Youthful Narrator

Level up with these stories told by children or younger-than-average people!

Updated April 16, 2025
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The adventures of Huckleberry Finn /
Twain, Mark,
Paper Book
Mark Twain's tale of a boy's picaresque journey down the Mississippi on a raft conveyed the voice and experience of the American frontier as no other work had done before. When Huck escapes from his drunken father and the 'sivilizing' Widow Douglas with the runaway slave Jim, he embarks on a series...
All the water in the world : a novel
Raney, Karen
Paper Book
A stunning debut novel about a teenage girl and her mother as they grapple with first love, family secrets, and tragedy. Maddy is sixteen. Smart, funny, and profound, she has loyal friends, a mother with whom she's unusually close, a father she's never met, devoted grandparents,...
Beautiful country : a memoir
Wang, Qian Julie
Paper Book
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER * The moving story of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world--an incandescent debut from an astonishing new talent * A TODAY SHOW #READWITHJENNA PICK In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates...
Black swan green : a novel
Mitchell, David
Paper Book
From highly acclaimed two-time Man Booker finalist David Mitchell comes a glorious, sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. In his previous novels, David Mitchell dazzled us with his narrative scope and his virtuosic command of multiple...
The boy on the bridge
Carey, M. R.
Paper Book
One exceptional boy journeys into the ashes of society to find the cure for a devastating plague in this riveting post-apocalyptic standalone set in the same world as the USA Today-bestselling The Girl With All the Gifts. Once upon a time, in a land blighted by...
Close your eyes, hold hands : a novel
Bohjalian, Chris
Paper Book
A heartbreaking, wildly inventive, and moving novel narrated by a teenage runaway, from the bestselling author of Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls. Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands is the story of Emily Shepard, a homeless teen living in an igloo made of ice...
Dear world : a Syrian girl's story of war and plea for peace
Al Abed, Bana
Paper Book
"A story of love and courage amid brutality and terror, this is the testimony of a child who has endured the unthinkable." --J.K. Rowling "I'm very afraid I will die tonight." --Bana Alabed, Twitter, October 2, 2016 "Stop killing us." --Bana Alabed, Twitter,...
Ghost wall
Moss, Sarah
Paper Book
A Southern Living Best New Book of Winter 2019; A Refinery29 Best Book of January 2019; A Most Anticipated Book of 2019 at The Week, Huffington Post, Nylon, and Lit Hub; An Indie Next Pick for January 2019 "Ghost Wall has...
A girl is a body of water /
Makumbi, Jennifer Nansubuga.
Paper Book
In her thirteenth year, Kirabo confronts a piercing question: who is my mother? Kirabo has been raised by women in the small Ugandan village of Nattetta--her grandmother, her best friend, and her many aunts--but the absence of her mother follows her like a shadow. Seeking answers from Nsuuta, the...
Last bus to wisdom
Doig, Ivan.
Paper Book
Named a Best Book of the Year by the Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Kirkus Review The final novel from a great American storyteller. Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig's...
Oliver Twist, or, the Parish boy's progress /
Dickens, Charles,
Paper Book
One of the great novelist's most popular works, Oliver Twist is also the purest distillation of Dickens's genius. This tale of the orphan who is reared in a workhouse and runs away to London is a novel of social protest, a morality tale, and a detective story. Oliver...
The reason I jump : the inner voice of a thirteen-year-old boy with autism
Higashida, Naoki
Paper Book
"One of the most remarkable books I've ever read. It's truly moving, eye-opening, incredibly vivid."--Jon Stewart, The Daily Show NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR * The Wall Street Journal * Bloomberg Business * Bookish
Room : a novel
Donoghue, Emma
Paper Book
The award-winning bestseller that became one of the most talked about and memorable novels of the decade, Room is "utterly gripping...a heart-stopping novel" (San Francisco Chronicle).   Held captive for years in a small shed, a woman and her...
Something wicked this way comes
Bradbury, Ray
Paper Book
Few American novels written this century have endured in th heart and mind as has this one-Ray Bradbury's incomparable masterwork of the dark fantastic. A carnival rolls in sometime after the midnight hour on a chill Midwestern October eve, ushering in Halloween a week before its time. A calliope...
The sweetness at the bottom of the pie
Bradley, C. Alan
Paper Book
Flavia, an 11-year-old with a chemistry lab, finds a corpse in a cucumber patch and applies the detective skills she learned plotting against her older sisters. This debut mystery by a Canadian author won the 2007 Crime Writer Association's Debut Dagger Award.
Sweetness in the skin : a novel
Robinson, Ishi
Paper Book
"A delightful coming-of-age story set in Jamaica, amid heartbreak, hopefulness, and mirth."--Charmaine Wilkerson, New York Times bestselling author of Black Cake "Poignant and emotional, with touches of both humor and sorrow. . . . This book makes you think about what it means to be a...
Tell the wolves I'm home /
Brunt, Carol Rifka.
Paper Book
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal * O: The Oprah Magazine * BookPage * Kirkus Reviews * Booklist * School Library Journal   In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love,...
To kill a mockingbird
Lee, Harper.
Paper Book
Lawyer Atticus Finch defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic, Puliter Prize-winning novel--a black man charged with the rape of a white woman. Through the eyes of Atticus's children, Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unanswering honesty the irrationality of...
When skateboards will be free : a memoir of a political childhood
Sayrafiezadeh, Saïd.
Paper Book
With a profound gift for capturing the absurd in life, and a deadpan wisdom that comes from surviving a surreal childhood in the Socialist Workers Party, Said Sayrafiezadeh has crafted an unsentimental, funny, heartbreaking memoir. Saïd¿s Iranian-born father and American Jewish mother had one thing...

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