The best YA books that adults will love too

Did you love Calvin and Hobbes when you were a child? How about as an adult? If so, you will love Martine Leavitt’s Calvin. Calvin, in this novel, is a schizophrenic teen who is convinced that Hobbes is real. He thinks if he can walk across frozen Lake Erie – with the girl he loves, Suzie – and convince Bill Watterson to write one more Calvin cartoon, he will be healed. 

This book is a brilliant exploration of mental health and relationships, rooted in characters you already know and love.  

I’m fascinated by books that take place in college, a rich transitional time where characters are still teens–insecure and figuring things out–but also with new adult responsibilities and freedoms. 

This book took me back to those late teen years of uncertainty and new adventures. The protagonist, Penny, is thrilled to be away from home at the University of Austin, Texas, but even more thrilled by meeting Sam, an aspiring filmmaker who works in a local café. These two couldn’t be more awkward, and through most of the book, they are too anxious to actually meet up and only communicate through text. Their final meet-up, like any good romance, is thrilling.

I loved the snappy dialogue and texts and the deep development of Choi’s characters. I also loved that author Choi’s website is called Choi to the World.

My favorite books take you somewhere radically different but also engage you in real emotions. This book takes you deep into the academic world of 1830s Oxford but is also a fantasy book. It’s historical fiction, or as my own teenage son says, a fantasy that feels grounded. 

The narrator, Robin Lovell, is what I call an inside/outside character. Born in Canton but trained by the mysterious Professor Lovell in England to become an expert in Chinese, Latin, and Greek, he is both an insider at the Oxford Institute of Translation called Babel, where he is a student, and an outsider because of his foreign birth. When Robin realizes Babel is part of an unjust war against his mother country, China, he is forced to ask hard questions about language, translation, and the effects of colonization. 

This is an exciting story of twists and intrigue, student revolution, and war, but it also explores language as a force of colonialism. I loved sections that explained the history of colonialism and the evolution of words that are common in English but are from around the world. 

Hands down, this is my favorite coming-of-age novel, written by Rainbow Rowell. Protagonist Cath copes with anxiety, family problems, and being away from home at college for the first time, but I loved this book because it plays with Harry Potter tropes, another book that appeals to adults as well as teens. 

Cath is obsessed with a Harry Potter-like series called Simon Snow. Like Harry, Simon attends a school for magic and fights against evil, but he’s also in love with his roommate, a thinly veiled version of Draco Malfoy. 

Cath not only reads all the Simon Snow books and dresses up in costumes for the movies, but she is also a devoted fan fiction writer. While Cath copes with her life and falls in love for the first time, it’s her queer Simon Snow fan fiction that kept me reading. 

If you fall in love with Simon Snow the way I did, you can also read Rainbow Rowell’s brilliant Simon Snow series, Carry On.

Although I love a book that takes you traveling to the past or to foreign lands, sometimes I want to jump into the shoes of a contemporary character and understand their world. This book does just that. 

Starr Carter is a black teenager who lives in a poor, predominantly black neighborhood but attends an elite, mostly white private school. Starr manages to code-switch between her two lives until her childhood friend is shot by the police. 

If you like books about social justice and characters who stand up for what they believe, this is a fantastic read.