YA Novels – Sans Romance!

Code Name Verity

by Elizabeth Wein

If you know me, you know I love airplanes. (I even wrote a whole listicle about my favorite aviation-related books). I love Code Name Verity because it’s about planes, but I adore it because it’s a thrilling, dangerous survival story about friendship that doesn’t need romance to make it a page-turner.

October 11th, 1943 — A British spy plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France. Its pilot and passenger are best friends. One of the girls has a chance at survival. The other has lost the game before it’s barely begun.

When “Verity” is arrested by the Gestapo, she’s sure she doesn’t stand a chance. As a secret agent captured in enemy territory, she’s living a spy’s worst nightmare. Her Nazi interrogators give her a simple choice: reveal her mission or face a grisly execution.

As she intricately weaves her confession, Verity uncovers her past, how she became friends with the pilot Maddie, and why she left Maddie in the wrecked fuselage of their plane. On each new scrap of paper, Verity battles for her life, confronting her views on courage, failure and her desperate hope to make it home. But will trading her secrets be enough to save her from the enemy?

A universally acclaimed Edgar Award winner, Code Name Verity is a visceral read of danger, resolve, and survival that shows just how far true friends will go to save each other. This updated edition features a brand-new short story, essay from the author, a discussion guide, and more.

Stay Dead

by April Henry

There’s very little that is less romantic than being stranded after surviving a plane crash with an assassin on your heels, wouldn’t you agree? (If you disagree, you should take a good long look at your priorities). Stay Dead is a riveting survival story that will keep you reading way past bedtime.

In the aftermath of a car accident that claimed the life of her senator father, sixteen-year-old Milan finds herself adrift, expelled from her third boarding school. Milan’s mother, who has assumed the senate seat, diverts her private plane to pick up her daughter. But on their way home, a bomb rips off a wing and the plane crashes in the mountains. In her final moments, Milan’s mother entrusts her with a key. She reveals it will unlock the evidence that so many people have already died for—including Milan’s father. The only way Milan can survive, her mom tells her, is to let everyone believe she died with the other passengers.

​Milan is forced to navigate a perilous descent in freezing conditions while outwitting everything from a drone to wild animals. With relentless assassins on her trail, she must untangle the web of deceit and save herself and countless others. Will she piece together the truth in time?

We Rule the Night

by Claire Eliza Bartlett

If you’re in the mood for a true “girl power” book, this immersive story about two fierce girls who join a women’s military flight unit certainly does the job! Thrilling missions, complicated female friendships, and (my personal favorite) aviation make this high-stakes fantasy a perfect sans-romance read!

Seventeen-year-old Revna is a factory worker, manufacturing war machines for the Union of the North. When she’s caught using illegal magic, she fears being branded a traitor and imprisoned. Meanwhile, on the front lines, Linné defied her father, a Union general, and disguised herself as a boy to join the army. They’re both offered a reprieve from punishment if they use their magic in a special women’s military flight unit and undertake terrifying, deadly missions under cover of darkness. Revna and Linné can hardly stand to be in the same cockpit, but if they can’t fly together, and if they can’t find a way to fly well, the enemy’s superior firepower will destroy them — if they don’t destroy each other first.

We Rule the Night is a fiercely compelling story about sacrifice, complicated friendships, and survival against impossible odds.

An Outbreak of Witchcraft

by Deborah Noyes, illustrated by M. Duffy

I know I said there was nothing less romantic than being stalked by an assassin while escaping from a plane crash, but I think being wrongfully accused of witchcraft and burning to death tops that. When I read this nonfiction graphic novel for the first time, my mind was blown by how truly bananas the Salem Witch trials were. Also, the art in the book is gorgeous and should not be missed!

From 1692 to 1693, fear reigned in the small village of Salem, Massachusetts. The night Abigail Williams and Betty Paris first accused their servant of witchcraft was only the beginning. 

Several more accusations would follow suit, sparking a widespread panic that consumed Salem in one of the longest cases of witch trials in America, where more than twenty innocent lives were lost, and mistrust ran amok.

The community was in ruins, from the afflicted who fanned the flames of superstition to the judges who used their power unjustly and the accused who were falsely charged and hanged in consequence. In the absence of due process and with hysteria abounding, no one in Salem was safe.

Journey into how it all began in this arresting, true-to-life look at how lies became facts, friends turned to foes, and loved ones turned to enemies.

Briarheart

by Mercedes Lackey

This feminist (and badass) retelling of Sleeping Beauty ditches the prince in favor of sisterhood. I love fairytale retellings, and I think this one is especially rad for leaving out the romance plot. Instead, Miriam—sister of Aurora, aka Sleeping Beauty—is tasked with learning some major warrior skills so she can become her sister’s chief protector.

Miriam may be the daughter of Queen Alethia of Tirendell, but she’s not a princess. She’s the child of Alethia and her previous husband, the King’s Champion, who died fighting for the king, and she has no ambitions to rule. When her new baby sister Aurora, heir to the throne, is born, she’s ecstatic. She adores the baby, who seems perfect in every way. But on the day of Aurora’s christening, an uninvited Dark Fae arrives, prepared to curse her, and Miriam discovers she possesses impossible power.

Soon, Miriam is charged with being trained in both magic and combat to act as chief protector to her sister. But shadowy threats are moving closer and closer to their kingdom, and Miriam’s dark power may not be enough to save everyone she loves, let alone herself.

My Last Summer with Cass

by Mark Crilley

We all have that friend that we’ve known forever, grown with, and even grown apart with. But still, they’re our forever friend. My Last Summer with Cass is an ode to that friendship and how it can change and develop over time. It’s also an ode to art and artists. It’s a perfect summer read, a tender friendship story, and a gorgeous graphic novel all in one!

Megan and Cass have been joined at the brush for as long as they can remember. For years, while spending summers together at a lakeside cabin, they created art together, from sand to scribbles . . . to anything available. Then Cass moved away to New York.

When Megan finally convinces her parents to let her spend a week in the city, too, it seems like Cass has completely changed. She has tattoos, every artist in the city knows her. She even eats chicken feet now! At least one thing has stayed the same: They still make their best art together.

But when one girl betrays the other’s trust on the eve of what is supposed to be their greatest artistic feat yet, can their friendship survive? Can their art?

Hollow Fires

by Samira Ahmed

I love this contemporary thriller for so many reasons, one of which is that it’s about a girl who dreams about being a journalist. (Not to make this about me, but as a high schooler, I too dreamed about being a journalist). But this novel––which does have a light romance plot with a twist––is captivating, interesting, and important! It challenges us to question the truths we’re told and to fight for justice.

Safiya Mirza dreams of becoming a journalist. And one thing she’s learned as editor of her school newspaper is that a journalist’s job is to find the facts and not let personal biases affect the story. But all that changes the day she finds the body of a murdered boy.

Jawad Ali was fourteen years old when he built a cosplay jetpack that a teacher mistook for a bomb. A jetpack that got him arrested, labeled a terrorist—and eventually killed. But he’s more than a dead body, and more than “Bomb Boy.” He was a person with a life worth remembering.

Driven by Jawad’s haunting voice guiding her throughout her investigation, Safiya seeks to tell the whole truth about the murdered boy and those who killed him because of their hate-based beliefs.
 
This gripping and powerful book uses an innovative format and lyrical prose to expose the evil that exists in front of us, and the silent complicity of the privileged who create alternative facts to bend the truth to their liking.

Wolfpack

by Amelia Brunskill

If you look at the description below, you may feel chills run down your spine. Told from the collective perspective of nine girls living in a cult, Wolfpack is a suspenseful, thrilling, paranoia-filled novel in verse. While there is a minor romance plotline, this book ultimately celebrates female friendship and the lengths these girls will go to protect each other.

Nine girls bound together
in beautiful, virtuous Havenwood,
a refuge from an unsafe world.

Then there are eight
one of them gone — 
departed with no warning.
Did this member of their pack
stray willingly,
or did something more sinister occur?

The girls seek answers
not knowing if they should be angry
or frightened
or perhaps,
they should be both.