A Reading Guide
Best Sapphic YA Books
Ten young adult novels where girls who love girls get the story, not the subplot.
Young adult fiction has quietly become one of the best places to find sapphic stories. Where an earlier generation of queer readers had to decode subtext, YA shelves now hold whole love stories — awkward, earnest, occasionally heartbreaking — with two girls at the center and no apology attached.
These ten span contemporary romance, fantasy, mystery, horror, and historical fiction. Some are funny, some are sad, and a couple are genuinely frightening. All of them are books you can hand to a teenager — or pick up at forty without feeling like you've wandered into the wrong section.
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Start here
The essential four
Malinda Lo — Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021). San Francisco's Chinatown, 1954. A Chinese-American girl discovers the Telegraph Club and, with it, the word for what she feels. A National Book Award winner, and the rare historical YA that treats its period as lived-in rather than scenic.Find Last Night at the Telegraph Club on Amazon →
Malinda Lo — Ash (2009). The Cinderella retelling that opened a door. An orphaned girl, a fairy bargain, a huntress instead of a prince. Fifteen years on it still reads like the first time someone told you the story could go that way.Find Ash on Amazon →
Sonora Reyes — The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School (2022). A Mexican-American girl starts at a Catholic school with one rule: don't let anyone find out she's gay. Warm, sharp, and funnier than its premise sounds — the title is earned.Find The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School on Amazon →
Kelly Quindlen — She Drives Me Crazy (2021). A basketball rivalry, a fake-dating scheme, and a cheerleader who is not nearly as straight as advertised. Pure rom-com comfort, executed with total sincerity.Find She Drives Me Crazy on Amazon →
More shelves
Six more worth the library card
Adiba Jaigirdar — The Henna Wars (2020). Two girls run rival henna businesses for a school competition and fall for each other somewhere between the pitches. A Bangladeshi-Irish love story about family, appropriation, and first love.Find The Henna Wars on Amazon →
Sara Farizan — If You Could Be Mine (2013). In Tehran, two girls are in love in a country where that is impossible — until one of them considers the one loophole the law offers. Devastating, and unlike anything else on this list.Find If You Could Be Mine on Amazon →
Nina LaCour — We Are Okay (2017). A girl alone in a snowed-in college dorm over Christmas, and the best friend she left behind in California. Grief and first love in the quietest, most beautiful register — a Printz Award winner.Find We Are Okay on Amazon →
Amelinda Bérubé — The Dark Beneath the Ice (2018). A former dancer is being haunted — or losing her mind — and the only person who believes her is the strange girl from school. Queer horror with a genuinely unnerving haunting at its core.Find The Dark Beneath the Ice on Amazon →
Nina Varela — Crier's War (2019). A human girl is gifted to the ruling android princess as a servant, sent there to kill her. Enemies-to-lovers fantasy with actual stakes, and the rare slow burn that earns the burn.Find Crier's War on Amazon →
Kit Frick — I Killed Zoe Spanos (2020). A girl arrives in the Hamptons and keeps recognizing places from a podcast about a missing local girl — a girl she's never met. A mystery told through podcasts and unreliable memory.Find I Killed Zoe Spanos on Amazon →
From this shelf
Aging out of YA?
The thing YA trains you to want — best friends, slow burn, two women who know each other too well — doesn't disappear when the characters get older. If what you love in these books is the friends-to-lovers ache, Laura Chambers Is the Apocalypse in a Sweater is where it goes next: a contemporary sapphic romance for readers who grew up on YA and kept reading.
Laura Chambers Is the Apocalypse in a Sweater
A quiet archaeology student, a disruptive urban planner, and a library table that becomes the beginning of everything.
Laura Chambers Is the Apocalypse in a Sweater
by Aaron D. Stott
A quiet archaeology student, a disruptive urban planner, and a library table that becomes the beginning of everything.
Read the first chapter →