The best gritty YA books that explore death, grief, and mourning

After I read The Outsiders for the first time when I was twelve, I fell in love with dark, gritty novels about teenagers dealing with hard issues and events in their lives. The Outsiders is told from the point of view of fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, an orphan living with his two older brothers in 1960s Tulsa, Oklahoma. All three are “greasers” who, along with their fellow greasers, regularly get into scrapes with a brutal gang known as the “Socs”—rich kids whose life mission is to pound any greaser they can find. Ponyboy is used to the drill of being jumped by the Socs on the regular until one fateful night when he’s backed into a corner by the Socs—an encounter that results in a death, spiraling his life into a living nightmare. 

I love this book because it doesn’t have a traditional happy ending, and yet, there’s hope in the end. This novel not only changed the trajectory of my own personal reading and writing, but it completely transformed coming-of-age fiction and opened up a deeper, darker world of YA stories that need to be told.

The Pigman was the first YA novel I ever read that’s told in two separate voices. Each chapter alternates between two high school sophomores: John Conlan and Lorraine Jenson. The two meet Angelo Pignati, a lonely widower, due to making a random prank phone call asking for a monetary donation to the “L. and J. Fund.” John and Lorraine nickname Mr. Pignati the “Pigman” because of his deceased wife’s collection of ceramic pigs. Their prank call soon leads to friendship, which horrifically ends in tragedy inadvertently caused by John and Lorraine, thus inspiring both to choose to deal with their grief by writing “a memorial epic” of their friend.

I love the writing style of alternating two character voices, which inspired me to write my own first novel in two voices. The dialogue in The Pigman is filled with dark humor and sarcasm, which for me, brings even more shock value to the novel’s tragic ending. Paul Zindel is another author who brought a fresh voice and needed change to coming-of-age novels. Every aspiring YA writer needs to read his work!

In A Ring of Endless Light, sixteen-year-old Vicky Austin has to come to terms with death from all directions, starting with the funeral service of Commander Rodney presided over by her grandfather, who is dying of cancer. Watching her grandfather deteriorate over the summer on Seven Bay Island is hard as it is, but it’s complicated even more when Vicky has to juggle the romantic interest of three very different guys: Leo, an old friend and Commander Rodney’s son; Zachary, whose attempted suicide caused Commander Rodney’s death; and Adam, her older brother’s friend, who offers her an amazing chance to work with dolphins, something that gives her a break from the constant hard in her life. 

I love this emotionally heavy novel, largely due to Madeleine L’Engle’s beautiful, descriptive writing. A Ring of Endless Light finds beauty in struggle and sorrow, and even in death. Ms. L’Engle’s novels always bring me to tears!

This 1978 suspense novel completely freaked me out when I read it for the first time in high school, because the plot was so horrifyingly believable. Four high school students in New Mexico, angry at their strict, hard-hitting, demanding English teacher, devise a plan to punish him by kidnapping him and giving him the scare of a lifetime. That’s all they meant to do. They didn’t mean to kill him. Mark, the leader of the group, convinces everyone to cover up the death. Susan is the only member not on board with Mark’s way of dealing with their crime. She’s overcome with guilt and wants to come clean to the police. This only results in a domino effect of more tragedies and death before the group’s secret is discovered.

This novel has received all kinds of awards and honors, and richly deserves each one. I love that this novel takes the subject of peer pressure to a darker, uglier level, side by side with the subject of having to deal with unanticipated results of planned actions. A must YA read!

Told from the point of view of thirteen-year-old tomboy Georgie Burkhardt in 1871 Wisconsin, the story begins with the funeral of Georgie’s sister, Agatha—a funeral Georgie calls her sister’s first funeral, which Georgie knows won’t be Agatha’s last, and is the reason Georgie leaves town in search of her sister. Even though mere days earlier, the sheriff rode into town with an unidentifiable body wearing her older sister’s blue-green ball gown, Georgie won’t believe the body belongs to her sister. Thus begins her adventure tracking all of the clues and bits of evidence she can find to prove her sister is still alive and bring her home.

The pure adventure of this frontier story pulled me in from page one. The mystery of Agatha’s death, and whether Georgie’s simply in denial over her sister’s death, or just possibly might be the only one in town who’s on the right track about her sister still being alive, kept me turning pages and following Georgie’s adventures to the jaw-dropping conclusion. This book needs to be made into a movie!