Subreddit

Top books from r/YAlit

A community discussing young adult books, publishing trends, age categories, adaptations, long-running fandoms, and the blurred border with middle grade and adult crossover fiction.

Updated September 2026 — rankings refresh with each new pull of comment data.

153

Books ranked

33,212

Published mentions

sum of exact per-book subreddit rows

—

Members

Years tracked

About this ranking

r/YAlit's 2026 ranking doubles as an argument about what YA means. The Hunger Games dominates with 278 mentions, followed by Six of Crows (147), A Court of Thorns and Roses (94), Fourth Wing (80), and Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (71). Only the first two are clean current YA signals: ACOTAR and Fourth Wing are adult crossover fantasy, while early Harry Potter is middle grade. Compared with r/RomanceBooks, the same romantasy titles appear here as cultural and shelving disputes rather than straightforward genre fits. Counts capture those disputes alongside recommendations, making classification part of the page rather than quietly turning every popular title into YA.

By year

2026 2025 2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019

Most-mentioned in r/YAlit

Ordered by tracked mention count across all published years. Sentiment is shown as context and does not change the order. The Upvotes toggle re-sorts by comment-score weight — display only, the canonical order stays mention-count.

Sort by upvotes = sum of comment scores on recognized mentions

A Court of Thorns and Roses

Sarah J. Maas

Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, gets dragged into the faerie lands as payment, and spends five books choosing a court.

5,706 in this sub Not scored

Six of Crows

Leigh Bardugo

Kaz Brekker recruits five other criminal teenagers for a heist inside a supposedly impenetrable ice fortress.

4,418 in this sub positive

The Hunger Games

Suzanne Collins

A teenage girl volunteers to fight to the death on live television in place of her younger sister, then spends three books resisting everyone who wants to make her a symbol.

2,862 in this sub positive

Throne of Glass

Sarah J. Maas

A teenage assassin is pulled out of a slave-labor camp and entered in a kingdom's brutal death-match tournament to win her freedom.

2,694 in this sub mixed

The Lightning Thief

Rick Riordan

A twelve-year-old with ADHD and dyslexia finds out both are demigod traits, then gets ten days to stop a war between Greek gods he didn't know were real.

1,912 in this sub Not scored

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

J. K. Rowling

An eleven-year-old orphan gets a letter, a train platform that shouldn't exist, and a scar that makes him famous for something he can't remember.

1,739 in this sub Not scored

Fourth Wing

Rebecca Yarros

A war college trains dragon riders by letting classmates kill the weak ones off, and the heroine's body was built for neither a dragon nor a sword.

980 in this sub Not scored

The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller

Patroclus, exiled and overlooked, grows up shadowing Achilles and follows him to Troy already knowing how the war ends for them.

783 in this sub Not scored

Mistborn: The Final Empire

Brandon Sanderson

A street thief who can swallow metal and burn it for power gets recruited into a heist crew whose actual target is the immortal emperor who's ruled for a thousand years.

727 in this sub Not scored

#10

Red Rising

Pierce Brown

A low-caste miner surgically altered to pass as the ruling elite infiltrates the academy that killed his wife, planning to burn the system down from inside.

655 in this sub Not scored

#11

The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern

Two magicians raised from childhood for a duel to the death disguise the fight as a circus that only opens after dark.

650 in this sub Not scored

#12

Spinning Silver

Naomi Novik

A moneylender's daughter out-bargains a winter king to save her family, in a Rumpelstiltskin retelling with a Jewish heroine at its center.

587 in this sub Not scored

#13

The Poppy War

R. F. Kuang

A dark-skinned war orphan tests into an elite military academy, discovers she can channel a fire god, and burns her way toward genocide.

581 in this sub Not scored

#14

The Bear and the Nightingale

Katherine Arden

A girl in medieval Russia keeps the household spirits fed with scraps of bread while a priest convinces her village those same spirits are demons.

536 in this sub Not scored

#15

Circe

Madeline Miller

Exiled to an empty island for turning a rival into a monster, a minor goddess spends immortality perfecting the one power the gods never bothered to master.

474 in this sub Not scored

#16

Northern Lights

Philip Pullman

A girl crosses into other worlds with a truth-telling compass and a soul that lives outside her body as a shape-shifting animal.

461 in this sub Not scored

#17

Uprooted

Naomi Novik

A village girl is taken by an ancient wizard as tribute every ten years, until the year his choice turns out to be a mistake he can't undo.

461 in this sub Not scored

#18

The House in the Cerulean Sea

TJ Klune

A caseworker is sent to inspect an orphanage of six dangerous magical children, one of them the literal Antichrist, and has to decide whether to file the report that shuts it down.

445 in this sub Not scored

#19

The Priory of the Orange Tree

Samantha Shannon

A queen who cannot risk a female heir, a dragon rider guarding a strait, and an outlawed mage protecting her in secret all move toward the same sleeping fire-breather.

415 in this sub Not scored

#20

The Lord of the Rings

J. R. R. Tolkien

A gardener and three friends carry a cursed ring across a continent at war, because the only way to destroy it is to walk it into the volcano that forged it.

294 in this sub Not scored

#21

The Book Thief

Markus Zusak

A girl in Nazi Germany steals books while Death narrates, and it's become r/suggestmeabook's default answer to almost any request for something sad.

261 in this sub Not scored

#22

The Way of Kings

Brandon Sanderson

A bridgeman slave carries spears through a warzone he's not allowed to fight in, until he decides to become the soldier no one will follow.

245 in this sub Not scored

#23

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Taylor Jenkins Reid

A reclusive Old Hollywood icon finally agrees to tell her real story, husband by husband, but insists on giving it only to an unknown magazine writer.

238 in this sub positive

#24

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen

A prideful landowner insults a woman at a dance, then spends the rest of the book making it up to her.

217 in this sub Not scored

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