New YA Book Releases for October 1, 2025

A year ago, Stella Chen’s brother died, and with that, her family’s unraveling. Stella and her brother grew up being raised in rural China by their grandmother before they came to the US to live with their parents. Now, Stella’s parents are uprooting the family again, going from rural Illinois to California. No one is talking, and the silence only amplifies Stella’s feelings of loneliness and unease.

But it only gets worse when Stella’s parents inform her that she will be joining her former friend Alan Zhao on a roadtrip throughout California. They’re going to be visiting colleges in anticipation of the next step in their lives. Stella doesn’t want to do this, especially because Alan is everything Stella isn’t, including prepared and excited for college.

The trip, though, isn’t as bad as she feared. Indeed, it might be what begins the healing process for Stella. It might also allow her to see how much she and Alan have in common.

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Dani and Alec were inseparable growing up. But when Dani and her family move away from Minnesota, Alec’s promise to keep in touch doesn’t actually happen. So when Dani’s mother and father go through an ugly divorce and Dani and her mother move back to Minnesota, Dani thinks it’ll be a chance to find out what happened. Why did Alec stop talking?

Alec is nothing like she remembers, though. He’s a hero on the ice in their small town, and that doesn’t really make him available to spend time with. So Dani’s going to let it go and forget about him. At least, that was the plan. A series of surprise events put the two back into one another’s orbits and they’re forced into a fake coupledom.

We know what’ll happen here. That fake relationship becomes all the more real, and not only do Dani and Alec find a lot of common ground and a lot of sparks, but Alec will finally let Dani in on what really happened all those years ago.

Sebastian, 17, agrees to move to New Gault reluctantly. His mother has been diagnosed with cancer and he’s going to help take care of her, despite her history of being abusive. Seb’s not happy about the town and certainly not happy to see his mother is as aggressive as she’s always been. He made a promise to his abuela, though, and he’s going to stick to it.

On his first day at his new high school, he’s paired up with Lu, a student ambassador. Lu tells Seb about the technology at their school making it a safe space and free from bullying. The catch is that users have to watch everything they say and stay within strict word limits every day. Seb isn’t into that.

Lu finds the technology liberating and they don’t understand why someone like Seb would decline it. It feels to them like Seb has rejected them personally.

Unfortunately for Seb, denying the technology comes with a cost. His mother will be denied her cancer treatment if he doesn’t partake. So he does so reluctantly, and it helps him and Lu grow closer. As their relationship evolves, though, Seb can’t help but work to challenge Lu over the technology and over what it means to even be safe.

This queer speculative romance dives into a lot of big, meaty, contemporary questions.

This is something that, in all of my years covering and reading YA literature, I have not seen before. It’s a YA romance created as an advent calendar.

Over the course of 24 days, readers open up one chapter a day of this story that follows an 18-year-old girl spending the Christmas break at her father’s Swiss chalet. She’s been through a LOT, including two major heart surgeries and she’s ready to truly unwind over the holiday season.

This is a romance, so you know there’s a sweet happily ever after as well. The love interest is a ski instructor April meets and is deeply encouraged by.

Meka is joining the family business as a mortician’s assistant. Her parents own a funeral home, so she’s been around the dead her whole life. She’s grateful that despite how many people can freak out at what she and her family do, her boyfriend Noah is pretty cool with it. The two of them have been growing closer and closer, and Meka thinks she’s ready to finally say she loves him.

But things come crashing down real quick, and suddenly, nothing seems to make sense in Meka’s world. Her home is being surrounded by ravens, she’s being followed, people are leaving strange things at her door, and, well, dead people don’t seem to be staying dead.

It turns out that what Meka thought she knew about the family business was one story. The truth is something else entirely.

Adler’s third edited anthology features yet another star-studded contributorship. This time, 15 different writers offer up twists on beloved fairy tales ranging from Rumpelstiltskin to Puss in Boots to The Nutcracker, Cinderella, and more. Among the contributors are Malinda Lo, Alex London, Stacey Lee, and Tracy Deonn.

Deinhart Mansion has been there forever. It’s a huge part of the town’s lore, and it’s always just been abandoned. But when the final member of the Deinhart family dies and the house is on the market, Arden and her friends see not an opportunity to buy the place but an opportunity to break in and party. They’re graduating and what could be better than living it up in a haunted mansion?

But then the house shuts its doors and locks everyone inside. The walls begin to bleed. It turns quickly from celebration to nightmare, and no one is guaranteed to make it out alive.

Arden James is a hot Hollywood teen. She’s known for being a little reckless and messy. So when she loses an audition for her perfect role because of her reputation, she and her publicist are set to compose a brilliant lie to turn things around. But for the lie to work, Arden needs to go home for the holidays. It’ll be the first time she’s back home in over four years.

Caroline has been building the perfect portfolio over the last four years to get into journalism school. She’s managed to forget about Arden, her former best friend and first crush who left her and left town unceremoniously to begin her acting career. So when Arden shows up at her door, Caroline isn’t expecting to be reeled into a fake dating scheme that will land her a byline in Cosmopolitan. Write about 12 fake dates the two took in their small town? Easy peasy.

But we know how these fake dating things go. It might be more than simply “fake.” This is the holiday Sapphic rom-com of your dreams by a dynamic real-life #goals Sapphic couple.

Jane Vandermaker-Cook is desperate to get her mother back. Living at home with her father means she and her little brother are subject to brutal verbal and emotional abuse and his weird, unhinged rules. Jane’s mom travels the world to make ends meet for the family because she is a rockstar. Literally. But even if things are a little easier for Jane and her brother when mom is home, Jane’s dad confines her mom to a series of pneumatic tubes. The family is also joined by a rat named Brutus, a gardener, and a whole bunch of security cameras.

When Jane gets access to the footage of those cameras, what they reveal is a family that is anything but simply weird or quirky. This discovery, though, is key to helping save her mother—and as a bonus (if that’s even the right word!), there’ll be a punk opera involved in this story because when she’s able to, Jane is in a band and loves making music like her mom.

Throughout the book, there are interludes from Brutus the rat, who can also shape-shift. There are also interstitials written as a play and as a rock concert. This character-driven novel is a big boy at 400 pages and explores the relationships between mothers and daughters, as well as the way girls and women are subjected to the systems of the patriarchy, whether they want to be or not.