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What's Up in YA

The Best YA Books of 2024, According to All The Lists

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Kelly Jensen

Editor

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She's the editor/author of (DON'T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen.

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Every single year, the “best of” lists hit sooner and sooner. This year’s first list landed sometime at the end of September or early October—so early that I’ve already forgotten when. While this year is a little bit of an anomaly because everyone prepared in advance for the election in November, these lists being released so early means that not only do books published in the last few months get overlooked, but it’s easy to forget the best of lists even came out at all.

As frustrating as the push to be first can be, these “best of” lists are such helpful guides to what readers of all different backgrounds and perspectives saw as the most memorable or best written throughout the year. It can surface the titles that did not get major press or money behind them, just as it can help reiterate that a buzzy book really was worth the hype.

Let’s take a look at a bunch of this year’s “best” lists and the titles they deemed to be the best published in young adult in 2024. Each offers a handful of the titles from the list, and you can check the entire list at the respective link. I’ve tried not to include repeats across the lists, though that would certainly make for an interesting look at the titles earning “best” accolades in spades.

Amazon’s Best Books of the Year

Amazon Editors offer up several best of the year lists. You can check out the list of their top 20 titles here, which includes one YA book, When The World Tips Over by Jandy Nelson.

There’s also an exclusively best of YA list from Amazon. Some of the titles on the list of 20 picks that include every genre and format include:

Audible’s Best YA Audiobooks of 2024

Annoyingly, the editorialization of the best YA audiobooks from Audible leans into the idea there are stories “for boys,” as if books have a gender or gendered audience. But their picks this year for best audiobooks are pretty dang good. Among the picks are:

Barnes & Noble Best Young Adult Books of the Year for 2024

The “top” best books of the year for Barnes & Noble do not include any YA titles; this year’s children’s pick is a middle grade novel. But there is a whole additional list of best YA titles to dive into, which include:

NPR’s Books We Love: 2024

NPR’s best books creation is different than most others in that it is a huge, interactive list. You can drill down into genres or audiences, as much as you can play around with unique themes within the books that make the list in any given year. Here are some of the YA books on NPR’s Books We Love roundup for 2024:

New York Public Library’s Best YA Books of 2024

Library best-of lists are always some of the best, since they cover not only the titles you’d expect to find but plenty that may not have had the promotion or that were “quieter” in nature. Here are some of the titles the New York Public Library named as their best this year and it includes fiction, nonfiction, and comics:

Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2024

There are no YA books on Publishers Weekly‘s top 10 books of the year. There are, however, 15 books on their best YA titles of 2024 specific list, including:

School Library Journal‘s Best of 2024

School Library Journal creates several lists of bests for the year. Each one is dedicated to some genre or format in youth literature. You can see the entire list of best books here, while some of the titles pulled out for best YA fiction include:

Among the best YA nonfiction titles:

Some of the best YA comics and manga—yes, two separate lists!:

And for best YA audiobooks:

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