Which College-Based YA Should You Bring with You Freshman Year?

When you think of YA books, you most likely think of high school. But these awesome books, which take place either the summer before or during freshman year of college, prove that YA lovers want to read college stories, too!

After all, what’s a more perfect time to explore your identity than when you’ve left home for the first time? There aren’t many college YA titles out there, but you should definitely add these to your summer reading list and bring them with you freshman year.

Freshmen

By Tom Ellen, Lucy Ivison

Edgy and endlessly funny, Freshmen follows Phoebe and Luke, two former high school sweethearts about to embark on their freshman year as best friends (for now). But when members of Luke’s soccer team send out compromising leaked photos of female students, the women saddle up to shut down the site and take down the team. Things got just a lot more complicated for Phoebe and Luke.

Neverworld Wake

By Marisha Pessl

All six former friends in this book have graduated from high school and are ready to embark on a major summer reunion. The novel takes place one year after Beatrice Hartley has graduated from Darrow-Harker School, where she and her posse were the cool, beautiful kids everyone wanted to be. But now Beatrice and her former besties are grieving the loss of their friend Jim. The group is splintered, and dark secrets are slowly coming to the surface. It’s an edgy book with a slightly older feel and a nightmarish jigsaw puzzle you’ll want to revisit again and again.

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If you add any college YA to your list, make sure that Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl is included! It’s the story of Cath, a freshman at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, who’s having a difficult time adjusting to college. She’s dealing with some serious social anxiety, and it doesn’t help that her twin sister, Wren, is more outgoing, her new roommate is super unfriendly, and her professor just gave her an F for turning in fan fiction for her latest assignment. Cath copes by immersing herself in the world of fan fiction, where she is an award-winning author and has thousands of loyal followers. Otherwise, she’s totally out of her comfort zone and her element. Can she survive this massive life change and find a way to tell her own stories?

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No one understands angst quite like Jenny Han. In this third and final installment in the Summer series, Belly and Jeremiah are attending the same college, although their happy ever after isn’t going quite as well as Belly expected. To make matters more complicated, a part of her is still pining over Conrad, even though he told her to choose Jeremiah over him. But when Jeremiah makes the worst mistake possible, Belly has to decide whether their relationship was really true love after all. Bring tissues for this title, because you’ll be doing plenty of crying! But make sure to read the other two books in the series first, as you’ll get to experience just how much Belly has changed and matured since that first fateful summer.

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Equal parts hilarious and heartwarming, Gloria Chao’s YA debut is told through the eyes of Mei, a brilliant seventeen-year-old Taiwanese American student who is starting her freshman year at MIT. Mei’s parents want her to become a doctor more than anything, but she hasn’t let them in on a little secret: she’s totally afraid of germs, and she isn’t a big fan of biology. Oh, and she’s crushing hard on her classmate Darren, who is not Taiwanese and is therefore not parent-approved.

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After receiving a coveted scholarship in exchange for a fraternity exposé, feminist Cassie Davis goes undercover, rushes her school’s chapter of Delta Tau Chi, and becomes the first woman ever to be accepted into a frat, for better or for worse. Things get sticky when she starts to fall for one of her pledge brothers and realizes that the men she’s been lying to might not be her enemies after all.

What book did you read freshman year that spoke to your college experience? Let us know in the comments!

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Aug 8, 2018

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Which College-Based YA Should You Bring with You Freshman Year?

When you think of YA books, you most likely think of high school. But these awesome books, which take place either the summer before or during freshman year of college, prove that YA lovers want to read college stories, too!

Freshmen

By Tom Ellen, Lucy Ivison

Neverworld Wake

By Marisha Pessl

By

By

By

By

What book did you read freshman year that spoke to your college experience? Let us know in the comments!

Join the conversation

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