8 Entertaining YA Books About High School Dances

Theo’s friend group is all about the dares: eating three packets of Sriracha hot sauce with no water, singing Mariah Carey at lunch, running naked through the quad. So when Theo’s friend dares him to ask his crush, Christian, to prom, Theo’s got no choice, he has to do it.

Theo’s first attempt is an epic fail, but it’s nothing compared to what happens during his second attempt at a classmate’s house party. Embarrassed, Theo retreats to an upstairs bedroom to recover, where he finds he’s not the only one seeking a hiding place.

It’s not long before the group hiding in the upstairs bedroom forms a sort of band of misfits, talking, swapping horror stories, and playing games as their classmates party below. The bond these teens form leads to new friendships, new dares, and an unexpected but much happier end of the year than they had expected.

Theo’s voice is fresh and likable, and we really appreciated the realistic nature of the dialogue and experiences: these sounded like real teens battling real problems. The book is open and honest about the many ways all teenagers struggle to figure out the larger world of sex and relationships, something we think many students would find helpful.

The Lovett High competition for Homecoming Queen is tense this year: Nova Albright intends to be her Southern school’s first Black Queen. Tinsley McArthur, however, is determined to continue her family’s long standing tradition of winning the crown, a big deal in her family and community.

When Nova wins, Tinsley gets drunk with a few friends and makes some ugly comments about Nova, which one of Tinsley’s “friends” records and posts online. The next morning, Nova is found dead in a local slave cemetery she had been working to restore (and which Tinsley mentioned in her racist rant). Naturally, Tinsley is the prime suspect and the focus of Internet vitriol.

The thing is, though . . . Tinsley (probably?) didn’t do it. The story alternates between two points of view: Tinsley and Duchess, Nova’s best friend. Duchess’s dad is on the local police force, and Duchess is frustrated that despite being Black, he’s letting the privileged Tinsley get away with murder. So she decides to start her own investigation, only to discover just how much about Nova’s life she didn’t know. When Tinsley approaches her, desperate to defend herself, the two girls reluctantly join forces to figure out what really happened to Nova.

As they investigate, Tinsley is forced to confront the prejudices she’s learned from her community, and her family in particular, which gives the novel a level of depth as we watch her and Duchess navigate their new relationship. But it’s also a really twisty mystery. We didn’t want to put it down until we knew what happened to Nova, and we think a wide variety of students will be equally intrigued.

One of Steph’s AP Lit students recommended this one while we were reading Pride and Prejudice in class, and since we’re always looking for a good Jane Austen adaptation (our adult favorites include Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible, Sonali Dev’s series about the Raje family, and Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last), we had to check it out.

Lizzie Bennet is a student at the prestigious Longbourn Academy, where she faces bullying for her scholarship status. Prom at Longbourn is a big deal: it’s all about the designer dresses, expensive shoes, and wealthy dates from Pemberley, the private boys’ school next door.

Lizzie’s roommate Jane is falling in love with Charles Bingley (from Pemberley, of course), forcing Lizzie to spend way too much time with Charles’s obnoxious sister and snooty friend Will Darcy. After making a snarky comment about Lizzie’s scholarship status, Will keeps showing up everywhere Lizzie goes, and she hates it. But, of course, not all is as it seems, and first impressions can be deceiving.

This is a cute and frothy love story that many students will likely enjoy, though its appeal largely comes from its retelling of Austen’s classic, so we’re not sure we would use it for First Chapter Friday in a class that hasn’t read the original. But if you do teach Pride and Prejudice, it’s a lot of fun to trace the characters and events from the original as Eulberg adapts them to the private boarding school setting.

When we meet Sky Baker, he’s living with his best friend Bree after his mother kicked him out of the house for being gay, and he and Bree are eagerly planning his promposal to Ali. Sky’s not even sure Ali is gay, but he’s decided to go for it (who could resist those eyebrows, after all?).

But when someone emails the whole school a picture of Sky’s promposal brainstorm along with a picture of Sky and Ali tagged with both racist and homophobic slurs, Sky is humiliated. When he finally stops hiding in his basement bedroom, however, he learns that most of the school is on his side, and he has a big group of friends eager to help him discover who sent the email.

As much as we feel for Sky in his humiliation, we love the friends who come around him and support him, letting him know he’s not alone. The struggle to belong is a common part of the high school experience, one that is heightened when students like Sky and his friends are different from their peers in a variety of ways, and it’s heartwarming to see these students find their tribe. The novel also takes on a hopeful tone as we see the majority of the school come around and support Sky rather than furthering his embarrassment.

If you’re considering using this for First Chapter Friday, make sure to read the first chapter ahead of time: the book as a whole doesn’t have sex scenes, but the first chapter mentions masturbation a couple times, which won’t work in some classrooms.

It was a little painful for us to read a Back to the Future-esque novel in which the protagonist goes back to . . . the 90s (cringe), but given the popularity of the 90s among our students, we think they’d love this one (and, let’s be honest, we enjoyed the nostalgia, too).

Sam has no interest in the clichéd high school traditions her mother Priscilla, a former high school cheerleader and first-generation Korean American, values, and when Sam’s grandmother ends up in a coma, her fraught relationship with her mom comes to a head, the two of them screaming hurtful things at one another in a mall parking lot. When Sam’s mother leaves, Sam orders a ride from an app, but when her driver, Marge, drops her off, she has somehow ended up in the 1990s, enrolled in high school alongside her mother.

Sam believes she is there to help her mother win Homecoming Queen and repair her relationship with Sam’s grandmother, so she dives wholeheartedly into the project (despite it being rather awkward that the new girl has decided to take on Priscilla’s campaign). As Sam spends more and more time with Priscilla, she realizes her mother’s relationship with her grandmother is far different from her own relationship with her grandmother, and Priscilla faces a lot of casual racism and pressure to fit in, laying the groundwork for an improved relationship if Sam is ever able to return home.

When Sam meets Jamie, however, she’s not entirely sure she wants to return home, especially when she’s been feeling doubt over her current relationship back in the 2020s.

Sam is strong and likable, and we enjoyed spending time with her. It was interesting to reflect on how much high school has changed since we were high school students ourselves, and the novel gave us a window into the racism, macro and micro, that our Asian American students face. At its heart, though, this is a family story, and it’s heartwarming to see the relationship between Sam, her mother, and her grandmother heal in unexpected ways.

Jackson’s homage to Steven King’s Carrie was a delight to read. It’s all there: the bullying, the telekinesis, the creepily oppressive parent, the bucket of blood, the pity-date to the school dance, the bully with a change of heart. And yet Jackson adds a rich layer to the familiar story by making the protagonist, Maddy, a biracial teenager who has been passing for white in her conservative Southern town until she gets caught in a rainstorm and her impeccably straightened hair returns to its natural state, revealing her secret to everyone.

As the novel continues, the students at Maddy’s high school are forced to grapple with the town’s history with racism: Maddy wonders about the mysterious skills she is developing and her mother, who left years ago, Kendrick (the star football player accepted by the popular white students) and his sister, who started her school’s Black Student Union; the white students desperate to keep their proms segregated; the white girl who develops a conscience about the way she and her classmates are behaving; the Black students trying to navigate life in this town. The wide variety of perspectives allows Jackson to explore racial issues in a way that, while clearly exaggerated, still rings uncomfortably plausible.

At its heart, however, the novel is a paranormal thriller, and it’s really good. The novel’s structure is based around a series of podcast episodes, trying to determine what really happened at the prom night massacre in the small town of Springville, Georgia, and as we learn the story from multiple characters’ perspectives, we, too, really want to know what happens and why. The novel kept us turning pages until the exciting end.

Liz Lighty has never really felt like she fits in at her midwestern high school; after all, she’s Black, poor, and kind of awkward. Her mother died of sickle cell anemia, and her younger brother also has the disease. Her dream is to attend Pennington College on a music scholarship while beginning her path towards becoming a doctor, but when she doesn’t get the scholarship, she’s devastated.

Then Liz remembers that whoever wins the competition for prom king and queen also wins a scholarship, so despite her usual determination to stay out of the spotlight (and off her school’s social media app), Liz decides to leave her comfort zone and run for prom queen. If it gets her into Pennington, it’s worth it, right? 

Over the course of the campaign, Liz is torn between letting her friend (and campaign manager) shape her into someone she’s not, just to win the competition (which also involves letting everyone think she’s dating her former childhood best friend), and being her real self. When she starts to fall for Mack, the new girl at her school, this conflict becomes even sharper since she’s afraid her school won’t accept her at all if they find out she’s gay.

It’s hard not to root for Liz as she navigates the murky waters of high school, especially high school in the days of social media, and we think many of your students will relate to Liz’s struggle to muster up the bravery required to be her true self, regardless of the consequences.

Harriet Douglass grew up on a plantation in Louisiana that her parents transformed into one of the South’s few enslaved people’s museums. She loves the work they do, but she’s also been filled with so much anger ever since her mother died of cancer, and her temper gets her into trouble when tourists make insensitive comments.

So when Harriet finds out that the plantation next door has been purchased by Claudia Hartwell, who plans to turn it into a wedding venue for two Hollywood stars, she is livid and determined to hate Claudia’s daughter Layla, a social media influencer from California who will be attending her private school.

And yet when Harriet meets Layla (amidst a confrontation with their history teacher that gets Harriet suspended), Layla turns out not to be as bad as she expected, especially since she is not onboard with her mother’s plans. As the two girls plot to take down the wedding venue, they begin to form a friendship, one that falls apart when Layla gets cold feet and Harriet finds out her school’s prom will be at the plantation.

There were so many things we liked about this book. We learned a lot about the South’s uncomfortable relationship with its old plantations and what it’s like to live in a community that glamorizes homes where your ancestors were treated as less than human. We also felt for Harriet as she struggled to navigate her anger and grief alongside her grieving father, and we rooted for her as she struggled to trust her classmates who, it turns out, want to be her allies but make a lot of mistakes along the way.

Despite the hopelessness Harriet feels in the face of her efforts to cancel the plantation next door, she ultimately learns that she has a voice and using it does make a difference, even if it’s not in the ways she expected it to.