The best young adult books about secrets

This book is the ultimate trickster tale. I fell in love with the book (and the whole series) when I realized that Megan Whalen Turner is an expert at creating unreliable narrators: storytellers who either can’t see the truth or intentionally hide the truth. (I won’t tell you which it is for The Thief!) At the end of the book, everything is turned on its head, and the first thing you want to do is go back to the beginning and read it all over to figure out how you missed it! The Thief’s secret is a stunner.

You might know the movie by Miyazaki, but Wynne Jones’s book is wonderful on its own terms – and kind of different (Miyazaki took some intriguing liberties). There are three main characters in this book, and all three of them are keeping secrets – in some cases because magic is keeping them silent! I first read this book long ago, and I return to it whenever I want to visit the strange but familiar landscape in which an old lady (who is really a young girl) can be friends with a fire demon.

Akata Witch has a magic system like no other. Reading this book made me rethink the “rules” of magic systems in fantasy fiction. The weirdness, the silliness, the insects! Okorafor has also found a way to think about identity in magic (there’s the secret) that is both profound and fun.

This book (and the series it’s a part of) utterly changed my understanding of fantasy writing. I realized that fantasy could take on big issues – and contemporary ones – by describing made-up worlds and fairly narrow lives. The “secret” in this story, stretching a bit, is the world itself, which is kept secret from the book’s protagonist, Tenar. The labyrinth that she lives in is her destined place, but she has the wisdom and grace to not only save someone who has landed in it, but to find her way out of it herself. 

This book is for slightly younger readers, but I think it has genuine multi-generational appeal. I read it aloud to my eight-year-old, who laughed aloud and loved it – in fact, it was the first read-aloud chapter book that he stuck with. And his grandmother is also reading and loving it! Astrid has the feel of a classic, with its humor and its gentle wisdom. Though it’s a story about a feisty girl who loves sledding, it’s also a story about how someone you love can keep a hurtful secret. How does one forgive such a thing? Astrid figures it out.