Teens Who Take a Stand: YA Fiction About Activism

There's no such thing as being too young to get involved in causes that are important to you! No matter what your cause is, your voice is important and can make an impact. Some famous activists who got started with their activism as children or teens include girls' education activist Malala Yousafzai, climate activist Greta Thunberg, and LGBTQIA+ activist Jazz Jennings. These books below, while fiction, show that it's possible for teens to use their voice to make change in their communities.

In novel in verse Wild Dreamers, Ana and Leandro meet in a wilderness park in California. They feel an immediate connection with each other and with a mountain lion that's roaming the park after being displaced due to habitat destruction. The two start a rewilding club at school and work with scientists to make wildlife crossings so that this mountain lion and others can find their way to each other once more. 

This Book Won't Burn follows Noor as she leaves her Chicago home for a small town for the last quarter of her senior year. She plans to keep her head down and just make it through the remainder of the semester, but she quickly learns that hundreds of books written by queer and BIPOC authors are being removed from the school library's shelves due to "obscene" content. Noor must decide if she should fight against this decision and draw attention to herself, or stay quiet and go against everything she believes in.

When the Islamic Center in Said and Tiwa's home town burns down in Four Eids and A Funeral, the two former best friends turned enemies must reluctantly work together to convince the mayor to rebuild the center instead of demolishing it to build condos. They rally their community to come together with petitions, fundraisers and public art to try and fight off their growing feelings for each other along the way.

In Down Came the Rain, Houston-based Eliza has been displaced by Hurricane Harvey and turns to environmental activism to help ease her anxieties about climate disasters, despite the disapproval of her father who works for a Big Oil company. She meets Javi at her new school, who suffers from  his own anxieties about climate change, and the two start an environmental justice club together at their school.

Social media is another way to get active as shown in Your Plantation Prom Is Not Okay. Harriet and her father run an enslaved people' museum at a former plantation in Louisiana. The plantation next door is bought out by Claudia Hartwell, a wealthy California woman and her daughter Layla, with the intention of using it to host antebellum style weddings and events, much to Harriet's dismay. Together with the help of Layla, Harriet takes to social media to try and cancel a celebrity wedding booked at the plantation as well as her own school's prom.