YA books set in New York City

Top 10 YA books set in New York City : City of Bones, Dash & Lily's Book of Dares, The Princess Diaries, It's Kind of a Funny Story, Suite Scarlett, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, The Poet X, Bright Young Things, Beastly, The Orange Houses

City of Bones
AuthorCassandra Clare
ISBN1416914285
When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder― much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Then the body disappears into thin air. It's hard to call the...
Dash & Lily's Book of Dares
AuthorRachel Cohn
ISBN0375866590
“I’ve left some clues for you.
If you want them, turn the page.
If you don’t, put the book back on the shelf, please.”

So begins the latest whirlwind romance from the bestselling authors of Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Lily has left a red notebook full of challenges...
The Princess Diaries
AuthorMeg Cabot
ISBN0613371658
The first book in the #1 New York Times bestselling Princess Diaries series by Meg Cabot.

Mia Thermopolis is pretty sure there’s nothing worse than being a five-foot-nine, flat-chested freshman, who also happens to be flunking Algebra. Is she ever in for a surprise.

First Mom...
It's Kind of a Funny Story
AuthorNed Vizzini
Ambitious New York City teenager Craig Gilner is determined to succeed at life - which means getting into the right high school to get into the right job. But once Craig aces his way into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School, the pressure becomes unbearable. He stops eating and sleeping...
Suite Scarlett
AuthorMaureen Johnson
ISBN0439899273
Scarlett Martin has grown up in a most unusual way. Her family owns the Hopewell, a small Art Deco hotel in the heart of New York City. When each of the Martins turns fifteen, they are expected to take over the care of a suite. For Scarlett's fifteenth birthday, she gets both a room called the Empire Suite...
Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist
AuthorRachel Cohn
ISBN0375835318
It all starts when Nick asks Norah to be his girlfriend for five minutes. He only needs five minutes to avoid his ex-girlfriend, who’s just walked in to his band’s show. With a new guy. And then, with one kiss, Nick and Norah are off on an adventure set against the backdrop of New York City—and...
AuthorElizabeth Acevedo
A young girl in Harlem discovers slam poetry as a way to understand her mother’s religion and her own relationship to the world. Debut novel of renowned slam poet Elizabeth Acevedo.

Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into...
Bright Young Things
AuthorAnna Godbersen
The year is 1929. New York is ruled by the Bright Young Things: Flappers and socialites seeking thrills and chasing dreams in the anything-goes era of the Roaring Twenties.

Letty Larkspur and Cordelia Grey escaped their small Midwestern town for New York's glittering metropolis. All Letty...
Beastly
AuthorAlex Flinn
ISBN0060874163
I am a beast.

A beast. Not quite wolf or bear, gorilla or dog but a horrible new creature who walks upright—a creature with fangs and claws and hair springing from every pore. I am a monster.

You think I'm talking fairy tales? No way. The place is New York City. The time is now. It's no deformity,...
AuthorPaul Griffin
ISBN0803733461
Meet Tamika Sykes, Mik to her friends (if she had any). She's hearing impaired and way too smart for her West Bronx high school. She copes by reading lips and selling homework answers, and looks forward to the time each day when she can be alone in her room drawing. She's a tough girl who never gets close to...
AuthorHaley Tanner
ISBN1400069319
In Vaclav & Lena Haley Tanner has created two unforgettable young protagonists who evoke the joy, the confusion, and the passion of having a profound, everlasting connection with someone else.

Vaclav and Lena seem destined for each other. They meet as children in an ESL class in Brighton...
Into the Dangerous World
AuthorJulie Chibbaro
ISBN0803739109
*"This striking combination of story and illustration creates a powerful portrait of a budding artist." Publishers Weekly starred review

Raised on a Staten Island commune in the 1980s, Aurora has never attended a day of school, and has seen little of the outside world. What she knows best...
AuthorSophie Flack
ISBN0316126535
As a dancer with the ultra-prestigious Manhattan Ballet Company, nineteen-year-old Hannah Ward juggles intense rehearsals, dazzling performances and complicated backstage relationships. Up until now, Hannah has happily devoted her entire life to ballet.

But when she meets a handsome...
13 Little Blue Envelopes
AuthorMaureen Johnson
ISBN0060541431
Inside little blue envelope 1 are $1,000 and instructions to buy a plane ticket.

In envelope 2 are directions to a specific London flat.

The note in envelope 3 tells Ginny: Find a starving artist.

Because of envelope 4, Ginny and a playwright/thief/ bloke about town called...
In the Forests of the Night
AuthorAmelia Atwater-Rhodes
ISBN0440228166
By day, Risika sleeps in shaded room in Concord, Massachusetts. By night, she hunts the streets of New York City. She is used to being alone.
But someone is following Risika. He has left her a black rose, the same sort of rose that sealed her fate three hundred years ago. Three hundred years ago Risika...
Shadowshaper
AuthorDaniel José Older
ISBN0545591619
Sierra Santiago was looking forward to a fun summer of making art, hanging out with her friends, and skating around Brooklyn. But then a weird zombie guy crashes the first party of the season. Sierra's near-comatose abuelo begins to say "Lo siento" over and over. And when the graffiti murals in Bed-Stuy...
Watch Us Rise
AuthorRenée Watson
Jasmine and Chelsea are sick of the way women are treated even at their progressive NYC high school, so they decide to start a Women's Rights Club. They post everything online—poems, essays, videos of Chelsea performing her poetry, and Jasmine's response to the racial macroaggressions she experiences—and...
The Memory of Things
AuthorGae Polisner
ISBN1250095522
On the morning of September 11, 2001, sixteen-year-old Kyle Donohue watches the first Twin Tower come down from the window of Stuyvesant High School. Moments later, terrified and fleeing home to safety across the Brooklyn Bridge, he stumbles across a girl perched in the shadows, covered in ash, and...
Other Words for Love
AuthorLorraine Zago Rosenthal
It's the mid-1980s, and Ari Mitchell feels invisible at her Brooklyn high school. Her hair is too flat, her style too preppy, and her personality too quiet. And outside school, Ari feels outshined by her beautiful, confident best friend, Summer. Their friendship is as complex and confusing as Ari’s...
AuthorPaula Danziger
ISBN0698116941
This summer could be a disaster. Kendra's parents have invited Frank, a 15-year-old she's never met, to stay with them. And they've planned a goofy scavenger hunt for the kids, including Kendra's bratty younger brother. They have to race all around New York City and visit places like the Empire State...
Princess in Pink
AuthorMeg Cabot
ISBN0060096128
Princess Mia is dreaming about the prom - and contending with a hotel workers' strike - in the fifth, supremely hilarious episode of Meg Cabot's Princess Diaries. This time, Mia's in the pink about the upcoming Albert Einstein H.S. prom, and she's crossing her fingers that Michael will ask her to go....
AuthorGarret Weyr, also Freymann-Weyr
ISBN0618141812
Ellen loves Link and James. Her older brother and his best friend are the only company she ever wants. She knows they fight, but she makes it a policy never to take sides. She loves her brother, the math genius and track star. She is totally, madly in love with James, his face full of long eyelashes and hidden...
Scarlett Fever
AuthorMaureen Johnson
Ever since Mrs. Amberson, the former-aspiring-actress-turned-agent, entered Scarlett Martin's life, nothing has been the same.

She's still in charge of the Empire Suite in her family's hotel, but she's now also Mrs. Amberson's assistant, running around town for her star client, Chelsea—a...
Labyrinth Lost
AuthorZoraida Córdova
ISBN1492623164
I was chosen by the Deos. Even gods make mistakes.

Alex is a bruja, the most powerful witch in a generation…and she hates magic. At her Deathday celebration, Alex performs a spell to rid herself of her power. But it backfires. Her whole family vanishes into thin air, leaving her alone with Nova,...
AuthorNikki Grimes
ISBN0142501891
When Wesley Boone writes a poem for his high school English class, some of his classmates clamor to read their poems aloud too. Soon they're having weekly poetry sessions and, one by one, the eighteen students are opening up and taking on the risky challenge of self-revelation. There's Lupe Alvarin,...
Show and Prove
AuthorSofia Quintero
ISBN0375897771
A poignant coming-of-age story about two boys finding their way in the South Bronx in the mid-1980s.

The summer of 1983 was the summer hip-hop proved its staying power. The South Bronx is steeped in Reaganomics, war in the Middle East, and the twin epidemics of crack and AIDS, but Raymond “Smiles”...
AuthorMarina Budhos
ISBN1416903518
Nadira is that fat daughter. She is also the slow daughter, the one who is slow to speak and quick to feel. She is constantly compared to her sister Aisha. Aisha is the perfect sister. She is the sister who is going places and the one who impressed everyone with her knowledge and her ability to adapt. After...
Burn Baby Burn
AuthorMeg Medina
ISBN0763674672
Nora Lopez is seventeen during the infamous year 1977 in New York.

After a freezing winter, a boiling hot summer explodes with arson, a blackout, and a serial killer named Son of Sam, who is shooting young people on the streets seemingly at random.

Not only is the city a disaster, but...
Jessie Hearts NYC
AuthorKeris Stainton
ISBN1408304287
Jessie is about to embark on the trip of a lifetime. She is spending the whole of the summer in New York with her best friend Emma, at her mum's cool apartment. She is hoping the trip will help her to get over her previous disastrous relationship. Finn, a New York hottie, is having a difficult time dealing...
AuthorJohn Donovan
ISBN0738721344
The 40th anniversary edition of a groundbreaking teen classic When the grandmother who raised him dies, Davy Ross, a lonely thirteen-year-old boy, must move to Manhattan to live with his estranged mother. Between alcohol-infused lectures about her self-sacrifice and awkward visits with his distant...
Hush
AuthorEishes Chayil
ISBN0802720889
Inside the closed community of Borough Park, where most Chassidim live, the rules of life are very clear, determined by an ancient script written thousands of years before down to the last detail--and abuse has never been a part of it. But when thirteen-year-old Gittel learns of the abuse her best friend...
AuthorWalter Dean Myers
Myers is at his clever best in this witty and action-packed, coming-of-age story of a teenager's summer during the Harlem Renaissance and his run-ins with famous gangsters, writers, and musicians.

It's 1925 and Mark Purvis is a 16-yr-old with a summer to kill. He'd rather jam with his jazz...
AuthorCarolyn Mackler
ISBN0763620912
Fifteen-year-old Virginia Shreves has a larger-than-average body and a plus-size inferiority complex, especially when she compares herself to her slim, brilliant, picture-perfect family. But that’s before a shocking phone call — and a horrifying allegation — about her rugby-star brother...
AuthorRobert Lipsyte
ISBN0064471527
This is a sports fiction novel that tells a story of Alfred Brooks, a seventeen-year-old high school drop-out, living in Harlem, finding his way in the world and in boxing. Alfred learns that getting to the top is not as important as how you get there, and that before you can be a champion, you have to be a...
AuthorCoe Booth
ISBN0439925363
The acclaimed author of TYRELL returns to PUSH with a striking novel about a mother and daughter who are only fourteen years apart, but need to learn to understand each other before it's too late.

Kendra's mom, Renee, had her when she was only 14 years old. Renee and her mom made a deal -- Renee could...
AuthorM.E. Kerr
ISBN0061139890
M. E. Kerr's first novel - hailed by the New York Times as a "timely, compelling" and "brilliantly funny" look at adolescence and friendship

It was bad enough that they had to move to Brooklyn.
Brooklyn Heights, as Tucker Woolf's dad instructs him to tell everyone after he loses his job....
AuthorNorma Klein
ISBN0449245209
I first read this book in the early 80s when I was a young teenager and I adored it then. It's about Tatiana, a 14-year-old New Yorker, who stars in her first movie and is navigating her blooming sexuality. I loved all of Norma Klein's books and so it was interesting for me to read Domestic Arrangements again...
AuthorE.R. Frank
ISBN0142300837
From the outside, they're simply a group of urban teenagers. But from the inside, they're some of the most complex people you'll ever meet. There's Eric, fiercely protective of his brother Mickey-but he has a secret that holds together his past and future. Sonia, struggling to live the life of a good...
What If It's Us
AuthorBecky Albertalli
ISBN0062795252
Arthur is only in New York for the summer, but if Broadway has taught him anything, it’s that the universe can deliver a showstopping romance when you least expect it.

Ben thinks the universe needs to mind its business. If the universe had his back, he wouldn’t be on his way to the post office...
Hot Pink in the City
AuthorMedeia Sharif
Asma Bashir wants two things: a summer fling and her favorite '80s songs. During a trip to New York City to stay with relatives, she messes up in her pursuit of both. She loses track of the hunk she met on her airplane ride, and she does the most terrible thing she could possibly do to her strict uncle... ruin...
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