The 16 Best YA Romance Books, Ranked by the Reread Test

Ari is fifteen and angry in a way he cannot explain, with a brother in prison nobody at home will discuss and a father who came back from Vietnam and went quiet. Dante is open, funny, certain of himself, and teaches Ari to swim. The novel runs across two El Paso summers in the late 1980s, mostly through conversations, letters and long drives in the desert. Sáenz writes teenage loneliness with more respect than almost anybody, and the parents here are full characters rather than furniture.

Simon Spier is not out at school and has been writing to an anonymous boy called Blue, who is somewhere in the same building. Then he leaves himself logged in on a library computer, and Martin, a deeply unfunny classmate, uses the screenshots to make Simon set him up with a friend. What lifts the book above its plot is everything around it: the school play, the Oreos, a friendship group quietly drifting apart, and a family who love Simon and still manage to get it wrong.

Dimple Shah escapes to a web development programme in San Francisco expecting six weeks of code and freedom from her mother's opinions about her hair. Rishi Patel turns up with good manners and the knowledge that both families have quietly arranged for the two of them to meet. He is a romantic who wants the tradition. She throws iced coffee at him. Menon writes second generation Indian American life without explaining it to anybody, so the culture is simply the water everyone in the book swims in.

Noah tells the years when he and Jude were thirteen, inseparable, and both in love with things they could not say aloud. Jude tells sixteen, when the twins barely speak, the family has broken apart, and every sculpture she makes shatters. The two halves lock together like a puzzle, and there are real romances inside both, but the engine is the sibling relationship. Nelson writes in high colour, metaphors stacked three deep, which readers either fall for completely or abandon within ten pages.

Eleanor is big, red-haired, badly dressed and new, and she lives with a stepfather who runs the house on fear. Park is half Korean, quiet, and lets her read his comics over his shoulder on the bus until eventually they start talking. Rowell writes first love at the level of the hand and the wrist, the physical shock of sitting close to somebody at sixteen. The situation at Eleanor's house sits under every scene, and the ending refuses to tidy itself up for anyone.

Natasha is Jamaican, undocumented, and has hours left before her family is removed from the country. Daniel is Korean American, secretly a poet, heading to an alumni interview arranged by parents who want a doctor in the family. They collide on the street and he sets out to prove, on a schedule, that he can make her fall in love before the day ends. Yoon cuts the story with short chapters from strangers, a security guard, a lawyer's secretary, so the whole city ends up implicated.

Nishat is Bangladeshi, Muslim and gay, living in Dublin, and she tells her parents the truth about herself early in the book rather than saving it for the final chapter. Then a school business competition puts her up against Flávia, a Brazilian Irish girl she likes, who starts selling henna art with no cultural claim to it at all. The argument about appropriation happens between two teenagers instead of being delivered as a lesson, and Nishat's older sister is the best supporting character on this list.

Liz Buxbaum has loved romcoms since her mother died, because they were her mother's films and watching them is how she visits her. So she has a plan for senior year: get Michael, newly returned to town, to ask her to prom. Wes, the irritating boy next door, agrees to help in exchange for something he wants. Every chapter opens with a line from a romcom, the banter genuinely moves, and the grief for Liz's mother runs underneath the comedy without taking it over.

Zahra Khan works shifts at a tea shop in New Jersey to keep her widowed mother's household going, and college is quietly slipping out of reach while she does it. Her mother sets up a match with Harun, whose family has money, and the two teenagers quickly realise they both want out, so they fake the courtship to buy themselves time. Nasir at the tea shop complicates all of it. The Bangladeshi community here is specific rather than generic, and money is a constant presence.

Anna's father, a writer of precisely the sort of weepie this site keeps arguing about, sends her to an American school in Paris for her final year. There she meets Étienne St. Clair, who is charming, English, shorter than she expected, and taken. The book is very good on the specific loneliness of being new in a city you did not choose, and on how a friendship group assembles itself around a dining table. The Paris is a tourist's Paris and it works anyway.

Pepper's family runs a fast food chain and has handed her the social media account. Jack's family owns a small New York deli that insists the recipe was stolen from them, and he is running their replies. Neither knows who the other is online, which is the anonymous correspondence setup rebuilt with a school messaging app. The food writing is good, Jack's twin brother subplot is better than the romance, and the pressure Pepper's mother puts on her is drawn with real sympathy.

Winnie Mehta is a film obsessive who runs her school's movie festival and believes the birth chart that names the man she will marry, down to the first letter. Then her boyfriend cheats, the prophecy starts looking unreliable, and Dev, who argues with her about films constantly, becomes the complication. Sharma builds the entire book out of Hindi film architecture, so the plot turns where a film would turn, including a proper interval-shaped reversal in the middle.

Lily writes songs, has no money, and lives in a loud house full of siblings, so she is bored in chemistry and scribbles a lyric on the desk. Somebody answers. The correspondence runs for weeks and becomes the most honest conversation either of them is having, while in the classroom Lily is busy disliking the obvious candidate. West writes clean contemporary romance with no explicit content anywhere, and the family here is warm rather than a set of obstacles to escape.

Belly has spent every summer of her life at Cousins Beach with her mother's oldest friend and that friend's two sons, Conrad and Jeremiah. This year she is sixteen and something has shifted. The love triangle is the engine, and it is the reason the internet still argues about this series, but the part that lasts is the friendship between the two mothers and the thing the adults are carefully not discussing in front of the children.

In a version of New York where a service phones you at midnight to say this is your last day, Mateo and Rufus both get the call and find each other through an app built for exactly that purpose. Mateo has spent his life indoors being careful. Rufus is grieving and in trouble with people who are looking for him. The day the two of them spend together is the entire book, and the title removes the suspense deliberately, so you watch rather than hope.

Hazel has thyroid cancer and lungs that do not work properly, and she meets Augustus at a support group in a church basement she attends under protest. They bond over a novel that stops mid-sentence and talk their way to Amsterdam to confront its author about the ending. Green writes teenagers who speak in finished paragraphs, which is either the charm or the problem depending on your age, and he is genuinely hard on the idea that sick children exist to inspire healthy adults.