The best books where teens grapple with the blurred line between good and evil

After starting out as a more straightforward magical adventure, the Harry Potter series begins digging deeper into the murkiness of good and evil in Book 5. Harry himself is an unquestionably “good” person, who makes the right decision even if it’s difficult, so he provides a fitting contrast for other characters who aren’t so clean-cut. 

Though it’s now common knowledge, I can still remember how the scene where Harry sees his father bullying Snape in the Pensieve shook me to the core. Harry’s father had always been portrayed as a paragon of good, a true hero, while Snape was nothing more than a bully. As the series continues, Harry is forced to come to terms with the moral ambiguity of more than one character, most prominently Dumbledore. And Rowling provides no answers, instead leaving readers to debate endlessly over these questions.

A Series of Unfortunate Events begins by pitting the Baudelaires against the evil Count Olaf and his henchmen, escaping time and time again from his villainous schemes. But as the series progresses, good and evil begin to blur. The Baudelaires are forced to do things they would have previously considered evil (lighting fires, lying), while they learn that V.F.D. is not the noble organization they had once thought. 

Towards the end of the series, the moral ambiguity grows starker than ever, and in The Penultimate Peril, the Baudelaires find themselves facilitating an evil scheme in the process of trying to disguise themselves. Though aimed at younger readers, these books are very cleverly written, with plenty of hidden meanings that I’ve enjoyed rediscovering as an adult! 

The very premise of this trilogy is chilling—a staged battle where children fight one another to the death—and it’s hard to see how a noble character could have any part in this. But Katniss volunteers out of the selfless desire to save her sister, which creates the immediate question of how someone that kind-hearted could participate in such a horrific spectacle. 

I remember reading with apprehension about Katniss’s burgeoning friendships, because I knew she would have to kill or be killed in the end. How would she reconcile what she was forced to do with her own humanity? 

When the games begin, Katniss creates emotional distance by treating the career tributes—those who train from a young age for the hunger games—differently from those who were forced into the games against their will. But in the end, it comes down to Katniss and Peeta, the closest of her competitors. She can’t bring herself to kill him…but the game makers give her no choice.

At the beginning, readers are drawn into an exciting world where humans battle to save their desolate planet from an alien race. But in typical Brandon Sanderson fashion, good and evil are not clear-cut, and the conflict soon grows far more complex. 

As the series progresses, the main character, Spensa, discovers that the battle for her planet is not as straightforward as she had once thought, and that the aliens she had fought were neither uniform nor uniformly evil. When she infiltrates an alien homeland in Book 2, Spensa is forced to question her original assumptions about who deserves to be saved—not just humans, but maybe also some alien races and even artificially intelligent beings. 

Ender’s Game follows the development of a young genius as he learns to fight the alien race threatening humanity. As he advances through the ranks, Ender begins to fight in battle simulations with the help of his team. 

But when he wins a major battle, he learns the simulations were real, and he has now destroyed the alien race. This horrifies him, and readers are left grappling with the moral question of what it means for Ender that he has participated in such large-scale slaughter without knowing what he was doing.