • To Dance: A Ballerina’s Graphic Novel   by Siena Cherson Siegel
  • Taking Sides  by Gary Soto
  • The Land  by Mildred D. Taylor

Suggested Books for Eighth Grade

  • Does My Head Look Big in This?  by Randa Abdel-Fattah
  • The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian  by Sherman Alexie
  • Fever 1793  by Laurie Halse Anderson
  • Freedom Riders: John Lewis and Jim Zwerg on the Front Lines of the Civil Rights Movement  by Ann Bausum
  • Tangerine   by Edward Bloor
  • Ask Me No Questions   by Marina Budhos
  • Jumping the Nail   by Eve Bunting
  • Gifted Hands   by Ben Carson
  • I, Too, Sing America  by Catherine Clinton
  • The Hunger Games  by Suzanne Collins
  • Red Kayak  by Priscilla Cummings
  • The Ear, the Eye and the Arm  by Nancy Farmer
  • Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Wartime Sarajevo   by Zlata Filipovic
  • Who Am I without Him?: Short Stories About Girls and the Boys in Their Lives  by Sharon G. Flake
  • Dateline: Troy  by Paul Fleischman
  • The Trouble Begins at 8: A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West  by Sid Fleischman
  • Shadow Spinner  by Susan Fletcher
  • The Thief Lord  by Cornelia Funke
  • Anthony Burns  by Virginia Hamilton
  • Harlem Stomp!  by Laban Carrick Hill
  • The Demon in the Teahouse   by Dorothy Hoobler
  • The Misfits  by James Howe
  • California Blue  by David Klass
  • Wolf Tower  by Tanith Lee
  • Red Midnight   by Ben Mikaelsen
  • Harlem  by Walter Dean Myers
  • Fortune’s Bones: The Manumission Requiem  by Marilyn Nelson
  • The Chosen  by Chaim Potok
  • Jackie’s Nine: Jackie Robinson’s Values to Live By  by Sharon Robinson
  • Gandhi, Great Soul  by John B. Severance
  • Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy  by Sonya Sones
  • Living Up the Street  by Gary Soto
  • The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde   by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Iron West  by Doug TenNapel
  • Team Moon  by Catherine Thimmesh
  • Good-bye, Chunky Rice  by Craig Thompson
  • The Hobbit  by J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Stuck in Neutral   by Terry Trueman
  • The Thief   by Megan Whalen Turner
  • The Invisible Thread: An Autobiography  by Yoshiko Uchida
  • A Journey to the Center of the Earth  by Jules Verne
  • Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps  by Andrea Warren
  • Up from Slavery  by Booker T. Washington
  • The Killer’s Cousin  by Nancy Werlin
  • Uglies  by Scott Westerfeld
  • Like Sisters on the Homefront   by Rita Williams-Garcia
  • Bat 6  by Virginia Euwer Wolff
  • Hush  by Jacqueline Woodson
  • Dragonwings  by Laurence Yep

Suggested Books for Ninth Grade

  • Estrella’s Quinceañera  by Malin Alegria
  • Speak  by Laurie Halse Anderson
  • The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing   by M.T. Anderson
  • Freeze Frame   by Heidi Ayarbe
  • Another Country  by James Baldwin
  • Tyrell  by Coe Booth
  • Fahrenheit 451  by Ray Bradbury
  • Manchild in the Promised Land  by Claude Brown
  • Code Talker: A Novel about the Navajo Marines of World War Two  by Joseph Bruchac
  • The Water Is Wide  by Pat Conroy
  • Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes  by Chris Crutcher
  • The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream  by Sampson Davis and Others
  • A Bone from a Dry Sea  by Peter Dickinson
  • Tears of a Tiger  by Sharon Draper
  • Martha Graham: A Dancer’s Life  by Russell Freedman
  • The Outsiders  by S.E. Hinton
  • Brave New World  by Aldous Huxley
  • Find Where the Wind Goes: Moments from My Life   by Mae Jemison
  • The First Part Last  by Angela Johnson
  • The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man  by James Weldon Johnson
  • Jefferson’s Children  by Shannon Lanier
  • To Kill a Mockingbird  by Harper Lee
  • The Call of the Wild  by Jack London
  • Gold Dust  by Chris Lynch
  • Sorrow’s Kitchen: The Life and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston   by Mary E. Lyons
  • Beauty  by Robin McKinley
  • Twilight  by Stephenie Meyer
  • Bad Boy, A Memoir   by Walter Dean Myers
  • A Step from Heaven  by An Na
  • Carver: A Life in Poems   by Marilyn Nelson
  • 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East  by Naomi Shihab Nye
  • An Island Like You: Stories of the Barrio  by Judith Ortiz Cofer
  • Eragon  by Christopher Paolini
  • Twelve Angry Men   by Reginald Rose
  • Frankenstein  by Mary Shelley
  • Unwind  by Neal Shusterman
  • Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale  by Art Spiegelman
  • The Pearl   by John Steinbeck
  • Dracula  by Bram Stoker
  • Chasing Lincoln’s Killer  by James Swanson
  • The Rules of Survival  by Nancy Werlin
  • The Piano Lesson  by August Wilson
  • Pedro and Me: Friendship, Loss, and What I Learned  by Judd Winick
  • American Born Chinese   by Gene Luen Yang

Suggested Books for 10th Grade

  • A Death in the Family   by James Agee
  • Emma  by Jane Austen
  • A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier  by Ishmael Beah
  • Warriors Don’t Cry   by Melba Pattillo Beals
  • A Place Where the Sea Remembers  by Sandra Benitez
  • Weetzie Bat  by Francesca Lia Block
  • Cold Sassy Tree  by Olive Ann Burns
  • Parable of the Sower  by Octavia E. Butler
  • Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You  by Peter Cameron
  • Girl With a Pearl Earring  by Tracy Chevalier
  • And Then There Were None  by Agatha Christie
  • On the Street Where You Live  by Mary Higgins Clark
  • Childhood’s End  by Arthur C. Clarke
  • Running Loose  by Chris Crutcher
  • Neanderthal  by John Darnton
  • Breath, Eyes, Memory  by Edwidge Danticat
  • Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years  by Sarah Louise Delany
  • Great Expectations  by Charles Dickens
  • Last Shot: A Final Four Mystery  by John Feinstein
  • Bang!  by Sharon G. Flake
  • Lord of the Flies   by William Golding
  • Marley & Me  by John Grogan
  • Hiroshima  by John Hersey
  • Skinwalkers   by Tony Hillerman
  • Mudbound  by Hillary Jordan
  • Good Poems  by Garrison Keillor
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest  by Ken Kesey
  • The Bean Trees  by Barbara Kingsolver
  • The Color of Water  by James McBride
  • The Member of the Wedding  by Carson McCullers
  • The Glory Field  by Walter Dean Myers
  • Mutiny on the Bounty  by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
  • Cry, the Beloved Country  by Alan Paton
  • In My Father’s House  by Ann Rinaldi
  • The Killer Angels  by Michael Shaara
  • Persepolis  by Marjane Satrapi
  • As You Like It  by William Shakespeare
  • Report from Ground Zero  by Dennis Smith
  • Of Mice and Men   by John Steinbeck
  • Treasure Island  by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Skim  by Mariko Tamaki
  • The Bomb  by Theodore Taylor
  • Extreme Sports  by Joe Tomlinson
  • Philadelphia Fire   by John Edgar Wideman
  • Night  by Elie Wiesel
  • Fences  by August Wilson
  • The Autobiography of Malcolm X  by Malcolm X
  • Briar Rose  by Jane Yolen
  • The Book Thief  by Marcus Zusak

Suggested Books for 11th Grade

  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy  by Douglas Adams
  • Before We Were Free  by Julia Alvarez
  • Gather Together in My Name   by Maya Angelou
  • Go Tell It on the Mountain  by James Baldwin
  • All Souls’ Rising   by Madison Smartt Bell
  • When the Legends Die  by Hal Borland
  • Something Wicked This Way Comes  by Ray Bradbury
  • Somebody Told Me: The Newspaper Stories of Rick Bragg  by Rick Bragg
  • Jane Eyre   by Charlotte Bronte
  • Woman Hollering Creek, and Other Stories  by Sandra Cisneros
  • Heart of Darkness   by Joseph Conrad
  • Born Confused  by Tanuja Desai Hidier
  • The Count of Monte Cristo  by Alexandre Dumas
  • Murder in the Cathedral  by T.S. Eliot
  • A Cup of Tea, A Novel of 1917  by Amy Ephron
  • Cover-up  by John Feinstein
  • Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close  by Jonathan Safran Foer
  • Anansi Boys  by Neil Gaiman
  • Grendel  by John Gardner
  • Two Parties, One Tux and a Very Short Film About the Grapes of Wrath  by Steven Goldman
  • Looking for Alaska  by John Green
  • Water for Elephants  by Sara Gruen
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time  by Mark Haddon
  • A Farewell to Arms  by Ernest Hemingway
  • The Big Sea: An Autobiography  by Langston Hughes
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God  by Zora Neale Hurston
  • The Historian   by Elizabeth Kostova
  • The Left Hand of Darkness   by Ursula K. LeGuin
  • Wicked  by Gregory Maguire
  • Life of Pi  by Yann Martel
  • Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels  by Scott McCloud
  • Madapple   by Christina Meldrum
  • Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time   by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin
  • The Women of Brewster Place  by Gloria Naylor
  • A Wreath for Emmett Till  by Marilyn Nelson
  • The Things They Carried  by Tim O’Brien
  • 1984  by George Orwell
  • DC Noir  by George Pelecanos
  • When I Was Puerto Rican  by Esmeralda Santiago
  • Hamlet  by William Shakespeare
  • Marcelo in the Real World  by Francisco X. Stork
  • The Joy Luck Club  by Amy Tan
  • The Color Purple  by Alice Walker
  • The Glass Castle  by Jeannette Walls
  • The Time Machine  by H.G. Wells
  • The Wedding  by Dorothy West
  • Ethan Frome  by Edith Wharton

Suggested Books for 12th Grade

  • In the Time of the Butterflies   by Julia Alvarez
  • Foundation  by Isaac Asimov
  • The Salt Eaters  by Toni Cade T. Bambara
  • Frida: Viva La Vida! Long Live Life!  by Carmen Bernier-Grand
  • Year of Wonders  by Geraldine Brooks
  • Shakespeare: The World as Stage  by Bill Bryson
  • Caramelo  by Sandra Cisneros
  • Swimming to Antarctica: Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer  by Lynne Cox
  • The Souls of Black Folk  by W.E.B. Du Bois
  • Light in August   by William Faulkner
  • The Street Lawyer  by John Grisham
  • The Return of the Native   by Thomas Hardy
  • When Rain Clouds Gather  by Bessie Head
  • Malcolm X: A Graphic Biography  edited by Andrew Helfer
  • Beowulf  by Gareth Hinds
  • Never Let Me Go   by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood  by June Jordan
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man  by James Joyce
  • Wheelchair Warrior: Gangs, Disability and Basketball  by Melvin Juette and Ronald J. Berger
  • The Secret Life of Bees  by Sue Monk Kidd
  • Annie John  by Jamaica Kincaid
  • Interpreter of Maladies  by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage  by Alfred Lansing
  • Makes Me Wanna Holler   by Nathan McCall
  • The Road  by Cormac McCarthy
  • Atonement  by Ian McEwan
  • Spindle’s End  by Robin McKinley
  • The Time Traveler’s Wife  by Audrey Niffenegger
  • Dreams from My Father  by Barack Obama
  • The Judas Goat  by Robert B. Parker
  • Luna: A Novel  by Julie Anne Peters
  • The Street  by Ann Petry
  • My Jim  by Nancy Rawles
  • Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers   by Mary Roach
  • What I Was  by Meg Rosoff
  • The Lovely Bones  by Alice Sebold
  • The Rose that Grew from Concrete   by Tupac Shakur
  • A Thousand Acres  by Jane Smiley
  • East of Eden   by John Steinbeck
  • The Confessions of Nat Turner  by William Styron
  • The Good Negress   by A.J. Verdelle
  • The Aeneid   by Virgil
  • Black and White   by Paul Volponi
  • Candide  by Voltaire
  • Slaughterhouse-Five  by Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Once and Future King  by T.H. White
  • A Streetcar Named Desire  by Tennessee Williams

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