A Wizard of Earthsea follows Ged, a gifted youth from the island of Gont, whose early talent leads him to a school of wizardry. After a duel goes wrong and releases a dangerous shadow, he must leave home and undertake a solitary quest to confront and undo the harm he caused.

A girl taken as a child becomes the high priestess of a closed, sacred tomb complex and endures a life of ritual, solitude, and strict hierarchy.

A 15-year-old math-minded narrator who describes his world through exact observations decides to investigate the mystery of a neighbor's dead dog. The investigatory quest exposes family tensions and forces the narrator to navigate social rules and sources of fear while trying to hold to his own systems of logic.

Set in Nazi-era Germany, the novel follows a young girl who acquires books and navigates life in an adoptive household while war encroaches on daily routines. The narration comes from Death, offering an outside, occasionally amused perspective on civilians, loss, and the act of reading.

A modern adolescent discovers a tie to the old Greek gods and is thrust into a quest that mixes mythic monsters with contemporary urban life. The immediate pressure is a mission across landmarks to resolve a theft and personal mystery while learning who to trust.

Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming is a verse memoir that records her early childhood and adolescent memories growing up African American in the 1960s.

Two royal twins with emergent magical abilities are sent away from their ruling parent and trained by a monastery; their powers and identities entangle them with wider political and social conflicts.

A series of personal essays by George M. Johnson that trace growing up as a Black queer youth in the U.S., linking autobiographical scenes to direct address to younger Black queer readers.

A West African–inspired YA fantasy about a sixteen-year-old girl who fails a compulsory purity rite and is declared impure when she bleeds gold.