2026-2027 SC Young Adult Book Award
The South Carolina Young Adult Book Award nominees are appropriate for 9-12 grade levels. Visit SCASL's SC Young Adult Book Award page to learn more about past nominees and other materials.
A Deathly Compendium of Poisonous Plants: Wicked Weeds & Sinister Seeds
By Rebecca E. Hirsch"Should you encounter any of the plants in this book, do not treat them lightly. They can kill you. Or cause you unbearable agony. Or land you in jail. Consider yourself warned."
Science, history, and true crime converge in an informative and exciting look at Mother's Nature's ghoulish garden. From a hallucinogenic fungus linked to the Salem Witch Trials to the weed that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother, learn how certain plants evolved toxicity to avoid being consumed by predators and became the predator on their own.
In A Deathly Compendium of Poisonous Plants: Wicked Weeds and Sinister Seeds author Rebecca Hirsch takes you on a wild journey to look at how toxic chemicals in the natural world have been used for medicine, warfare, and sinister acts of foul plan. Tread lightly as we explore these plants' ominous deeds.
After Life
By Gayle FormanOne spring afternoon after school, Amber arrives home on her bike. It’s just another perfectly normal day. But when Amber’s mom sees her, she screams.
Because Amber died seven years ago, hit by a car while on the very same bicycle she’s inexplicably riding now.
This return doesn’t only impact Amber. Her sister, Melissa, now seven years older, must be a new kind of sibling to Amber. Amber’s estranged parents are battling over her. And the changes ripple farther and farther out: Amber’s friends, boyfriend, and even people she met only once have been deeply affected by her life and death. In the midst of everyone’s turmoil, Amber is struggling with herself. What kind of person was she? How and why was she given this second chance?
This magnificent tour de force by acclaimed author Gayle Forman brilliantly explores the porous veil between life and death, examines the impact that one person can have on the world, and celebrates life in all its beautiful complexity.
Better Must Come
By Desmond HallBarely Missing Everything meets American Street in this fiercely evocative, action-packed young adult thriller that looks at the darker side of light-filled Jamaica and how a tragedy and missing drug money helplessly entangle the lives of two teens who want to change their fate.
Deja is a “barrel girl”—one of the Jamaican kids who get barrels full of clothes, food, and treats shipped to them from parents who have moved to the US or Canada to make more money. Gabriel is caught up in a gang and desperate for a way out. When he meets Deja at a party, he starts looking for a way into her life and wonders if they could be a part of each other’s futures.
Then, one day while out fishing, Deja spies a go-fast boat stalled out by some rocks, smeared with blood. Inside, a badly wounded man thrusts a knapsack at her, begging her to deliver it to his original destination, and to not say a word. She binds his wounds, determined to send for help and make good on her promise…not realizing that the bag is stuffed with $500,000 American. Not realizing that the posse Gabriel is in will stop at nothing to get their hands on this bag—or that Gabriel’s and her lives will intersect in ways neither ever imagined, as they both are forced to make split-second choices to keep the ones they love most alive.
Blood at the Root
By LaDarrion WilliamsTen years ago, Malik’s life changed forever the night his mother mysteriously vanished and he discovered he had uncontrollable powers. Since then, he has kept his abilities hidden, looking out for himself and his younger foster brother, Taye. Now, at 17, Malik is finally ready to start a new life for both of them, far from the trauma of his past. However, a daring act to rescue Taye reveals an unexpected connection with his long-lost grandmother: a legendary conjurer with ties to a hidden magical university that Malik’s mother attended.
At Caiman University, Malik’s eyes are opened to a future he never could have envisioned for himself—one that includes the reappearance of his first love, Alexis. His search for answers about his heritage, his powers, and what really happened to his mother exposes the cracks in their magical community as it faces a reawakened evil dating back to the Haitian Revolution. Together with Alexis, Malik discovers a lot beneath the surface at Caiman: feuding covens and magical politics, forbidden knowledge and buried mysteries.
In a wholly unique saga of family, history and community, Malik must embrace his legacy to save what’s left of his old family as well as his new one. Exploring the roots and secrets that connect us in an unforgettable contemporary setting, this heart-pounding fantasy series opener is a rich tapestry of atmosphere, intrigue, and emotion.
Break to You
By Neal ShustermanAdriana knows that if she can manage to keep her head down for the next seven months, she might be able to get through her sentence in the Compass juvenile detention center. Thankfully, she’s allowed to keep her journal, where she writes down her most private thoughts when her feelings get too big.
Until the day she opens her journal and discovers that her thoughts are no longer so private. Someone has read her writings—and has written back. A boy who lives on the other side of the gender-divided detention center. A boy who sparks a fire in her to write back.
Jon’s story is different than Adriana’s; he’s already been at Compass for years and will be in the system for years to come. Still, when he reads the words Adriana writes to him, it makes him feel like the walls that hold them in have melted away.
This fast-paced, highly compelling tour de force novel exposes what life is like in detention—and reveals the hearts of two teens who are forced to live in desperate circumstances.
Brownstone
By Samuel Teer & Mar JuliaAlmudena has always wondered about the dad she never met.
Now, with her white mother headed on a once-in-a-lifetime trip without her, she's left alone with her Guatemalan father for an entire summer. Xavier seems happy to see her, but he expects her to live in (and help fix up) his old, broken-down brownstone. And all along, she must navigate the language barrier of his rapid-fire Spanish—which she doesn't speak.
As Almudena tries to adjust to this new reality, she gets to know the residents of Xavier's Latin American neighborhood. Each member of the community has their own joys and heartbreaks as well as their own strong opinions on how this young Latina should talk, dress, and behave. Some can't understand why she doesn't know where she comes from. Others think she's "not brown enough" to fit in.
But time is running out for Almudena and Xavier to get to know each other, and the key to their connection may ultimately lie in bringing all these different elements together. Fixing a broken building is one thing, but turning these stubborn individuals into a found family might take more than this one summer.
Cancelled
By Farrah PennNot to brag, but Brynn Whittaker is basically killing her senior year. She's got the looks, the grades, and a thriving "flirt coach" business that will help pay for her ultimate dream school: Stanford University.
But when a highly incriminating video goes viral after the first rager of the year, Brynn finds herself at the center of a school-wide scandal of ruinous proportions. She knows she's not the girl in the video hooking up with her former best friend's boyfriend (While wearing a banana costume, no less. Hey, points for style), but adding that to her reputation of being a serial dater, she quickly starts losing friends and customers. On top of that, the scorn she receives exposes the culture of misogyny that is rampant at her school . . . and Brynn and her three best friends are determined to take down all the haters.
But as she gets closer to identifying the person in the video that got her cancelled, Brynn must decide—is exposing the girl worth losing everything she's worked so hard for?
Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear
By Robin WasleyHigh school is hard enough to survive without an apocalypse to navigate.
Sid Spencer has always been the most normal girl in her abnormal hometown, a tourist trap built over one of the fault lines that seal magic away from the world. Meanwhile, all Sid has to deal with is hair-ruining humidity, painful awkwardness, being one of four Asians in town, and her friends dumping her when they started dating each other—just days after one of the most humiliating romantic rejections faced by anyone, ever, in all of history.
Then someone kills one of the Guardians who protect the seal. The earth rips open and unleashes the magic trapped inside. Monsters crawl from the ground, no one can enter or leave, and the man behind it all is roaming the streets with a gang of violent vigilantes. Suddenly, Sid's life becomes a lot less ordinary. When she finds out her missing brother is involved, she joins the remaining Guardians, desperate to find him and close the fault line for good.
Fighting through hordes of living corpses and uncontrollable growths of forest, Sid and a ragtag crew of would-be heroes are the only thing standing between their town and the end of the world as they know it. Between magic, murderers, and burgeoning crushes, Sid must survive being a perfectly normal girl caught in a perfectly abnormal apocalypse.
Only—how can someone so ordinary make it in such an extraordinary world?
Dungeons and Drama
By Kristy BoyceMusical lover Riley has big aspirations to become a director on Broadway. Crucial to this plan is to bring back her high school’s spring musical, but when Riley takes her mom’s car without permission, she's grounded and stuck with the worst punishment: spending her after-school hours working at her dad’s game shop.
Riley can't waste her time working when she has a musical to save, so she convinces Nathan—a nerdy teen employee—to cover her shifts and, in exchange, she’ll flirt with him to make his gamer-girl crush jealous.
But Riley didn’t realize that meant joining Nathan's Dungeons & Dragons game…or that role playing would be so fun. Soon, Riley starts to think that flirting with Nathan doesn't require as much acting as she would've thought...
Fortune’s Kiss
By Amber ClementAre you willing to risk everything for a chance to be kissed by fortune?
Drink and let your soul be measured.
Welcome to Fortune's Kiss, where you can attain your wildest dreams, but the price of admission . . . may be your life.
For the first time in a decade, the legendary gambling den, Fortune's Kiss, has returned to Ciudad Milagro. The game is Lotería.
As starry-eyed children, best friends Mayté and Lorena made a pact to enter the den together, but much has changed: strong, proud Mayté, sole daughter of the disgraced Robles family, dreams of becoming a famous painter, while beautiful Lo suffers at the hands of her powerful—and abusive—father.
With its return, the pair enter the mystical den. Once inside, they realize that beneath the enchanting glamour, the salon hides treacherous secrets—like the old, predatory magic beating in its heart. And it is ravenous.
Round after round, the girls scheme, lie, flirt, do what's necessary to win. But when bodies begin piling up, all bets—and friendships—are off as each girl learns exactly how far she's willing to go to ensure she leaves the table on top.
See, this Lotería is no children's diversion. It is a deadly game of chance that may just eat them alive.
Looking for Smoke
By K.A. CobellSince moving to the Blackfeet Reservation with her parents, Mara Racette has felt like an outsider, taunted by her tight-knit classmates for growing up far away. So, when a local girl includes Mara in a traditional Blackfeet Giveaway to honor her missing sister, Mara thinks she’ll finally make some friends.
Instead, a girl from the Giveaway, Samantha White Tail, is found murdered.
Because the members of the Giveaway group were the last to see Samantha alive, each becomes a person of interest in the investigation:
New-girl Mara Racette, who hated Samantha for being particularly cruel.
Grief-stricken Loren Arnoux, who was Samantha’s best friend until her sister’s disappearance drove a wedge between them.
Class-clown Brody Clark, whose unreciprocated crush on Samantha is an open secret.
And tough-guy Eli First Kill, who has his own complicated history with Samantha.
Despite deep mistrust, the four must now take matters into their own hands and clear their names. Even though one of them may be the murderer.
Now, Conjurers
By Freddie KölschNovember 1999. North Dana, Massachusetts.
Nesbit Nuñez discovers the partially devoured body of Bastion Attia: star quarterback, secret witch, and Nesbit’s even-more-secret boyfriend. No one knew why brilliant, gentle Bastion lived his life by a seemingly arcane set of rules, including a strange manner of speech and an inability to say his own name.
Now the remaining members of North Coven—Nesbit, Dove, Drea, and Brandy—vow to get answers. Nothing can prepare them for what they uncover: Bastion had been locked in a terrifying battle of wits and wills with something living deep beneath an ancient mausoleum in the local cemetery.
North Coven must confront the red-gloved monster that took piece after piece of Bastion, that he fought until his last breath. Not knowing that Bastion left behind the key to its destruction . . .
The Black Girl Survives in This One
By Desiree S. Evans & Saraciea J. FennellFifteen chilling and thought-provoking stories place Black girls front and center as heroes and survivors who slay monsters, battle spirits, and face down death. Prepare to be terrified and left breathless by the pieces in this anthology.
The bestselling and acclaimed authors include Erin E. Adams, Monica Brashears, Charlotte Nicole Davis, Desiree S. Evans, Saraciea J. Fennell, Zakiya Dalila Harris, Daka Hermon, Justina Ireland, L.L. McKinney, Brittney Morris, Maika & Maritza Moulite, Eden Royce, and Vincent Tirado. The foreword is by Tananarive Due.
The Brightwood Code
By Monica HesseTimely and unforgettable,The Brightwood Code sheds light on hidden history and the brutality of being a woman in a war built by men.
Seven months ago, Edda was on the World War I front lines as one of two hundred “Hello Girls,” female switchboard operators employed by the US Army. She spent her nights memorizing secret connection codes to stay ahead of spying enemies, and her days connecting vital calls between platoons and bases and generals, all trying to survive—and win—a brutal war. Their lives were in Edda’s hands, and one day, in fateful seconds, everything went wrong.
Now, Edda is back in Washington, DC, working as an American Bell Telephone operator, the picture of respectability. But when her shift ends, Edda is barely hanging on, desperate to forget the circumstances that cut her time overseas short. When she receives a panicked phone call from someone who utters the fateful code word “Brightwood,” Edda has no choice but to confront her past. With precious few clues and help only from Theo, a young man bearing his own WWI scars, Edda races to uncover what secrets may have followed her across the ocean.
The Glass Girl
By Kathleen GlasgowEveryone in fifteen-year-old Bella’s life needs something from her. Her mom needs her to help around the house, her dad needs her to not make waves, her ex needs her to not be so much. The only person who never needed anything from her was her grandmother—and now she’s dead.
There’s only one thing that dulls the pressure: alcohol. Vodka, beer, peppermint schnapps—alcohol smooths the sharp edges of Bella’s life. And what’s the big deal? Everyone drinks. Besides, Bella can stop whenever she wants. But after she gets blackout drunk at a Thanksgiving party and wakes up in the hospital, it’s time to face reality. And for Bella, reality means rehab.
Gorgeously written and deeply compassionate, Kathleen Glasgow’s The Glass Girl is a candid exploration of the forces pushing young women toward addiction—and what it really takes to help them get better.
The Unboxing of a Black Girl
By Angela ShantéWritten as a collection of vignettes and poetry, The Unboxing of a Black Girl is a creative nonfiction reflection on Black girlhood. The debut YA title, by award-winning author Angela Shanté, is a love letter to Black girls set in New York City and serves as a personal and political critique of how the world raises Black girls.
As Shanté navigates the city through memory, she balances poetry with vignettes that explore the innocence and joy of childhood eroded by adultification. Through this book, she illuminates the places where Black girls are nurtured or exploited in stories and poems about personal and political boxes, love, loss, and sexual assault. Many entries are also studded with cultural footnotes designed to further understanding.
The Wilderness of Girls
By Madeline Claire FranklinAfter being placed in foster care, Rhi is hungry for a fresh start and begins working at the Happy Valley Wildlife Preserve. While in the woods, she stumbles upon a surreal sight: a pack of wolves guarding four feral and majestic girls. After Rhi gains their trust, they reveal that they’re princesses from another land, raised by a magical prophet they call Mother—and they’re convinced Rhi is their lost fifth sister.
Unsure what to believe, Rhi ushers the girls to civilization, where they’re met with societal uproar and scrutiny, dubbed by the ravenous media and true crime junkies as “The Wild Girls of Happy Valley.” Desperate to return to their kingdom, the girls look to Rhi for help. Rhi knows the girls are deluded, but at the same time she’s drawn in by their boldness and authenticity—traits she is afraid she has lost within herself. And when Rhi witnesses strange phenomena she can’t quite explain, the line between fantasy and reality blurs.
As the hunt for answers intensifies, Rhi must make a decision that will change the course of her life and the lives of her Wild Girls forever.
Two Sides to Every Murder
By Danielle ValentineMost people’s births aren’t immortalized in a police report—but Olivia was born during the infamous Camp Lost Lake murders. Seventeen years later, Olivia’s life looks pretty perfect . . . until she discovers the man she calls dad is not her biological father. Now she wants answers about her bloodline, and the only place she knows to look is Camp Lost Lake.
Most people don’t spend their formative years on the run with an alleged murderer—but Reagan did. In the court of public opinion, her mom was found guilty of the deaths at Camp Lost Lake, and both of them have been in hiding ever since. But Reagan believes in her mother’s innocence and is determined to clear her name.
Luckily for Olivia and Reagan, Camp Lost Lake is finally reopening, providing the perfect opportunity to find answers. But someone else is dead set on keeping the past hidden, even if it means committing murder.
Unbecoming
By Seema YasminIn a not-too-distant America, abortions are prosecuted and the right to choose is no longer an option. But best friends Laylah and Noor want to change the world. After graduating high school, they’ll become an OBGYN and a journalist, but in the meantime, they’re working on an illegal guide to abortion in Texas.
In response to the unfair laws, underground networks of clinics have sprung up, but the good fight has gotten even more precarious as it becomes harder to secure safe medication and supplies. Both Layla and Noor are passionate about getting their guide completed so it can help those in need, but Laylah treats their project with an urgency Noor doesn’t understand—that may have something to do with the strange goings-on between their mosque and a local politician.
Fighting for what they believe in may involve even more obstacles than they bargained for, but the two best friends will continue as they always have: together.
Under the Surface
By Diana UrbanAn epic survival-thriller about a girl who goes missing for days in the Paris catacombs and the boy she loves who’s desperate to find her—a gripping story of love, danger, betrayal, and hope… even when all seems lost.
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