Best Books for Young Adults

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About the Best Books for Young Adults

Administered by:

Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) logo

*Top Ten

2001 Selection(s)

The Beet Fields

by Gary Paulsen. Delacorte Press, $15.95.

Gary Paulsen tells the story of his sixteenth summer, running away from home to experience life by working in the beet fields, witnessing death, helping an old woman on her farm, and working in a carnival for two brothers.


Esperanza Rising

by Pam Munoz Ryan. Scholastic Press, $15.95.

Esperanza and her mother are forced to leave their life of wealth and privilege in Mexico to go to work in the labor camps of Southern California, where they must adapt to the harsh circumstances facing Mexican farm workers on the eve of the Great Depression.


Forgotten Fire

by Adam Bagdasarian. Laurel-Leaf Books, 2002. $17.95.

A twelve to fifteen year old's account of the Armenian Massacres from 1915 to 1918 based on the author's great uncle's life.


Geeks: How Two Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho

by Jon Katz. Villard, $22.95.

Trapped in rural Idaho, two 19-year-old, self-proclaimed geeks use their computer skills to land jobs, an apartment, and a new lives in Chicago.


Girl with a Pearl Earring

by Tracy Chevalier. Dutton, $21.95.

In Holland in 1664, a girl named Griet leaves her family to become a maid in the household of the painter Vermeer, but the passion she inspires in him and the passion art inspires in her end in sorrow.


Homeless Bird

by Gloria Whelan. HarperCollins, $15.95.

Koly, a thirteen-year-old girl in modern India, is forced into an arranged marriage with a dying boy. As a teenaged widow, she finds herself abandoned by her mother-in-law in a strange city where she must make a life for herself or die.


Hope was Here

by Joan Bauer. G. P. Putnam's Sons, $16.99.

When sixteen year old Hope and the aunt who has raised her move from Brooklyn to Mulhoney, Wisconsin, to work as a waitress and cook in the Welcome Stairways Diner they become involved with the diner owner's political campaign to oust the towns corrupt mayor.


Memories of Summer

by Ruth White. Farrar Straus Giroux, $16.

In 1955, thirteen year old Lyric finds her whole life changing when her family moves from the hills of Virginia to a town in Michigan and her older sister Summer.


Silent to the Bone

by E. L. Konigsburg. Jean Karl Book, Atheneum Books, $17.

Thirteen year old Branwell becomes unable to speak when the au pair accuses him of hurting his baby step-sister.


Stargirl

by Jerry Spinelli. Alfred A. Knopf, $15.95.

The eccentric new student, Stargirl, sees life differently than any of the students at MicaHigh School, and her non-conformist behavior changes her classmates and their perceptions of what it costs to be popular.


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