The Colorado Blue Spruce YA Book Award recognizes recently published books that are popular among middle and high schoolers in Colorado. Throughout fall 2025, twelve teams from school and public libraries across the state read multiple books and selected their favorite to nominate. We hope you enjoy reading them, too!
2025-26 Nominees | Readalikes | Past Winners
2025-26 Nominees
Teen groups at school and public libraries across the state nominated these 10 books for award consideration. View their booktalks and vote for your favorite nominee by April 10 HERE!
As the day dawns on the fiftieth annual Hunger Games, fear grips the districts of Panem. This year, in honor of the Quarter Quell, twice as many tributes will be taken from their homes. Back in District 12, Haymitch Abernathy is trying not to think too hard about his chances. All he cares about is making it through the day and being with the girl he loves. When Haymitch's name is called, he can feel all his dreams break. He's torn from his family and his love, shuttled to the Capitol with the three other District 12 tributes: a young friend who's nearly a sister to him, a compulsive oddsmaker, and the most stuck-up girl in town. As the Games begin, Haymitch understands he's been set up to fail. But there's something in him that wants to fight...and have that fight reverberate far beyond the deadly arena.
In Alderland, where Summer magicians defend the nation against Winters brutal reign, Domenic and Ellery become the unprecedented Chosen Two, bonded with the most powerful Summer and first-ever Winter wands, and face a looming cataclysm and the devastating truth that saving their homeland may require one to slay the other.
Exiled to live as a Low, sixteen-year-old Conrad refuses to become heir to his murderous uncle. But Meritocracy is a harsh and unforgiving rule on the floating island of Holmstead, and when his ailing mother is killed by monstrous gorgantauns, Conrad cuts a deal to save the only family he has left. To rescue his sister from his uncle's clutches, Conrad must enter the Selection of the Twelve Trades. Hunter, the deadliest of all the Trades, gains a fresh recruit with Conrad. Now he must endure vigorous training, manipulative peers, and the Gauntlet--a brutal final test that yields riches and status to whichever skyship crew kills the most gorgantauns.
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder (now a hit Netflix series) returns with her first novel for adults: a twisty thriller about a young woman trying to solve her own murder.
A teen girl searches for the truth behind her mother's shocking disappearance and even more shocking reappearance during the filming of a true crime documentary.
On the night before her wedding, 17-year-old Sorel leaps from a window and runs away from her life. To keep from being discovered, she takes on the male identity of Isser Jacobs--but it soon becomes clear that there is a real Isser Jacobs, and people want him dead. Her mistaken identity takes Sorel into the dark underworld of her small city in the Pale of Settlement, where smugglers, forgers, and wicked angels fight for control of the Jewish community. In order to make it out, Sorel must discover who Isser Jacobs really is, and who she wants to be.
After making a cultural blunder at her cousin's wedding, seventeen-year-old Leah travels to China to connect with her roots and winds up falling for a former classmate on the trip, who she previously blamed for ruining her life.
Set in the 1930s to today, [this novel follows] four generations of Filipino American boys [who] grapple with identity, masculinity, and father-son relationships.
Jake volunteers at a nursing home because he likes helping people. He likes skating and singing, playing Bingo and Name That Tune, and reading mysteries and comics aloud to his teachers. He also likes avoiding people his own age... and the cruelty of mirrors... and food. Jake has read about kids like him in books, the weird one, the outsider, and would do anything not to be that kid, including shrink himself down to nothing. But the less he eats, the bigger he feels. How long can Jake punish himself before he truly disappears?
On her senior French trip, seventeen-year-old Ruby follows her classmates into the Paris catacombs to attend an exclusive party, but they quickly become entangled in a sinister pursuit underground and uncover dark secrets about the catacombs and each other.
Enclosed under a vast dome, Snowglobe is the last place on Earth that's warm. Outside Snowglobe is a frozen wasteland, and every day, citizens face the icy world to get to their jobs at the power plant, where they produce the energy Snowglobe needs. Their only solace comes in the form of twenty-four-hour television programming streamed directly from the domed city. The residents of Snowglobe have everything: fame, fortune, and above all, safety from the desolation outside their walls. In exchange, their lives are broadcast to the less fortunate outside, who watch eagerly, hoping for the chance to one day become actors themselves.
Readalike for: Sunrise on the Reaping
Both dystopian novels explore propaganda as a tool of control and feature worlds with many layers and secrets.
Transgender demigod Teo is unexpectedly selected for the Sunbearer Trials, a fierce competition among demigod heroes where the winner sacrifices the loser to Sol, their blood fueling the Sun Stones that protect Reino del Sol.
Readalike for: Sunrise on the Reaping
Both titles include dangerous fight-to-the-death tournaments, explore class differences, and share themes of "things aren't always what they seem."
Told from more than a dozen alternating viewpoints, this spellbinding collection of stories follows eighteen students at the Galileo Academy for the Extraordinary as they each try to solve the murder of a professor, discovering that magic doesn't always play by the rules.
Readalike for: A Fate So Cold
Like A Fate So Cold, this action-packed novel plays with the "chosen one" fantasy trope, includes a unique magic system and detailed world-building, and incorporates a mystery.
For Malik, the Solstasia festival is a chance to escape his war-stricken home and start a new life with his sisters in the prosperous desert city of Ziran. But when a vengeful spirit abducts his younger sister Nadia as payment to enter the city, Malik strikes a fatal deal: kill Karina, crown princess of Ziran, in exchange for Nadia's freedom.
Readalike for: A Fate So Cold
Both dual-perspective fantasies are set in richly detailed worlds, follow two people wrestling with the choice between duty and love, and feature twisty political intrigue.
As a poor teenager living in the Dregs, Dash Keane can only escape his dismal reality by competing in illegal rooftop races and staying up late to watch the timenet with his younger brother. When there is an opportunity to participate in a competition set thousands of years in the past, he uses his rooftop racer skills to catch the eye of Mr. Myrtrym, head of entertainment for the massive Dominus Corporation. It is the chance of a lifetime when Dominus Corp. hires Dash to be a timestar--the focus of his own series in which he must survive some of the most dangerous periods in history, including the Cretaceous period, feudal Japan, the Wild West, and the Golden Age of Piracy.
Readalike for: Sky's End
Both action-packed stories feature deadly competitions, explore class differences, and have unique sci-fi/fantasy settings.
Narra Jal is one of the cursed, cast aside her whole life, considered unlucky. But with her mother's life on the line, she will return to the city where she was born to face the trials: a grueling, bloodthirsty series of challenges designed to select the next ruler of Tigang. Narra has nothing, just her fierce grit and a refusal to accept the destiny she's been handed. Even the intense, dark-eyed Guardian she feels a strangely electric connection with cannot help her. But she'll show everyone what the unlucky can do. Let the bloodbath begin.
Readalike for: Sky's End
Both titles are about main characters who infiltrate deadly competitions in order to protect or avenge a family member, featuring a society that contains layers and mysteries.
Alice is sent back to the night of her sister's murder and has until midnight to figure out who the killer is or risk losing her sister forever.
Readalike for: Not Quite Dead Yet
Both of these murder mysteries kick off on Halloween and feature a unique method of solving the murder, with this book sprinkling in time travel.
Annie Lane wasn't doing much of anything with her young life, but now that she's dead she has a purpose: figure out who murdered her and her best friend and make sure he can never kill anyone else.
Readalike for: Not Quite Dead Yet
In both of these thrillers, a girl must solve her own murder.
As a scholarship student at the prestigious Nithercott School, seventeen-year-old Ife feels like an outcast, but when a missing classmate reappears and acts strange, Ife teams up with two other students to investigate the school's decades-old legend of the Changing Man.
Readalike for: The Reappearance of Rachel Price
Unanswered questions fuel the plot of both twisty thrillers, though The Changing Man leans more into a dark academia setting.
One year after Nan's three best friends disappear, no one is more surprised than her when one of them returns--because she is the one who killed them.
Readalike for: The Reappearance of Rachel Price
Both of these thrillers kick off with the reappearance of a missing person and feature a narrator who only knows half the story.
Historical fantasy about three queer teens and their found family of queer pirates facing down a secret magical society.
Readalike for: The Forbidden Book
Both historical novels explore gender identity and are infused with mystery and supernatural elements, with Devils Like Us delving into a sinister Christian secret society.
Lithuania, 1943. A father drowns in the all-consuming grief of a daughter killed by the Nazis. He can't bring her back. But he can use kishuf, an ancient and profane magic to create an avenging golem in her image. Vera was made for vengeance. She is the Jew that the Nazis cannot kill. But is she more than the wrath that her creator infused within her?
Readalike for: The Forbidden Book
Both of these LGBTQ+ historical fantasies are centered around Jewish mythology.
Sixteen-year-old Bibi Hossain's summer plans for romance take an unexpected turn when her sister gets engaged, sending her to Bangladesh for the wedding, where she experiences major culture shock and a possible romance with the groom's younger brother.
Readalike for: Never Thought I'd End Up Here
In both of these rom-coms, wedding mishaps lead to the main character exploring their cultural heritage in a new country and finding love with a rival.
Stella Chen's life ground to a halt when her brother unexpectedly passed away a year ago. Raised together by their grandmother for years in the Chinese countryside before rejoining their parents in the United States, his absence destroys the connective tissue in her family. With another jarring move her senior year, from rural Illinois to unfamiliar surroundings in San Diego, she is left alone and adrift in her family's suffocating silence and the void of unanswered questions her brother left behind. So when Stella's parents force her to join her estranged childhood friend Alan Zhao for a college tour all over California, Stella dreads it. As this road trip takes Stella and Alan down beautiful coastlines and through fraught family dynamics, Stella can't help but feel the spark of why she and Alan were once so close.
Readalike for: Never Thought I'd End Up Here
Both of these novels feature an enemies-to-lovers romance with an estranged childhood friend and trips with richly detailed settings.
Set against the backdrop of Tehran and Los Angeles, this tale of intergenerational trauma and love is an ode to the fragile bonds of family, the hidden secrets of history, and all the beautiful moments that make us who we are today.
Readalike for: Everything We Never Had
Both novels share stories from multiple people within one family, exploring topics of identity, masculinity, connection, and how experiences from one generation impact the next.
Kiku is on vacation in San Francisco when suddenly she finds herself displaced to the 1940s Japanese-American internment camp that her late grandmother, Ernestina, was forcibly relocated to during World War II. These displacements keep occurring until Kiku finds herself stuck back in time. Living alongside her young grandmother and other Japanese-American citizens in internment camps, Kiku gets the education she never received in history class. She witnesses the lives of Japanese-Americans who were denied their civil liberties and suffered greatly, but managed to cultivate community and commit acts of resistance in order to survive.
Readalike for: Everything We Never Had
While Everything We Never Had is a novel and Displacement is a graphic novel, both titles discuss generational trauma through the lens of colonization and immigration.
Ever since cancer invaded his adoptive mother's life, Brett feels like he's losing everything, most of all control. To cope, Brett fuels all of his anxieties into epic fantasies, including his intergalactic Kid Condor comic book series, which features food constellations and characters not unlike those in his own life. But lately Brett's grip on reality has started to lose control. The fictions he's been telling himself about his unattractive body, the feeling that he's a burden to his best friend, that he's too sick to be loved has consumed him completely, and Brett will do anything to forget about the cosmic-sized hole in his chest, even if it's unhealthy. When Brett's journal and deepest insecurities are posted online for the whole school to see, Brett realizes he can no longer avoid the painful truths of his real-life narrative. As his eating disorder escalates, Brett must be honest with the people closest to him, including his new and fierce friend Mallory who seems to know more about Brett's issues than he does. With their support, he just might find the courage to face the toughest reality of all.
Readalike for: Louder Than Hunger
While Louder Than Hunger is in verse and this story is a novel, they both center the experiences of boys with anxiety and escalating eating disorders on their recovery journeys.
With a family who refuses to learn sign language, twelve-year-old Effie is mostly cut off from human communication at home, unable to speak of her abusive stepfather or violent father--only her interpreter understands, and Miss Kathy is willing to take Effie's case to court to provide her with a safe home.
Readalike for: Louder Than Hunger
Both emotionally intense novels-in-verse center younger teens learning how to survive painful situations while finding their voices.
Seventeen-year-old Noelle Layne knows horror. Every trope, every warning sign, every survival tactic. She even leads a successful movie club dedicated to the genre. Who better to throw the ultimate, most exclusive Halloween party on all of Long Island? Nothing is going to ruin this party. Except...maybe the low budget It clown she hired for a stirring round of tag. He axes one of her classmates. From the looks of his devilish grin and bag full of killer tricks, he's just getting started. A murderous clown is out for blood, but Noelle has been waiting her entire life to prove that she's a Final Girl.
Readalike for: Under the Surface
Both of these action-packed, suspenseful books feature parties that turn into a fight for survival. While Under the Surface is a thriller, There's No Way I'd Die First leans more into slasher horror.
Six out of eight teens who made it out alive from a ski trip two years ago must fight for their survival again--this time from a lurking killer on a secluded island.
Readalike for: Under the Surface
Both of these multi-perspective thrillers feature groups of teens who are trapped in a secluded space while they try to escape a killer.
Seventeen-year-old Ross Quest, a master thief, enters the Thieves' Gambit, a competition consisting of dangerous, international heists, in order to save her mother's life.
When fifteen-year-old Iranian American Marjan discovers her murdered father was secretly a veterinarian to magical creatures, she realizes she must take up his mantle, despite the many dangers.
A visit to a private amusement park is the trip of a lifetime for a group of teen influencers, until they learn that getting off the island alive is not part of the plan.
A gripping speculative thriller perfect for fans of Lauren Oliver and Ginny Myers Sain, about one girl with the power to see death before it happens--and the terrible consequences she faces when saving someone goes wrong.
Maverick feels strongly about family ties, making choices he feels necessary to help support his mom while his King father serves time, and leave him literally holding his son in a doctor's waiting room after he gets paternity test results back and his babymomma ghosts. Now the child he's raising is impacting the lives of his family and his girlfriend, and the gang life he led to support them all financially could leave them all bearing his responsibilities since it endangers his life. It looks like he may have been offered a chance to go straight, but leaving the King Lords won't be easy, and a "real" job has high demand for low return.
Soon after receiving an anonymous message stating that she has twenty-four hours to play a game by the sender's rules or he will kill her sister, sixteen-year-old Crystal Donovan realizes that cooperating will destroy her friends' lives and she must figure out a way to beat the kidnapper at his own game before she loses everything.