Favorite romance for a teen girl? All my romance reads are a bit too steamy! We've done Twilight already. Any genre is okay. Nothing 400+ pages though, and please easy to read (like lowerish reading level, no Jane Austen).
Emphasis on the romance please.
by BarbaraManatee_14me
17 Comments
Anything Nicola Yoon!!!
I remember reading *The Fault in Our Stars* at that age, it’s pretty good.
Kasie West/Nicola Yoon/Jenny Han/Stephanie Perkins/My Life With the Walter Boys/Tokyo Ever After/I’ll Be the One
Not strictly a romance but the Hunger Games and Divergent have romance plot lines.
The Golden Compass series has an element of a romance plot but it’s not a major part of the story. It’s a little more of the beaten path if you’re trying to not just focus on the big name series.
Pretty sure all the John Green books fit the teen romance bill.
+1 on the John Green rec. *Looking for Alaska* if my fave. He also co -wrote *Will Grayson, Will Grayson* which I might like even better than his solo stuff.
*Eleanor & Par*k by Rainbow Rowell might be worth a look. I appreciated it.
*Last Night at the Telegraph Club* is a queer, historical teen romance set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Pretty good on its own, and maybe great if those are of interest. (One could also read *Crazy Rich Asians* at 15, I think)
For a period piece, maybe *Great and Terrible Beauty* by Libba Bray (though I prefer *Beauty Queens*, it’s not really a romance)
and…. you know, there’s a romance angle to *Hunger Games* if she hasn’t read it
Can she make decisions for herself at the library? That might be the best route.
The House of Night series by PC and Kristen Cast is great. Vampires, witchcraft, and romance galore haha
If fantasy is on the table, I liked the Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy.
And the romance is kind of a side plot, but I love The Inheritance Games as well.
These are dated suggestions, so bear with me:
Although it’s intermediate, I think *Ella Enchanted* would still hold up for a 15 year old.
Tanith Lee’s Claidi Quartet is very readable. As is anything by Tamora Pierce starting with the Alanna books. These are YA Fantasy with romance plots.
Ann Rinaldi’s *Time Enough for Drums* was an absolute favorite of mine at that age. If that’s a hit, she has a lot more where that came from.
My students SWEAR by Leigh Bardugo Grishaverse, but I can’t vouch for her. I do trust these readers, though! Also, *The Summer I Turned Pretty* is a popular one.
A bit different: Swordheart by T. Kingfisher. It’;s funny as well.
The Rat Priest, Gnoles, and the interesting (LOL) experiments to work out how the sword works….
Not too steamy really, there is sex but not excessively and it’s short, a Novella really rather than novel.
Anything by Sarah Dessen! She was my absolute fave at that age. The Truth About Forever is her most popular, I think that’d be a good starting point.
I was around the same age a few years ago and really enjoyed Marissa Meyer’s books. She primarily writes sci fi and her series The Lunar Chronicles is a fairytale reimagining of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Snow White in a futuristic world with cyborgs and a lunar settlement. Romance is a big part of the plot, but isn’t the main focus. Meyer has another series called the Renegades trilogy which is about teens with superpowers in a dystopian world working for secret organizations – romance is once again a major subplot. I’ve only read the first book but my younger sister really enjoyed it too.
I will say that the books are a bit long (400-550 pages) but are very readable in my experience and you can really fly through them!
i really loved the sweep series by cate tiernan when i was her age
The scented court is perfect mild romantasy.
Anything by Sarah Dessen
If I Stay by Gayle Forman
Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell
The Jane and Mary series by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton and Jodi Meadows might interest her. They are fantasy retellings of famous people and works of literature.
The Jane series:
My Lady Jane (retelling of the story of Jane Grey)
My Plain Jane (retelling of Jane Eyre that features Charlotte Bronte as a character)
My Calamity Jane (retelling of the story of Calamity Jane)
The Mary series:
My Contrary Mary (retelling of the story of Mary, Queen of Scots)
My Imaginary Mary (a story about Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary Shelley before she married) and Ada Lovelace)
My Salty Mary (retelling of story of Mary Read combined with the little mermaid)
All of them are pretty much stand alones, though Lady Jane and Contrary Mary I think are written to exist in the same literary universe.