8 First Chapter Friday Recommendations: Winter Roundup

It’s no secret that despite abundant evidence that reading is good for us, the wide majority of our students don’t read for fun, gravitating toward online media instead. As English teachers, this hurts our hearts, especially since many of us became teachers in hopes of sharing our love of reading with our students. Many of us are introducing some variation of First Chapter Fridays in our classrooms to build excitement around reading, but as busy teachers, keeping up with current YA book trends is not always within our capabilities. Sure, we could Google top YA books or scroll TikTok or Instagram, but we also want to make sure we’re comfortable with the quality, content, and age-appropriateness of books we’re recommending to our students.

Here’s where we come in! As former high school teachers who also love to read, we want to support you by regularly providing First Chapter Friday recommendations we think your students would enjoy and we would feel comfortable suggesting to students in our own classrooms. Today, we’re sharing eight titles we read and enjoyed this winter.

Our First Chapter Friday Recommendations

The Gilded Ones by Namina Forna. At the beginning of this dystopian fantasy novel, 16-year-old Deka undergoes the Rites of Purity in her West African village to ensure her blood is red and thus pure. Already seen as different, Deka’s blood is gold, revealing impurity and threatening her life. She joins an army of girls like her, the alaki, to fight for the emperor and protect their people from deathshrieks, but she soon discovers that things are not as they appear. The novel puts a fresh spin on a popular genre, and we kept eagerly turning pages to find out what happened to Deka and her new friends.

Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao. This was Steph’s favorite of this winter’s titles. In Huaxia, young men rise to fame piloting giant robots called Chrysalises to fight off Hunduns, giant alien creatures. In order to pilot the Chrysalises, however, they must be paired with a young woman who will die as the pilot saps her of the energy needed to power the Chrysalis. After Zetian’s sister dies as one of these concubine-pilots, Zetian is determined to assassinate the pilot responsible for her death. When she does so during battle and emerges unharmed from the cockpit, she is christened the Iron Widow for her ability to not only withstand the drain of energy but also overpower her male partner. Naturally, her society views her as dangerous and pairs her with Li Shimin, a death row inmate and the strongest pilot in Huaxia. We couldn’t put the book down and found the exploration of gender power dynamics thought-provoking.

The Cousins by Karen McManus. Much as we personally love a good mystery, it took the YA world quite a while to develop its own take on the genre. Karen McManus is one of the top YA mystery authors, and The Cousins, in which three cousins who’ve never met are summoned to spend the summer working for their reclusive grandmother only to find that their dysfunctional family has a dark past, is a fun read.

Everything Sad Is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri. In this beautiful and creative autobiographical novel, the narrator (Daniel) tells his classmates the story of his family’s history, including his immediate family’s experience as Iranian refugees. Daniel is a born storyteller, and he weaves his family’s history in with Persian folklore and the tales of Scheherazade, creating a story that is both laugh-out-loud funny and emotionally resonant. It reminded us a lot of Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime but for a younger audience.

As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh. We learned so much from the story of Salama, a Syrian pharmacy student who is pulled into service as, essentially, a doctor due to overwhelming need when the revolution breaks out in Syria. Salama battles PTSD in the form of an imagined figure named Khawf, navigates grief and loss, wrestles with her own feelings about her country and the revolution, and falls in inconveniently-timed love with Kenan, who is struggling to keep his own siblings alive. It’s a moving read that brings to life a part of the world many of us know only from distant news stories.

If You Could See the Sun by Ann Liang. Alice Sun, a student at an elite boarding school in China, discovers that she has the ability to turn invisible, just after her parents tell her they will no longer be able to afford to send her to the school where she is in fierce competition with Henry Li to be the top student in their class. Alice reluctantly turns to Henry for help building an app peers can use to hire the Beijing Ghost to carry out secret tasks. The app takes off but, of course, spins out of control. The story is fresh and interesting, and watching Alice navigate the ethical dilemma she has created for herself as well as her changing relationship with Henry kept us reading through to the satisfying ending, exploring issues of class and equity.

Me (Moth) by Amber McBride. This novel in verse tells the story of Moth, who must navigate the grief she feels after losing her entire family in a car accident. She meets Sani, a Native American who struggles with depression, and they become friends, supporting one another as they work through their emotional pain and find their own identities as two people who don’t always feel they belong. The writing is beautiful, and the ending caught us by surprise.

I Must Betray You by Ruta Septys. Set in 1989 Romania amidst Nicolae Ceausescu’s tyrannical dictatorship, 17-year-old Cristian has been blackmailed by the secret police and forced to become an informant. This is nothing unusual in Ceausescu’s Romania. Friend is turned against friend. Family turned against family. If you weren’t informing on someone (and even if you were), someone was most definitely informing on you. Cristian dreams of exposing the truth of Ceausescu’s regime to the world and when he has the opportunity to join the revolution and fight for change in the country he loves, he can’t turn away. True to Septys’s style, she has presented a thoroughly researched novel. History lovers will enjoy her discussion of interviews and research at the end of the book and will be eager to learn more about this intriguing and heartbreaking time in Romania’s past. 

Sign up for our monthly First Chapter Fridays subscription! Each month, we send out FIVE Nearpods you can assign to your students previewing high-interest, prescreened books. Each Nearpod includes a book trailer, audio excerpt from the first chapter, and three multiple-choice questions. Students can complete the activity at their own pace, making it a no-prep-necessary activity for you! Wondering why we use Nearpod activities? Check out this post.

Not interested in the Nearpod activities? Still sign up! Use the First Chapter Friday recommendations with your preferred FCF method. And if you’re not interested in First Chapter Fridays at all? By signing up, you’ll have a few titles to recommend to your students when they come to you looking for a “good book to read.”

If there’s a title you’d like to see featured in one of our freebie Nearpods or here on the blog, reach out to us at hello@threeheads.works or on Instagram @threeheads.works.