10 YA Books With No Romance For When You’re Out of Love

Robin Roe’s A List of Cages follows two boys reunited by the universe but still vastly separated by circumstance. When Adam Blake finds himself working as an aide to his school psychologist in his senior year, he was expecting a free period to text with his friends. What he was not expecting was to be tracking down Julian, the foster brother he hasn’t seen in five years. What follows is a riveting and sometimes disturbing portrayal of just how badly systems can fail children, and how the smallest amounts of love and kindness go the greatest distance in the end.

Growing up as a mixed-race gay teenager in London, Michael has never felt like enough: not Jamaican enough, not Greek enough, not Black enough, and certainly not masculine enough. But as he grows up and comes of age as his authentic queer self, he starts to get to know the person he was always meant to be. Enter The Black Flamingo, his fierce drag persona, who is everything the world has taught him not to be. In freeing himself from the weight of the world’s expectations, Michael may soon learn how to embrace the power of being completely himself.

“There’s that nursery rhyme. You know it? All about what makes a girl. We’re sugar and spice and everything nice, but that sounds like a cookie recipe. It doesn’t sound like the composition of a person.” In one of the most powerful and important YA novels of the last decade, T.E. Carter’s I Stop Somewhere stops at nothing to expose the pervasive rape culture that continues to find ways of incriminating women and exonerating men. Bullied and tormented throughout middle school, Ellie Frias begins her freshman year of high school with a new outlook: if she keeps her head down and doesn’t bother anyone, no one will bother her. But when a chance encounter with a friendly stranger turns deadly, Ellie is trapped and sentenced to the torture of watching the same crimes happen to others. All she can do is wait and pray for someone to find her. The problem is no one looks for a girl they didn’t notice in the first place.

In We’ll Never Be Apart, Emiko Jean crafts a twisty psychological thriller that is sure to keep you on the edge of your seat. Committed to a psychiatric ward at Savage Isle, all 17-year-old Alice Munroe can think about is murder, fire, and revenge. Haunted by memories of the fire that killed her boyfriend Jason — flames that were set by her twin sister Cellie — Alice is conflicted until she meets a charismatic stranger named Chase, who agrees to help her seek vengeance. Starting to pour out all her thoughts into a journal, Alice realizes that before we can face the future, we must first confront the past.

“I am a collection of oddities, a circus of neurons and electrons: my heart is the ringmaster, my soul is the trapeze artist, and the world is my audience. It sounds strange because it is, and it is, because I am strange.” Faced with the collapse of her family, Mim Malone is forced to move across the country with her father and new stepmother. But when she catches news that her mother isn’t well back in Ohio, Mim knows she must return to her. Following the compelling protagonist through a backsplash of Greyhound buses and colorful characters on the road, Mim soon learns that the demons from her childhood are really the ones holding her back. What starts as a journey home becomes one of transformation that will teach her what sanity really means and how everything is just a matter of perception.

Raised with the belief that the only way to succeed in life is to escape her poor, Black neighborhood, Jade accepts a scholarship to a mostly white private school in a high-end area. She expected the transition to be difficult, but what she didn’t expect was being invited to join a mentorship program for “at-risk” girls from “bad” neighborhoods. But Jade knows she doesn’t need the support being offered and is about to learn that just because her mentor is also Black does not mean they come from the same backgrounds or share the same worldviews. Piecing Me Together shines a light on the persecution women of color often face and the ways in which our societies and cultures still need to improve.

While love does occupy most of the driving force behind Carol Rifka Brunt’s Tell the Wolves I’m Home, it’s an unconventional kind of love that’s different from romance and immediately came to mind for inclusion on this list. Not only is Tell the Wolves I’m Home required reading for anyone interested in the AIDS crisis, but also required reading for introverts and definitely introverts with anxiety. It’s 1987, and the only friend that 14-year-old June has in the world is her Uncle Finn, a renowned painter. Unable to fit in at school or with her older sister, Finn is the only person that understands June and makes her feel safe — not only her godparent, but her only confidant. But when Finn dies far too young from an illness June’s mother can’t bring herself to talk about, June is forced to face all of her hidden fears, anxieties, and feelings — with the help of a new friend who might just be her saving grace.