Cary Library's Best Books of 2023 - For Teens

After spending six months in a juvenile detention center for a crime he did not commit, seventeen-year-old Andre Jackson returns home and tries to adapt to a Covid-19 world and find his missing best friend. Life can change in an instant. When you're wrongfully accused of a crime. When a virus shuts everything down. When the girl you love moves on. Andre Jackson is determined to reclaim his identity. But returning from juvie doesn't feel like coming...

Reeling from the death of her cousin, Hannah concocts a risky plan to enroll in her cousin's elite private school and find who gave her the lethal pills, but the deeper Hannah goes the more she risks losing everything.

Eighteen-year-old American, Wren, is stranded in England when news of an impending world-ending comet causes global chaos, but when she meets a runaway prince with an agenda of his own, she realizes he might be her only chance of getting home in time to say goodbye. Wren, an American in London, is at the airport when she helps Theo escape a pack of tourists-- and finds out he is a run-away prince! He owes her a favor, and when news breaks that the...

"2019. Moud is an out gay teen living in Los Angeles with his distant father, Saeed. When Moud gets the news that his grandfather in Iran is dying, he accompanies his dad to Tehran, where the revelation of family secrets will force Moud into a new understanding of his history, his culture, and himself. 1978. Saeed is an engineering student with a promising future ahead of him in Tehran. But when his parents discover his involvement in the country's...

Seventeen-year-old queer adoptee Manny, now homeless, sets out to find his sister Elena, who is still enmeshed in Christ's Dominion, the community that abandoned him, but the journey is fraught with danger, as he is forced to confront the religious trauma from his past. It's been a year since Manny was cast out of his family and driven into the wilderness of the American Southwest. He has survived by following some hard-learned rules-- but now he's...

"Iris opens her eyes to hard truths and the power of her voice when her father dies of AIDS in 1987"--

Told in alternating timelines, seventeen-year-old Daisy and her mother move into her deceased uncle's mansion, only to find horrors waiting inside, and ten years later, Brittney investigates the mystery behind the Miracle Mansion that turned her mother's life around.

Nina LaCour meets Jenny Han in this beautiful and charming story of six moments that lead to two girls, one kiss, and eventually, three little words that were maybe always true. 
After years of bickering, Penny and Tate have called a truce: they’ll play nice. They have to. Their mothers (life-long best friends) need them to be perfect, drama-free daughters when Penny’s mother becomes a living liver donor to Tate’s...

"Since Shelbi enrolled at Windward Academy as a senior and won't be there very long, she hasn't bothered making friends. What her classmates don't know about her can't be used to hurt her--you know, like it did at her last school. Andy Criddle is not okay. At all. He's had far too much to drink. Again. Which is bad. And things are about to get worse. When Shelbi sees Andy at his lowest, she can relate. So she doesn't resist reaching out. And there's...