With summer around the corner, it’s time to ditch the schoolbooks and start crafting a pleasure-filled TBR! But you don’t want just any summer read; you want the one that suits you the best. High school culture (and adult culture, too) is full of a diverse array of personality types, ones which deserve bookish recommendations specially designed to their tastes.
Read on to find out which book fits your academic persona!
Trigger Warning: The books in this article contain mentions of addiction, racism, police brutality, homophobia, mental illness, and suicide. Please exercise personal care while reading.
The Social Butterfly: Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry
If you’re a social butterfly, you’re all about meeting new people and making connections. And that’s just what Alice and Hayden hope to do when they vie for the rights to tell the stunning tale of legendary figure Margaret Ives.
Alice has no chance of gaining the contract, given that Hayden is already an established, Pulitzer-prize-winning writer. But Margaret offers both of them a one-month trial period to test their caliber. The only problem? Margaret is sharing different pieces of her story with each of them, and their NDAs prevent them from assembling the truth. Soon, Alice and Hayden aren’t sure which story they’d rather figure out more: Margaret’s or theirs?
The Overachiever: Enter Title Here by Naomi Kanakia
Academic overachievers put way too much pressure on themselves. But can we really blame them when education is presented as the end-all be-all for everything?
Meet Reshma Kapoor, an ace high school senior who’s so close to Stanford, she can almost taste it. When a literary agent, enthralled by a piece Reshma wrote for Huffington Post, reaches out to offer a book deal, Reshma knows she finally has the perfect extracurricular to set her application apart. Unfortunately, writing a hit novel means you have to gain some extra life experience, so Reshma better start getting some friends, or, scarier, a boyfriend. The more connections Reshma makes, the more she starts to doubt everything she thought she knew about success.
The Delinquent: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
“Delinquent” isn’t a title that most people would willingly name themselves. More often, it’s used derogatorily by people who don’t care to understand you. When Starr’s best friend Khalil is fatally shot by a police officer, it’s this same derogatory language that soon haunts mainstream media.
Starr knows this never should’ve happened — Khalil was unarmed and clearly a victim of racial profiling — but everyone is quick to call him a thug and a gangbanger. When protestors fill the streets and the local cops start threatening Starr’s family, she isn’t sure what she should do. As the only person who was with Khalil when he died, Starr, for once, holds all the power. And what she has to say could tear the community apart.
The Wallflower: The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
Okay, this one might be a bit obvious. But anyone who knows the quiet ache of observation over participation will relate to Charlie’s story.
Charlie has always lived life on the outside of things: the back of the classroom, the empty lunch table, and yes, the wall in a crowded room. But when he meets an exciting collection of high school seniors — including the hilarious Patrick and the beautiful Sam — Charlie suddenly has more friends than ever before. Coming off the wall proves to be difficult, especially when Charlie knows that in a few short months, all these new friends will graduate and leave him behind.
The Theatre Kid: Saving Hamlet by Molly Booth
If you’re a theatre kid, your life is nothing but late-night rehearsals and stressful cast dynamics. Sometimes you wish you could just get away from all the drama!
When Emma takes over as stage manager for Hamlet, it seems that all the chaos in the world has fallen into her lap. After a rehearsal, Emma accidentally falls through a trap door and winds up in the Globe Theatre in 1601. She may have wanted to get away, but certainly not that far! As Emma hops back and forth between the past and the present, she soon finds herself in love with two different boys, each from a different timeline. Soon, she must decide where she truly belongs and save two performances of Hamlet before the curtains rise.
The Outcast: Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Outcasts, by definition, don’t have a unified peer group. They exist on the fringes of things, even more so than wallflowers. When an outcast is lucky enough to find a connection, they know just how rare that bond can be.
Aristotle, AKA Ari, and Dante couldn’t be any more different. Sure, they’re both Mexican-American teens, but the similarities end there. Ari is self-conscious and closed off, partly due to his older brother being in prison. Alternatively, Dante is as open and voracious as they come. Against all odds, the two become dedicated friends. This bond proves to be instrumental in helping them discover the people they want to be.
The Class Clown: This Will Be Funny Someday by Katie Henry
Humor is a freeing form of self-expression, and no one knows that freedom better than the class clown. Yet, beneath the jokes and zippy one-liners, there’s always a deeper person waiting to be discovered.
Izzy has never been one to speak out of turn — not at school, not at home, and certainly not in front of her controlling boyfriend. But when she stumbles onto an open-mic stage at a Chicago comedy club, Izzy discovers that she has a lot to say, after all. Soon, Izzy is living a double life. During the day, she’s the quiet, well-mannered high school teen. At night, she’s the brassy comic whom all her new friends think is a fellow college student. (Whoops!) As her separate worlds threaten to collide, Izzy knows that no matter what, she’s not giving up the freedom that comedy has granted her.
The Goth Kid: Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz
If you’re a goth kid, you may have a fascination with death and darkness, coupled with a heart that beats with more feeling than anyone realizes. After all, your core is about individuality and never falling prey to the status quo. Hazel Sinnett, a young woman in 1817 who longs to be a surgeon, knows just how you feel.
When Hazel gets kicked out of Dr. Beecham’s anatomy lectures on account of her gender, she manages to convince him to let her back in if she can pass the medical exam on her own. Now, Hazel better find some corpses to study — and fast! Enter Jack Currer, a man who digs up graves for a living. Hazel’s medical knowledge proves useful to Jack, given that Roman Fever is sweeping through Edinburgh and no one in the aristocracy seems to care. In the backdrop of a moody Scottish castle, Hazel and Jack work together to uncover not only secrets of anatomy but of society itself.
Whether you’re a teen, a college kid, or looking to recapture your youth, we know these titles are the perfect start to your summer reading list. We here at Bookstr wish you a happy, book-filled break!
For more school-related book recs, click here.
Visit our Recommendations bookshelf on Bookshop.org for top-notch reading lists.
