Book-lovers and high schoolers are celebrating Teen Read Week, but even if you're way past adolescence, you can enjoy a tear-jerking YA novel at any age.
Young adult literature sometimes receives a bad rap as a depressing genre, but a hallmark of YA books is actually a hopeful ending.
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That doesn't mean some of the more emotional titles won't leave you in a puddle of your own tears.
Catalyst doesn't present itself as a tearjerker, which makes the surprising incredibly sad turn of events even more emotionally devastating. If you don't want anyone to see you cry, don't read it in public.
It's a novel about a teenager with terminal cancer -- you know it's going to be sad. But you will not understand the depths of despair about to be thrown at you until it hits you on the last page. Despite the incredibly depressing premise, fans are eagerly awaiting the movie.
The first 10 minutes of Up, like the entirety of The Notebook are sad, but you can at least take comfort in the fact that the couples had long, happy lives together. This novel offers no such comfort.
The Hate List has sadness coming at you from all directions. The protagonist's boyfriend shoots her then himself (fatally) when he brings a gun to school, and that's not even the saddest aspect of her life.
A.S. King's novel about a teen who has been brutally bullied his entire childhood will make you angry, as well as sad. Things are so bad, his form of escapism is hanging out in the dangerous jungles of Vietnam.
What makes If I Lie such a painful read is how isolated the protagonist finds herself when her small town believes she's cheated on her boyfriend serving overseas.
If you like a little variety with your emotional turmoil, Clean has characters suffering from eating disorders, drug addiction, abusive parents, neglectful parents, and every other problem a teen could possibly encounter. The full-rounded characters and their chemistry together prevents it from ever slipping into after-school-special territory.
Gone, Gone, Gone layers tragedy upon tragedy by focusing on two teens who are still dealing with the very personal fallout from 9/11 while they live through the tense days of the D.C. sniper. At its heart, though, it's a tentative, sweet love story.
Blood Wounds can, at times, be a bloody, gruesome book. Yet it's not the violence that suddenly comes up in the protagonist's life that's the most upsetting -- it's the more subtle pain she battled for years before.
If you like your Notebook-level heartbreaking romance with a touch of soul-crushing Law and Order: SVU, pick up Craig Thompson's beautifully illustrated semi-autobiographical novel.
If you haven't read The Outsiders "Stay gold, Ponyboy" is a slightly nonsensical, but otherwise uninteresting sentence. If you have read it, you know that's your cue to sob uncontrollably while vowing you will stay gold.
Image: Flickr, Joe Shlabotnik