A Native Hawaiian Story, Queer Cheerleaders, and More New YA Books for May 20, 2026

Remember that roundup of 2026 YA books that center road trips outside the United States? Here’s another book you can add to that list, and you can also add it to your list of exciting books written in verse.

Jenny Campbell’s childhood had few roots, so she planned her future to roll out before her in a predictable way. She’s just graduated from high school, and she knows the next stop will be New York University, a marketing major, and living in the big city.

Before that, though, she’s mapped out an amazing solo backpacking trip to Europe. But once Jenny arrives in Europe, she begins to find wonder in letting go of the rules and plans, and in trying new things that aren’t on her agenda. That includes falling in love while in Rome.

Jenny returns to the US at summer’s end, ready to begin the next stage of her life, but she finds out that she’s pregnant. She chooses abortion, and while she intends to do all she can to keep her New York City plan alive, she’s finding that sometimes letting go of the plan is what makes life worth living.

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Aouli Elizabeth Smith has a lot of feelings, and they’re complicated. She doesn’t feel like she’s heard at home, and because she doesn’t believe in the church, she feels like an outsider there, too. She’s also fighting with her sister and has recently lost her best friend. Aouli pours those feelings into her song journal to make sense of her world.

One thing that does make sense to her, though, is the connection and community she feels with her Aunty Ehu and their weekend gatherings with other Native Hawaiians in western Washington. Those Saturday afternoons are filled with joy and warmth.

So when an explosive secret about her father comes to life, it threatens to unsettle this perfect pocket of peace Aouli has cultivated. Lost for words, it’s a new boy named Nalu who may help her find them again.

This novel in verse is garnering comparisons to Elizabeth Acevedo’s excellent The Poet X.

Cute cat on a book cover alert! Not only is there a cute cat here, but that cute cat seems indicative of the fun to be had in this clever debut.

Chloe Lovejoy is your most average of average students. But when she wakes up on her 16th birthday, something is amiss: she inherits the role of Mother Nature from her grandmother. She is, as you might expect, nervous about taking on such a tremendous job, and it’s made even more nerve-wracking when her grandma isn’t there to help her through the transition. It’s the Chloe show now, and she’s got to oversee the natural laws of the world solo.

Now, Chloe is trying to balance homework, friendship, hurricanes, and earthquakes. She’s doing all she can to keep it together, but someone in her community wants to harness Chloe’s powers for evil. She can’t let anyone know her secret, but it’s clear that she’s going to have to work harder to keep it all together (and protect herself so she can keep protecting the planet).

A year after high school, Reid is nervous about returning to his town’s Legacy Weekend, a tradition that invites high school alums back to their small town. See, Reid left for college on a scholarship as a championship runner, but he’s now got an injury no one can know about. It’s an injury that could jeopardize his future.

Then there’s Clara. Her legacy can’t be failure either, especially because she’s spent the last year aimless. But her chances for redemption–AKA film school–are as close as making a film about Legacy Weekend. But she’s nervous about interviewing her former classmates, including her ex, Reid. She doesn’t want to revisit the scandal that rocked their senior year.

Too bad there’s an anonymous social media account out there now airing everyone’s secrets, even before the weekend has truly kicked off. While this book has plenty of secrets and legacies to unravel, it’s ultimately a second-chance romance.

When Davie Cathee joined the Oak Haven High cheerleaders three years ago, every other cheerleader on the squad came out as queer. They became the queerleaders of the school.

But now Davie is the cheer squad’s captain, and there’s a vicious rumor spreading that she only allows queer people on the team. Charges of discrimination abound, and now, Davie has to recruit at least one straight cheerleader or face losing team funding from the school.

So when Kendall Hayes shows up, and Davie sees she’s got a boyfriend, Davie also sees her opportunity to recruit a straight girl. Too bad that Kendall and her boyfriend broke up and that Kendall is actually bisexual.

The two of them will now need to keep all those things under wraps to keep the cheer squad viable. Too bad the two of them are developing some Big Feelings for each other.

Beau wants to know whether her crush, Maia, reciprocates her feelings. Sure, she and Maia have been hooking up secretly, but that doesn’t mean feelings are really there.

So when Beau shows up to a huge party and sees Maia kissing Charm, she steps in. Except this isn’t the only thing going on–Maia’s also just received a promposal from her popular boyfriend.

Now, Beau and Charm are going to team up to get Maia back. First, by getting Charm to have Maia fall so hard that her boyfriend breaks up with her. Then, by turning the tables and letting Maia be the one who gets dumped.

Of course, there’s a hitch: Charm and Beau might begin to hit it off.

Caerus controls all of society, and they’re able to do that by bankrupting the lower class. Inesa lives among the poorest in society, and she and her brother run a taxidermy shop to try to survive. Her father, a prepper, is long gone, and her mother is constantly sick—”sick”—and racking up untold amounts of debt. Her mom has so much debt that Inesa has been tapped as the next Lamb for Caerus’s televised assassination event.

Melinoë is a trained Caerus assassin. She’s just come off a run where she was forced to kill a small child, and she’s also struggling with the failure of Caerus’s technology to wipe her memory of what happened. She keeps having terrible flashbacks, and though she’s determined to do her job as an assassin, it’s made harder as her memory keeps popping up before her eyes.

It’s now Inesa whom Melinoë needs to kill. But what happens when the two girls find themselves outside the realm of technology thanks to some glitches? Do they keep playing the roles they’re assigned from Caerus? Or do they take a different route and work to help one another survive?

If you like classic dystopian YA like The Hunger Games but wish it were a little more Sapphic, you’ll dig this one. It’s eerily prescient, too, to our current reality.

This is our dual release for the week, so you can snag it in hardcover or paperback right now (or, of course, as an ebook).

Rani Deshpande, 19, wants this summer to be one of reinvention. She didn’t love her first year in college, so she’s transferring to a new school in the fall. Now’s the time to do everything she can to know herself better: an amazing internship, hanging with her best friend, and finally learning how to drive.

That last part, though, is complicated. Not because she isn’t eager to learn. It’s that she’s getting lessons from Kush Khanna. Kush is a family friend and a former crush of Rani’s, and he’s the golden son of their tight-knit Desi community (Rani, unfortunately, is a bit of a black sheep). But the longer the two of them spend in a confined space together–Kush teaching and Rani practicing–the more they’re finding out that they have in common. The more they’re finding out that there might be some big sparks between them. Perhaps Kush and Rani have a lot more to one another than either of them ever knew growing up.

The cover for this one reminds me of Better Catch Up, Krishna Kumar by Anahita Karthik. They’d probably make for fun readalikes.