Book Riot | 10.06.2026 16:00
Young adult literature–YA lit–came into the 21st century on a high note. Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Walter Dean Myers’s Monster, and Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower all published in 1999. Many of the authors we’ve come to know and associate with YA, including Sharon Flake, Jacqueline Woodson, and Sarah Dessen, were establishing their careers before the calendar brought us into the 2000s. But the 2000s have been an era when YA books have grown not only in quantity but also in quality. Those early books, alongside the decades of evolution from the “first” of many “first” YA books, helped establish the importance of literature for teen readers.
