YA-Adult Crossover Titles for Teen Readers

Adult Books for Teen Readers

Teens often carry a heavy load of assigned reading, across all subjects. Although the assigned reading can be engaging, educational, and enlightening, it is still important for teens to make their own selections and read for pleasure! Reading for pleasure, especially books that are geared toward both teens and adults, can introduce concepts, career paths, and interests which teens might not run across in their classroom reading.

Morals and Mutual Interests

Books for adults that appeal to teens can create connections across age groups based on shared interests and can spark conversations about the broader world. Exploring books of a higher comprehension level can also introduce teens to situations where they can build and strengthen their moral base and experience the dualities of daily life. Seeing things through a potentially unreliable narrator’s eyes helps a reader consider their own values and how they align with the narrator on certain issues.

Editor's Choice Adult Crossover Picks

JLG’s Editors search high and low for the best books. Here, you can see some of JLG’s upcoming picks that were published for the adult market, but double as great teen reads too. Your library collection will benefit from JLG's top upcoming adult crossover picks! Add these high-interest, far-reaching topics to your collection development strategy by subscribing to any of JLG’s Adult Crossover categories.

JLG’s Top Fall Adult Crossover Books for Teens

Crying in H Mart
By Michelle Zauner
Subscription category: Adult Crossover High Plus (Grades 11 & up)
Shipping to subscribers for September 2021

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother’s tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food.


The President and the Frog
By Carolina De Roberts
Subscription category: Adult Crossover High Plus (Grades 11 & up)
Shipping to subscribers for October 2021

At his modest home on the edge of town, the former president of an unnamed Latin American country receives a journalist in his famed gardens to discuss his legacy and the dire circumstances that threaten democracy around the globe. Once known as the Poorest President in the World, his reputation is the stuff of myth: a former guerilla who was jailed for inciting revolution before becoming the face of justice, human rights, and selflessness for his nation. Now, as he talks to the journalist, he wonders if he should reveal the strange secret of his imprisonment: while held in brutal solitary confinement, he survived, in part, by discussing revolution, the quest for dignity, and what it means to love a country, with the only creature who ever spoke back—a loud-mouth frog.


The Hospital: Life, Death and Dollars in a Small American Town
By Brian Alexander
Subscription category: Adult Crossover Nonfiction Plus (grades 11 & up)
Shipping to subscribers for July 2021

By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes readers into the world of the American medical industry in a way no book has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed.


A Most Remarkable Creature
By Jonathan Meiburg
Subscription category: Adult Crossover Nonfiction Plus (grades 11 & up)
Shipping to subscribers for August 2021

In 1833, Charles Darwin was astonished by an animal he met in the Falkland Islands: handsome, social, and oddly crow-like falcons that were “tame and inquisitive…quarrelsome and passionate,” and so insatiably curious that they stole hats, compasses, and other valuables from the crew of the Beagle. Darwin wondered why these birds were confined to remote islands at the tip of South America, sensing a larger story, but he set this mystery aside and never returned to it.

Almost two hundred years later, Jonathan Meiburg takes up this chase. He takes us through South America, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of Guyana, in search of these birds: striated caracaras, which still exist, though they’re very rare.


All’s Well
By Mona Awad
Subscription category: Adult Crossover Thrillers Plus (grades 11 & up)
Shipping to subscribers for October 2021

Miranda Fitch’s life is a waking nightmare. The accident that ended her burgeoning acting career left her with excruciating, chronic back pain, a failed marriage, and a deepening dependence on painkillers. And now she’s on the verge of losing her job as a college theater director. Determined to put on Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the play that promised, and cost, her everything, she faces a mutinous cast hellbent on staging Macbeth instead. Miranda sees her chance at redemption slip through her fingers.

That’s when she meets three strange benefactors who have an eerie knowledge of Miranda’s past and a tantalizing promise for her future: one where the show goes on, her rebellious students get what’s coming to them, and the invisible, doubted pain that’s kept her from the spotlight is made known.


The Final Girl Support Group
By Grady Hendrix
Subscription category: Adult Crossover Thrillers Plus (grades 11 & up)
Shipping to subscribers for October 2021

In horror movies, the final girl is the one who’s left standing when the credits roll. The one who fought back, defeated the killer, and avenged her friends. The one who emerges bloodied but victorious. But after the sirens fade and the audience moves on, what happens to her?

Lynnette Tarkington is a real-life final girl who survived a massacre twenty-two years ago, and it has defined every day of her life since. And she’s not alone. For decades she’s been meeting with five other actual final girls and their therapist in a support group for those who survived the unthinkable, putting their lives back together, piece by piece. That is until one of the women misses a meeting and Lynnette’s worst fears are realized—someone knows about the group and is determined to take their lives apart again, piece by piece.


Awesome Adult Books!

Such interesting books are coming to JLG this fall! We can’t wait for these titles to hit your shelves and your readers’ hands. Perfect conversation starters, these adult crossover titles will expand your teens minds, their critical thinking skills, and invite them to learn more about the world around them.

Need subscription guidance? Get support from a JLG rep today!

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