A way to talk about someone who is sick

Critic Lisa Birger recommends eight young adult books that help teenagers (and not only!) survive difficult experiences: from war and PTSD to sexualized violence and death

This spring, the publishing house Meduza published its first book for teenagers - Natalia Krupenina’s novel “I Can Fall.” It's about a high school girl who becomes a volunteer in an organization that helps transport refugees from war zones. The world of Krupenina’s story is both “ours” and not quite, in it the signs of everyday reality coexist with fantasy elements: here they do not attack, but launch a War Machine, all people have types, for example, a dragon or a fairy, and familiar countries are called and look a little differently. But still, the main character remains in the center, her life, growing up, and everyday experiences. All these are signs of young adult prose: simultaneous fantasy and extreme realism; the ability to talk about difficult and complex things without losing a child's perspective; an experience of rethinking values ​​that not only teenagers can experience.

And yet, defining young adult as a genre is not so simple. These are books for teenagers, but adults enjoy reading them. These are stories of growing up, but the experiences of their characters can hardly be called universal. First of all, this is a way to talk about the sick, sometimes even forbidden, through a vivid plot and incredible adventures. And young adult is the most successful genre of the last decade and at the same time a phrase that, after the “publisher case” in 2025, turned out to be almost illegal in Russia.

From the huge variety of young adult literature, critic Lisa Birger has chosen eight books with which to start getting acquainted with the genre.

Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The Perks of Being a Wallflower , 1999

In Russian - publishing house "Azbuka", 2022

Teenagers of the 2000s learned to read thanks to Harry Potter, only to grow up and read this particular book: about a boy in high school, quiet and introverted, who finds himself in a new company after the death of his best friend, and then it turns out that his past contains even worse traumas. Its author, Stephen Chbosky, has only two books, and they were written 20 years apart, “The Quiet One” and the mystical thriller for teenagers “Imaginary Friend.” His main job is as a screenwriter, he is the author of the prematurely closed and quite cult post-apocalyptic series “Jericho” in the 2000s, and Chbosky also wrote scripts for the films “Miracle”, “La Bohème” and “Grannies”. The novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower and the film of the same name starring Emma Watson and Ezra Miller, released in 2012, remain his best-known works.

Perhaps the point is in simultaneously ignoring all possible prohibitions: Chbosky wrote the novel in letters, when it still seemed that no one had read them since the nineteenth century. And he wasn’t afraid of any triggers: sexualized violence, death, PTSD, LGBT characters and mentions of illegal substances. So, obviously, teenagers continue to consider this book one of the rare stories that truthfully depicts the difficulties of growing up, and adults continue to ban it - in America it is regularly included in the ten most banned books of the American Library Association, in Belarus it has been on the list of banned books since 2025, and in Russia it is not easy to find.

John Green, "The Fault in Our Stars"

The Fault in Our Stars , 2012

In Russian - AST publishing house, 2013

“The Fault in Our Stars” is the most successful novel by John Green, known for his fearlessness in dealing with difficult topics and his description of troubled teenagers: in the novel “Looking for Alaska” he openly talks about the possible suicide of the main character, in “Turtles to Infinity” he describes a girl with OCD. It was John Green's novels that finally lifted the ban on death in teenage books. But he needs the proximity of death not for sentimentality, not for emotional games with readers, but as a tool that demonstrates the ultimate, universality of teenage experience. His characters live sincerely, with open curiosity about everything around them and live through every experience as if it were the last time, precisely because they know that no growing up may happen to them.

This is how “The Fault in Our Stars” works - the story of characters who met in a support group for teenagers with cancer and lived a short, bright romance. They exchange their favorite books, go to Amsterdam, kiss in the Anne Frank Museum and all this time they talk, think and write to each other about the meaning of life - and not once do these conversations look deliberate in Greene. The novel is dedicated to the memory of Esther Earle, an American online activist and friend of John Green, who died of cancer at age 16.

Daria Dotsuk, “The Voice”

Publishing house "Samokat", 2017

Following the dawn of American young adult, the dawn of the Russian-language version of the genre would inevitably come - but its ability to talk about complex topics directly and bluntly was quickly cut off by Russian legislation. All the more valuable are the books where this happened. For example, “The Jester's Cap” by Daria Wilke, a rare book in Russian about the life of an LGBT teenager, or “The Voice” by Daria Dotsuk about a teenager with post-traumatic stress disorder.

The heroine of “The Voice,” high school student Sasha, cannot get rid of panic attacks after surviving a terrorist attack in the Moscow metro. The pills don’t help, and her mother sends her to Kaliningrad to live with her grandmother for the summer. At her grandmother's, Sasha enjoys the warmth and comfort of her home, begins going to the local book club, and eventually finds herself able to find her voice. “The Voice” is one of the first and still few books in the Russian space that talks about PTSD at a young age, talks about mental disorders without stigma and instills faith in a possible cure.

Mikita Franko, "Days of Our Lives"

Popcorn Books, 2020

One of the main bestsellers of the 2020s, it was finally banned in Russia in 2025 for “propaganda of LGBT ideology.” Mikita Franko's book was born from a closed blog on VKontakte, where she described the daily life of a child growing up in a same-sex family. This is how the story of Mik appeared - a boy who grows up in a Russian province, goes to a regular school, only he has two dads.

Of all the books on this list, Days of Our Lives is the least catastrophic - no one deals with complex themes, there is no illness or death, there is not even a fantasy setting. In Russia in 2020, the very possibility of a calm conversation about the life of an LGBT family seemed fantastic. The hostility of the surrounding world towards families and heroes unlike itself, of course, no longer needed description, but the book also managed to show how universal the experience of growing up is, how important it is to realize and try to understand what is happening to you personally, how a variety of teenagers find themselves united by common global issues.

Olga Ptitseva, “Where the wormwood blooms”

Popcorn Books, 2022

Olga Ptitseva is one of the most successful young adult authors in modern Russia, one of the few who managed to combine a fantasy plot with a Russian setting. The heroine of her novel, Ulyana, an ordinary high school student, once smelled wormwood on the street. This happened at the moment when her younger brother died under the wheels of a truck. Since then, Ulyana sees death in the eyes of others. She leaves home and wanders around communal apartments and trains until she discovers that she is not alone.

In 2023, a series of the same name was released based on the book, but Olga Ptitseva’s novels remain much more famous. It seems that her main secret is in direct communication with the reader. She can paint with thick colors an urban fantasy with unpleasant and scary details, a gray dull life, a metaphor for depression, loneliness and loss - and then next to it depict a magic door with a golden key, from which a weak light of hope shines - by the way, with each new book it becomes less and less weak, despite what is happening around.

Artem Roganov, “As Heard”

Publishing house "Samokat", 2023

The debut novel of the editor-in-chief of the online teenage magazine Lift took first place in the Youth category of the Yasnaya Polyana Prize in 2024. Like many young adult texts, this novel is not only an account of the universal teenage experience, but also an attempt to understand one's own feelings about time and one's place in it.

The main character Gleb is sixteen years old, he is an excellent student and an athlete, and everything is fine with him, but he is haunted by sounds, sometimes too loud, even painful. It is noisy not only inside - in the surrounding world of the early 2000s, with its extreme tension, there is also noise: other people’s desires and fears, the hum of the voices of adults, quarrels between parents separated due to political differences. Roganov managed to find an almost perfect metaphor for this broken world - an intrusive external presence from which it is impossible to hide anywhere.

Nastya Ryabtseva, “Grisha is not a witness”

Publishing house "Samokat", 2023

Nastya Ryabtseva changed many professions, was a PR woman, came up with advertising for big brands, and then went to an NGO, collected stories of people who needed help for “Such Things”, and was involved in fundraising. In 2022, she left Russia for Israel and founded the Wild Walks project (today it is called the Walks) to support teenagers in exile.

Ryabtseva also began writing the book “Grisha is not a Witness” after leaving and she herself says that it helped her find meaning. The story of a fourteen-year-old invisible boy who remains a witness to life for a long time, and then decides to become a participant in it and stand up for the victims of school bullying, really seems very saving. Not least because it is written in rhyme: the poetic rhythm helps to see the story and all its characters in their true light.

Sania Bikkina, "Displaced"

Publishing house "White Crow / Albus Corvus", 2024

Sania Bikkina is a practicing psychologist who worked in a refugee camp for the first year and a half of the great war between Russia and Ukraine. And the heroine of her book, Adelia, together with her father found herself in a center for displaced persons in a foreign country - also after the start of the war, although neither the country nor the war are named in the book. And now she, slowly recovering from an old trauma, must find meaning in a life that seems cruel and unfair.

Sania Bikkina’s book was included in the shortlist for the “Youth” nomination of the “Yasnaya Polyana - 2025” award and, in general, remains one of the few modern books that can explain the present time and the depth of the trauma that thousands of people are simultaneously experiencing, without going deeply into the political context of the disaster.

Lisa Birger