Young Adult books to read this Halloween
Once your trick-or-treating is done, you’ve bobbed for all the apples you can handle, and the lights are turned low for the evening, curl up with one of these delightful books perfect to finish off your Halloween reading season with the right spirit. (See what I did there?) And hey, if those bumps in the night end up keeping you awake, you can always keep reading.
It's Halloween, and the best book to feed your Halloween spirit is this wonderful spinoff of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas, which explores Sally's story after the events of the fan-favorite film. Too long was she kept as Dr. Finkelstein's slave, and now that she's the Queen of Halloween Town, she's determined to never go back to a life of captivity. But life as a queen can feel just as confining as a life of captivity, and she yearns for more. When she discovers a door to Dream Town, she thinks she's finally found what she's been looking for. But dreams, for all their worth, can quickly turn into nightmares. And we all know what can go wrong in Halloween Town when a nightmare threatens the holiday worlds of old. —Ben Grange, Amazon Editor
Tigest Girma delivers a delectable debut with Immortal Dark, and if you’re into vampires, romance, murder mysteries and dark academia, you have zero reasons not to pick up this book and dive right in. The first pages of the book draw you right in—get comfy because you might not want to put it down once you’ve started. We begin the story with Kidan Adane, an orphan whose family bloodline is bound to a vampire—and that bond has given her family power. Kidan’s sister goes missing, and she’s convinced their family’s vampire murdered her. To find the answers to her sister’s disappearance, she dives into the deep underbelly of Uxlay University, an institution that, on its surface, is the force that keeps humans and vampires in peaceful coexistence. In the darkness that supports this institution, her suspicions are upended, and she uncovers secrets that could destroy the very fabric of their society. To find the answers she seeks, she might just have to destroy it all. —Ben Grange, Amazon Editor
It doesn’t matter if you’ve read it once, a hundred times, or not at all, Halloween is the absolute perfect time to read (or re-read) the Harry Potter books. This series holds a special place in my heart; I grew up with a reading disorder, and Harry Potter was the book series that taught me that reading can be fun, meaningful, and life-changing. I’m in the stage of life right now where my children get to experience these books for the first time, and it’s almost as good as reading it for the first time myself as a child. If you really need convincing that this is a Halloween book, let me tell you that it’s filled with scenes of floating Jack-O-Lanterns, toads, owls, spiders, witches and warlocks, sinister potions, and magic spells. And if you don’t have time to read it on Halloween night, the movie is a pretty good SparkNotes version. —Ben Grange, Amazon Editor
This gorgeously illustrated graphic novel by author/illustrator duo Jennifer Dugan and Kit Seaton is the perfect book to read during spooky season. We follow Tessa, a werewolf whose pack lives on the outskirts of town and tries to assimilate with humanity as seamlessly as possible. But she has a secret. Well, two secrets, really. One, she’s gay, and has a crush on a mortal girl from school. And two, she doesn’t want to be a werewolf anymore. When she and her crush are alone together, a misunderstanding leads to her shifting into werewolf form in front of this mortal girl, which, naturally, is the wrong thing to do. Tessa seeks out a remedy to her problems by hunting down a group of humans who claim to have a cure for werewolves, but this quickly devolves into trouble as Tessa uncovers the truth—these humans don’t plan to offer a cure, they aim to commit genocide against every werewolf pack in all of New York. Tessa has to warn her pack, but what she doesn’t anticipate is her human friends getting caught in the crossfires of the genocidal maniacs who will stop at nothing to rid the world of werewolves. —Ben Grange, Amazon Editor
A perfect series to jump into since there's no wait for the next book, and the next, and the next. Sixteen-year-old Jacob is living a fairly dull existence until he sees something horrible that he can't believe is real. But Jacob's mind isn't playing tricks on him, and when he travels to a remote island off the coast of Wales what he finds there is more mind-boggling than ever: an orphanage of highly unusual children and their guardian, Miss Peregrine, stuck intentionally in a time loop. A magical and strange blend of fantasy and reality, with antique photographs that Riggs collected adding visual detail to an already intricate story, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is a blockbuster start to a series that captures a reader's attention and doesn't let go. —Seira Wilson, Amazon Editor
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