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Because addiction, abuse, and mental illness of all kinds are serious and scary, you find them mostly covered in YA fiction books. Authors of YA novels write about these issues in adults whose lives impact those of children, or they write about children themselves who are battling these issues. Many titles are written in the style of confessional memoirs told from the point of view of the young person.

This genre also benefits from the #ownvoices movement (discussed in the section “Diversity,” earlier in this chapter). Publishers seek out writers who have their own experiences and who can translate those experiences into fiction for young adults (see the books in Figure 3-24).

YA books about addiction that you might want to check out include Crank, by poet Ellen Hopkins (Margaret K. McElderry), about a perfect, gifted high school student who gets addicted to crank (methamphetamines). Summer of ’69, by Todd Strasser (Candlewick), drawing on the author’s own experiences, talks about a young man who exists in the tuning in, turning on, and dropping out milieu of the 1960s U.S. who may be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. The classic Go Ask Alice, by Beatrice Sparks (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), probably one of the very first YA novels about addiction, follows a teen girl’s harrowing descent into drug addiction.

a) From Pork Belly Tacos with a Side of Anxiety. Reprinted by permission of Santa Monica Press © 2022. b) From List of Ten. Text © 2021 Halli Gomez; cover illustration for the 2022 edition © 2021 Carolina Rodriguez Fuenmayor. Used with permission of the Publisher.

FIGURE 3-24: YA novels in the addiction, abuse, and mental illness genre.

Readers can find YA books about abuse harrowing and frightening, and the books’ protagonists find it all the more so. Some great books dealing with abuse include Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson (Square Fish), a multi-award-winning book about a girl who’s abused at a high school party; Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher (Razorbill), about a boy who gets a series of tapes from a friend about why she committed suicide two weeks before; and Boy Toy, by Barry Lyga (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), about a boy and the teacher who molested him.

The diseases that fall under the umbrella of mental illness involve tens of millions of children. You probably know a young person who has a mental illness. An author can explore any of these diseases creatively: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), depression, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), eating disorders, self-harm, and more. YA novels and this genre are a nearly perfect combination. Writers who have the diseases write to inform and get across messages, and protagonists who have the diseases get through their lives with varying degrees of success.

YA novels about mental illness cover a broad range of specifics. Check out Jennifer Niven’s All the Bright Places (Ember), about a pair of broken teenagers who contemplate suicide; My Heart and Other Black Holes, by Jasmine Warga (Balzer + Bray), about a girl who makes a suicide pact with a boy; and Before You Break, by Kyla Stone (Paper Moon Press), which deals with themes of suicide, mental illness, and abuse.