Reddit mentions: The best teen & young adult survival stories

So sorry for how long this is... ☹️
1.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MY7PEIP/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_OUK5AbRGQZFYS
2.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FH2MXOG/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_gSK5AbSHDCDQX
3.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BPXNT4K/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_GTK5AbCGJFNXW
4.) I want to gift https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015ORGFNE/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_qWK5AbWACC624 to u/cera_cyanide cuz they’re super cute & made me giggle when I saw them
5.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0545477115/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_DYK5Ab88FHE6P because it was my favorite book growing up & the story is so amazingly awesome & captivating!
6.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PCPCBVO/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_TsQ5Ab5VXF741
7.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P0YQYYW/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_L0K5AbVK59RCQ Super cute!!
8.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00523M5MQ/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_M2K5AbSYKVRDT I had a stuffed animal Gizmo as a child & this is just adorable!
9.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0047CG9F2/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_53K5AbK5D5B99 It is just an adorable older movie (I wanted to link “Unacknowledged” but it wouldn’t let me.
10.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0038A05X6/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_iqL5AbB5AJQ2M useful for digging yet also sharp to stab zombies in the face with.
11.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0756692393/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_G9K5AbJS3RVQS My son learned French in school & I would love to surprise him by being able to speak to him in French 🤓
12.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B019FGCM00/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_hpL5Ab4XX7SZ3
13.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00PYHLS3W/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_ibL5AbV9DFWV2
14.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BP9LFKV/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_cNK5AbFK932E6
15.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074TLXNLR/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_3cL5AbQRTTP8P
16.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00VY3SSSI/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_4dL5AbZT81WEY
17.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B076P9GWKD/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_ngL5AbW09YCMF I ALWAYS wanted a remote control car/truck growing up but I never got one ☹️
18.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0877798508/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_DoL5AbZ5SGMZJ
19.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01H644BJ8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_RlL5Ab4R201E7 I love Loki sooooo much 😍 & I need a new purse 😂
20.) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00TKPIC9M/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_3nL5AbNAY31QF

It's probably pretty telling that the character I relate to most in fiction is pretty damn unlikeable. That would be Victoria/Egg in Boy Proof: self-sufficient, cynical, and obsessively nerdy while pushing everyone away. It was so refreshing to read about a character who didn't have friends fawning over her and wasn't treated as a martyr because people weren't fawning over her. Narratively, the situation was a pretty clear-cut case of "You really brought that on yourself, you know" rather than "Poor MC!"

I will draw a distinction between characters who are meant to be unlikeable, characters who are inadvertently unlikeable, and characters I probably wouldn't want to be friends with in real life.

Whether your MC is a hero(ine) or antihero(ine), you're supposed to be rooting for them. Everyone thinks they're the hero of their own story, and they should have internal motivations and justifications to match. The bully isn't spreading a rumor about the girl she hates because she's a bully: she's doing it because she feels she deserves it. Show why she thinks the objective victim deserves it. Maybe she humiliated her at the science fair and she's been nursing a grudge. Maybe she gave her a nasty look on the bus. Maybe everyone thinks she's Little Miss Perfect and she's not. Maybe the evidence said she stole the money but she didn't really. Reading about these justifications and looking at situations from another perspective is why reading good fiction makes you more empathetic: you get to know characters who have entirely different thought processes.

Some more examples:

Meant to be unlikeable, but you're rooting for them because you understand them:

• Gilly in The Great Gilly Hopkins (MG about foster care) - angry, rude, thieving
  
• Elisa in The Girl of Fire and Thorns (YA fantasy about a fat, religious princess) - borderline case as I thought she was a very sympathetic character, but she does wallow quite a bit in self-pity before she develops a (seriously impressive) spine.
  
• Tris in the Circle of Magic books (MG-YA fantasy about mage school) - abrasive and prickly
  
• Daisy in How I Live Now (YA WWIII) - emotionally flat
  
• Eleanor in Eleanor & Park (YA contemporary set in the 80s) - pretty sure the reader is meant to understand that Eleanor is isolated by both personality and circumstance. She's not exactly reaching out to anyone.
  
• Claudia in Incarceron (YA steampunk/fantasy mashup) - imperious, demanding, self-centered
  
• Meggy in Alchemy and Meggy Swan (MG historical fiction) - cranky and resistant to change
  
• Matilda in Matilda Bone (MG historical fiction) - pious and judgmental
  
  Meant to be likeable and they're not:
  
  
• Ivy Rowe in Fair and Tender Ladies (adult historical fiction about Appalachia) - twit
  
• Eve in... Eve (YA dystopia) - self-centered twit
  
• Tris in Divergent (YA dystopia) - no discernible personality that I could find to base a judgment on
  
• Briar Wilkes in Boneshaker (YA steampunk + zombies) - Again with the lack of personality thing. Among all the characters, she came closest to having a personality, but was still a cardboard cutout.
  
  When characters are supposed to be likeable and they're just not, the fault usually seems to lie with the author for failing to tack on a complete, nuanced personality. Or, the personality is there and the decisions run entirely contrary to the informed traits and it's clearly not a case of "humans are occasionally inconsistent."
  
  I think what annoys me the most is when characters make dumb decisions that run contrary to what we know about that character. For example, in Eve, [when](#s "Caleb tells her that she should move on because all of the small children she supposedly loves and all of the men she's supposed to be deathly afraid of will certainly die when she is tracked, Eve throws a hissy fit because obviously he's a cruel man who doesn't want her love and is just trying to get rid of her.") Also, even though she's never seen a movie or really read about (what the reader knows as) modern times, "the crickets sound like cheerleaders!" :D :D :D This runs entirely contrary to what we're supposed to know about her (she's desperate to get to a different location, she's terrified of men, she protects people).
  
  In comparison, Nell from Into the Forest (adult dystopia) makes some [objectively terrible decisions](#s "like giving up a chance to return to society and fingering her sister"), but they make sense for the context and what we know about her character (scared of change, totally focused on the memories of her family). Daisy from How I Live Now is another unlikeable but sympathetic character making [bad decisions](#s "such as splitting up the group, obsessing about an incestuous relationship, etc"), but again they're presented in a way that makes sense for her mindset and circumstances.
  
  Likeable characters I probably wouldn't want to be friends with, but root for anyways:
  
  
• Aly in Trickster's Choice - keeps trying to score points off people with snark and humiliating come-uppances. Fun to read about, but annoying in real life.
  
• Gemma Doyle in A Great and Terrible Beauty - overly concerned with being in the popular crowd, which is not my thing.
  
• Tally from Uglies - again with popularity as a major motivation
  
• Anna in A Countess Below Stairs - so selfless she'd make me suspicious
  
  These girls have complete personalities and are sympathetic in text despite their flaws. However, I feel like I "know" them well enough that I can tell we probably wouldn't get along in real life.
  
  tl;dr: Readers are supposed to root for the MC even if they are objectively unlikeable. When the reader doesn't want to root for the MC, it's probably because the author didn't convey their personality clearly or consistently. I wouldn't want to be real-life friends with many of my favorite characters.

Hmmm... paranormal/supernatural tween reads with strong girl characters (not that Twilight had a strong female lead in it, but you may as well steer her in a better direction).

You really can't go wrong with the Hunger Games. Or you could get her the Japanese novel Battle Royale. It's also a dystopian novel about teenagers forced to battle each other to the death.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is worth checking out. It starts to lose some oomph towards the end, but is still a solid read with actual substance to the storyline. I'd get the hardback - the photography in it is just genius. Male lead, but there's a pretty cool chick who throws fireballs.

I enjoyed Anna Dressed in Blood. It's a bit like Supernatural, only with one male ghost hunter as the protaganist. He falls in love with a ghost, but she's a homicidal maniac.

The Rise of Renegade X - a boy raised by his evil supervillain mom discovers that he's the product of her one-night-stand with a superhero. That was pretty enjoyable...

Poison Study is a great book about a girl who's been sentenced to death and is offered a reprieve if she becomes the king's food taster. Her handler ends up subjecting her to a litany of poisons so that she can build up immunity. Didn't read the sequels, but the first book was pretty good.

Graceling is set in a world where certain people are born with random talents - the ability to hold their breath underwater for long periods of time, musical or dancing abilities, cooking the best food imaginable, etc. The main character is born with the talent to kill & becomes her uncle's assassin.

Stardust - Neil Gaiman... really nuff said, eh?

Howl's Moving Castle - A girl is turned into an old woman by an angry witch & takes refuge in the mysteriously moving castle of an "evil" wizard.

Okay. I'll stop now. :)

Happy Birthday! A friend of mine was going to get me this book for my birthday and seems to have permanently forgotten. Even if you don't have a big birthday, have a good one. Some of my best birthdays have been between 2/3 friends and myself, as opposed to the big parties.

Try Far North by Will Hobbs, especially if you read Hatchet by Gary Paulson and like it. It's a young adult novel about getting lost way up north in the winter and having to survive. Read it a long time ago so can't remember a ton about it, but I remember I liked it a lot and sounds exactly like what you are looking for.

Also check out Jack London How to Build a Fire short story which you can read for free. Then you might like some of his other stuff too.

These are fairly popular/obvious choices, so forgive me if you're aware of them, but I thought they deserved a mention since you just recently read Harry Potter. I have personally read all of these books and loved them. They're all currently being made into movies so that is a hint about how engaging/accessible they are for teens.

• The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins
  
  
• Divergent series by Veronica Roth.
  
  They are both dystopian novels. Divergent is particularly interesting because it's set in a future Chicago and it's interesting to see how the author plays around with that setting. Fair warning about Divergent: the third book in the series has not yet been released (I think it comes out this fall) so you may want to wait on these until next summer when all of the books are out.

Ok look, It’s not entirely a prison but I think it counts (?). It’s called The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks, you probably know about it. Here’s an Amazon link ( #notsponsored ) : https://www.amazon.com/Bunker-Diary-Fiction-Young-Adult/dp/146775420X

I think it’s a really good book, the writing is on point and it has great characters.

Okay, I love this question.

Padme suggests Lips Touch by Laini Tailor--it's a beautiful book of short stories that are strange but gorgeous, much like Naboo. And despite the title, it's not a romance so much as slices of lovely weirdness held together by the relationships people develop, which suits her. But Jyn and Rey vote this one down.

Leia suggests Passenger by Alex Bracken. It's a time travel book, but also about loss and displacement and people who don't have any real home left, so it makes her sad but hopeful.

Jyn and Rey team together to get the book club to read Six of Crows and then Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo, a fantasy duology about the dregs of society. In SoC, a team of low-lifes from a hard city take on a con job--think Ocean's Eleven, but in a fantasy world and with a rag-tag misfit crew of criminals. CK is about the revenge they take after a double cross. These books are both brilliantly written but also perfect for the characters as they are dark but hopeful at the same time, and Jyn in particular like Kaz Brekker, who will basically do anything to win but still loves his people.

The next person they invite to the club is Dr. Aphra because she's so badass. She suggests Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. K2SO told him about this one. It's a story told through found documents--there's no straight narration, but instead transcripts of interviews, photographs, documentation from space ships, etc. It's about a small group of ships on the run from a random attack on their home planet, trying to outrun the remaining enemy ship chasing them. But it also features a psychotic AI and a lot of death and chaos, which is right up Dr. Aphra's alley.

These are my 3 fav books I love them and if i do win could you do a pokemon painting? Also how big will it be.

i have wanted to read this book for quite some time! Ive read some of his other books and really liked them!

my three faves currently are Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood, Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, and Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman
they are all page-turner (s)

i love book contests!!! =)

Here are all the local Amazon links I could find:


amazon.co.uk

amazon.ca

amazon.com.au

amazon.in

amazon.com.mx

amazon.de

amazon.it

amazon.es

amazon.com.br

amazon.nl

amazon.co.jp

Beep bloop. I'm a bot to convert Amazon ebook links to local Amazon sites.
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Has anyone read Illuminae? It seems like it would be a pretty good book for this sub. I was gonna grab the Kindle version but the physical copy seems the better way to go because of all the pics and charts in the book.

Anyone read it?

I wouldn't worry too much about it. My sister is the same way, she's a college graduate who's always reading something (currently a 1200 page novel called The Homelanders) and is extremely intelligent. She just prefers to unwind and veg when she watches movies.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/140168694X/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

Far North was a book I read as a kid that is exactly like this. 15 year old kids plane goes down in the Canadian wilderness. Him and his friend have to survive the bleakness of nature. Reminds me of the Long Dark at times.

> Sketchy childhood with too many financial close calls? One too many readings of My Side of the Mountain in fourth grade? I've been this way ever since I was a little kid. Always had a Plan B, always interested in security and self-sufficiency.

Add Hatchet and Far North to that list and you've got me exactly.

Perhaps you could write it in an epistolary format.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00OEXJARS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Granted, this book is science-fiction, but there are certainly ways to write fantasy in a similar fashion.

In case anyone is curious, this is from The End Games by T Michael Martin.

https://www.amazon.com/End-Games-T-Michael-Martin/dp/0062201816

You can get it used for like a penny, if you're intrigued.

I've been on a YA Sci Fi kick lately. Some of the ones I've enjoyed:

• [Starbound Trilogy] (http://www.amazon.com/gp/bookseries/B00YSEB8ZK/ref=dp_st_1423171217)
  
• Across the Universe Trilogy
  
• Illuminae
  
• Tin Star
  

My friend wrote a book about Whidby! http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1502477513/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1449448079&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_QL70&keywords=jason+deehan

Why yes... yes I have!

In the last month I have read the Hunger games books and the Lightbringer series books.

Link in the blog is a referral link, FYI. Here is a non-referral link:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Hunger-Games-Trilogy-Boxed/dp/0545265355/

Thought it was Ready Player One but it turns out it's The End Games by T. Michael Martin

Illuminae and Gemina by Aime Kaufman & Jay Kristoff. I just read Illuminae and am now listening to Gemina. The writing takes some getting used to (the book is made to look like a dossier of emails, IMs, maps, interviews, etc.), but after a while I didn't really notice it.

Apparently, The End Games.
The following is not an affiliate link. I haven't read the book. I know almost nothing about it.
But here's the Amazon link.

I loved that book in grade school. Did you know Gary Paulson wrote other books in the series? I never read them, but I understand they were based off the idea Brian didn't get rescued at the end of Hatchet.

Brian's Winter https://www.amazon.com/dp/0307929582/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_9NBnub176GRNX

Far North

http://www.amazon.com/Far-North-Will-Hobbs/dp/0380725363

The Body by Stephen King

I think the girl in The Ghost of Fossil Glen likes rock climbing.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Ghost-Fossil-Glen-Mysteries/dp/0312602138

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.

Half a King by Joe Abercrombie.

Illuminae by Amie Kaufman.

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo.

The End Games by T. Michael Martin

The end games The End Games https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0062201816/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_0YVRyb3PSZ78M

Does anyone know what book this is?

Edit: Found it.

https://www.amazon.com/End-Games-T-Michael-Martin/dp/0062201816

http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Winter-Jason-Deehan/dp/1502477513/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1417462265&sr=8-1&keywords=jason+deehan

Hunger games

The Hunger Games

Surely you're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Me Talk Pretty One Day

World War Z

The Road

Infinite Jest