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Books with Absolutely Zero Romance Sick of love stories? We've got the perfect list! All of the YA titles here have ZERO romance. (No pining, no hand holding, no kisses... nothing!) |
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Elatsoe
by Darcie Little Badger
Imagine an America very similar to our own. This America been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples. Elatsoe lives in this slightly stranger America. She can raise the ghosts of dead animals, a skill passed down through generations of her Lipan Apache family. Her beloved cousin has just been murdered, in a town that wants no prying eyes. But she is going to do more than pry.
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A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking
by T. Kingfisher
Fourteen-year-old Mona isn't like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can't control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt's bakery making gingerbread men dance. But Mona's life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona's city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona's worries...
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Dread Nation
by Justina Ireland
When families go missing in Baltimore County, Jane McKeene, who is studying to become an Attendant, finds herself in the middle of a conspiracy that has her fighting for her life against powerful enemies.
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Dry
by Neal Shusterman
A lengthy California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, turning Alyssa's quiet suburban street into a warzone, and she is forced to make impossible choices if she and her brother are to survive.
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Scythe
by Neal Shusterman
Forced to become trained killers in a disease-free world where people can only die if eliminated by professional assassins, teens Citra and Rowan reluctantly train under a master reaper who informs them that the one who successfully kills the other will become his apprentice.
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Challenger Deep
by Neal Shusterman
Caden Bosch is on a ship that's headed for the deepest point on Earth: Challenger Deep, the southern part of the Marianas Trench. As he wrestles with his own internal struggle, Caden is split between his allegiance to the captain and the allure of mutiny.
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Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves
by Meg Long
Meg Long's Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves is a captivating debut about survival, found family, and the bond between a girl and a wolf that delivers a fresh twist on classic survival stories and frontier myths. On a frozen wasteland of a planet, a girl is on the run with a wolf who is born to be a killer but bound to be her guide. As they fight to escape ice goblins, giant bears, and a ruthless leader intent on trapping them both, one question drives them relentlessly forward: Where do you turn when there is nowhere to hide?
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The Lady's Guide to Petticoats and Piracy
by Mackenzi Lee
Hoping to travel to Germany to ask for help enrolling in medical school, Felicity has no money for the trip until a mysterious woman offers to travel with her and pay her way, which ends up entangling Felicity in a perilous quest across Europe.
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A Warning About Swans
by R. M. Romero
Swan maiden Hilde sacrifices her magical wings to seek freedom in the human world, but when her pact with an upstart baron takes her to the court of Ludwig II, she struggles to fit in, and only Jewish artist Franz, who has the power to paint souls, can help her escape her newfound prison.
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Pet
by Akwaeke Emezi
In a near-future society that claims to have gotten rid of all monstrous people, a creature emerges from a painting seventeen-year-old Jam's mother created, a hunter from another world seeking a real-life monster
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Contagion
by Erin Bowman
Responding to a distress call on the distant planet of Achlys, Thea Sadik and her search-and-rescue crew are confronted by a zombie-like outbreak that forces them to uncover a monstrous enemy.
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I Am Still Alive
by Kate Alice Marshall
Stranded in the woods after her cabin burns down and her father is killed, a disabled girl and her dog fervently prepare for the coming winter while plotting revenge on the person who murdered her father
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Long Way Down
by Jason Reynolds
Driven by the secrets and vengeance that mark his street culture, 15-year-old Will contemplates over the course of 60 psychologically suspenseful seconds whether or not he is going to murder the person who killed his brother. .
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Dreamland Burning
by Jennifer Latham
A dual-narrated tale by the author of Scarlett Undercover explores how race relations have changed in the past century through the story of 17-year-old Rowan, who investigates a century-old murder committed during the race riots of 1921 Tulsa.
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The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak
Trying to make sense of the horrors of World War II, Death relates the story of Liesel--a young German girl whose book-stealing and story-telling talents help sustain her family and the Jewish man they are hiding, as well as their neighbors.
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Gallant
by V. E. Schwab
Olivia Prior has grown up at the grim Merilance School for Girls with no no past except for her one treasure, her mother's journal, so when a letter arrives inviting her to come home to ruinous manor, Gallant, she seizes the chance to find out about her family.
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The Bone Houses
by Emily Lloyd-Jones
When risen corpses called 'bone houses' threaten Ryn's village because of a decades-old curse, she teams up with a mapmaker named Ellis to solve the mystery of the curse and destroy the bone houses forever.
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The Inexplicable Logic of My Life
by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Having believed he was happy with his place in the loving Mexican-American family he shares with his adoptive gay father, Sal turns angry and uncertain when his senior year arrives and he realizes that he wants to know more about his biological origins.
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Monday's Not Coming
by Tiffany D. Jackson
When her friend Monday Charles goes missing and Monday's mother refuses to give her a straight answer, Claudia digs into her disappearance.
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The Kingdom of Back
by Marie Lu
Forbidden by 18th-century restrictions to pursue her dream of becoming a composer, the musically gifted older sister of Wolfgang Mozart risks everything she cares about by accepting an irresistible offer from a mysterious stranger.
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House of Hollow
by Krystal Sutherland
Reappearing in their Scotland suburb a month after going missing, three sisters with no memory of what happened begin to transform, while strange phenomena begin occurring around them in ways that impact their coming-of-age a decade later.
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The Girl from the Well
by Rin Chupeco
Okiku has wandered the world for centuries, freeing the innocent ghosts of the murdered-dead and taking the lives of killers with the vengeance they are due, but when she meets Tark she knows the moody teen with the series of intricate tattoos is not a monster and needs to be freed from the demonic malevolence that clings to him.
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Clown in a Cornfield
by Adam Cesare
Resolving to keep her head down through graduation when a factory closing divides the adults and kids in her small community, Quinn is caught in a dispute between tradition and progress before a homicidal corporate mascot begins targeting teens.
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How to Make Friends with the Dark
by Kathleen Glasgow
Tiger, sixteen, has been pushing away from her overprotective mother, but when her mother dies suddenly Tiger must learn to live when it feels she is surrounded by darkness.
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Black Dove, White Raven
by Elizabeth Wein
Having moved to Ethiopia to avoid the prejudices of 1930s America, Emilia Menotti, her black adoptive brother Teo, and their mother Rhoda, a stunt pilot, are devoted to their new country even after war with Italy looms, drawing the teens into the conflict.
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Between Shades of Gray
by Ruta Sepetys
In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil.
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The Weight of Our Sky
by Hanna Alkaf
Amidst the Chinese-Malay conflict in Kuala Lumpur in 1969, sixteen-year-old Melati must overcome prejudice, violence, and her own OCD to find her way back to her mother.
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Loveless
by Alice Oseman
Surrounded by the narrative that dating + sex = love, Georgia, who doesn't have sexual or romantic feelings for anyone, comes to understand herself as asexual/aromantic and learns that there are plenty of other ways to find love and connection.
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Sadie
by Courtney Summers
Told from the alternating perspectives of nineteen-year-old Sadie who runs away from her isolated small Colorado town to find her younger sister's killer, and a true crime podcast exploring Sadie's disappearance.
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The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
by Sherman Alexie
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
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