Young Adult Reading Challenge (April 2018)

With this season comes new life. All around us we can see baby animals, new sprigs of plants, fresh growth on trees and rosebushes, and a crisp scent of hope in the air.

April’s reading challenge ties into spring in this way:

Young adult books present coming-of-age stories in which young people must figure out how to adapt to living in a grown-up world. They’re discovering how they want to spend the rest of their lives and learning a lot from the journey it takes to get there.

These books are typically geared towards folks between ages twelve and twenty-five, and they cover a variety of sub-genres such as romance, science fiction, fantasy, thriller, dystopian, utopian, and many others.

Need some suggestions?

Here are a few YA books on my radar:

Pulse by L.R. Burkard

Three teenage girls and their families must survive when America’s worst nightmare actually occurs: The failure of the electric grid due to an electromagnetic pulse. 

To outsiders, Andrea Patterson has the American dream house and family. But when the unthinkable happens, the dream looks more like a nightmare–one from which she and her family may not wake up alive. 

Lexie Martin’s homesteading family has never been cool like Andrea’s, but they’ve been prepping for disaster for years. For them, the world didn’t stop; it just slowed down. The one thing they didn’t prepare for? A psycho school bus driver who wants what they’ve got. 

Sarah Weaver, friend of Andrea and Lexie, lives on the top floor of a ten-story apartment building. When things went black, she thought it could be romantic, like in the time of Jane Austen. 

She was wrong. 

Has the world collapsed forever? 
Who will survive when technology fails? Perhaps even more important, 
Who will get to eat? 


The Healer’s Apprentice by Melanie Dickerson

Rose has been appointed as a healer’s apprentice at Hagenheim Castle, a rare opportunity for a woodcutter’s daughter like her. While she often feels uneasy at the sight of blood, Rose is determined to prove herself capable. Failure will mean returning home to marry the aging bachelor her mother has chosen for her—a bloated, disgusting merchant who makes Rose feel ill.

When Lord Hamlin, the future duke, is injured, it is Rose who must tend to him. As she works to heal his wound, she begins to understand emotions she’s never felt before and wonders if he feels the same. But falling in love is forbidden, as Lord Hamlin is betrothed to a mysterious young woman in hiding. As Rose’s life spins toward confusion, she must take the first steps on a journey to discover her own destiny.




Jonas and Olivia by Victoria Minks

Fourteen-year-old Olivia Wilkerson is left desolate and grieving when her patriot father passes away. Directed by his will to be placed in the care of an old friend, Olivia is forced to venture away from all she’s ever known to make her new life among people who are strangers to her.

Unaware of the new responsibility about to be thrust on him, Jonas Carmichael lives the life of a reclusive in an attempt to ignore the painful memories of the past. His heart has grown hard and bitter over the past thirty years of solitude, and his hatred towards people has only multiplied.

Suddenly burdened with Olivia, Jonas’s only burning desire is to shove the girl off on somebody else. But Olivia, still suffering from her loss, is only looking for someone to love her as her father did–and soon realizes that there is more to Jonas than meets the eye.

With the Revolutionary War pressing closer around Jonas’s secluded bubble of safety and threatening to burst it at any moment, Jonas discovers that there are choices to be made–choices that will not only affect himself but those around him as well.

After you finish reading the YA books you choose, come back here and share what you thought about them in the comment section.