Halloween is over, the candy bowl is down to the weird licorice no one wanted...and the nights keep getting longer. Whelp, that's my favorite time to read about werewolves. October gets all the credit, but that said November is the REAL wolf season: cold, dark by five, and this year it ends with a full supermoon on November 24! If you've been hunting for YA werewolf books to carry you through it, get cozy.
Here are seven I'd hand a friend, sorted by the wolf itch they scratch. A few are classics. One is mine. I'll be upfront about which. 🙂
What makes a great YA werewolf book?
Werewolves are the perfect teen monster, and that's no accident. Your body changes without asking permission. You feel things too big for the room. Adults keep telling you to control yourself. Then there's that one night you can't. That's not just lycanthropy. That's being sixteen.
The best werewolf books for teens lean into that. When I'm picking werewolf books to read, I look for three things:
- A shift that costs something. If turning into a wolf is just a cool party trick, the stakes evaporate. I want pain, risk or a secret that could blow up a life.
- A pack with politics. Real wolves live in families with rules (I nerded out on this in what real animal hierarchies teach shifter fiction). A good pack is a found family and a pressure cooker at the same time.
- A heroine or hero who pushes back. Rules about alphas and mates are only interesting when somebody breaks them.
Every book below hits at least two of those. Most hit all three.
The classic: Blood and Chocolate by Annette Curtis Klause
If YA werewolf books have a founding text, this is it. Published in 1997, it follows Vivian, a teenage werewolf whose pack has relocated to the Maryland suburbs after tragedy. She falls for a human boy who loves the idea of werewolves. The reality is another matter.
What still impresses me is that Vivian never apologizes for being a wolf. The book treats her wildness as beautiful, not as a disease. It's darker and more sensual than a lot of modern YA, so it's better for older teens, but it holds up shockingly well.
For snow and heartbreak: Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater
Grace has watched the same yellow-eyed wolf from her backyard for years. In Shiver, he turns out to be Sam, a boy who becomes human in the warm months and loses himself to the wolf as the cold sets in. Each winter could be the one where he doesn't come back.
Stiefvater swaps the moon for temperature, which is a brilliant twist. Every cold snap becomes a countdown. It's quiet, aching and very Minnesota. If you want the perfect late-autumn read with a hot drink, this is the one.
For pack politics: Raised by Wolves by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Bryn is human. She was also raised by a werewolf pack after a brutal attack took her parents, and she's spent her life learning to keep her head down around creatures who could break her in half. Then she finds a new werewolf locked in a cage in her alpha's basement, and keeping her head down stops being an option.
This is my pick for readers who love pack hierarchy as a plot engine. Bryn has no claws, no strength and no shift. All she has is nerve and a big mouth. Watching her outmaneuver wolves is a blast. (If you love this kind of power struggle, I wrote about why shifter hierarchies are more than a trope.)
For a forbidden romance: Nightshade by Andrea Cremer
Calla Tor is an alpha wolf in training, and her whole future is planned. She's promised to Ren, the alpha of a rival pack, so the two packs can unite. Then she saves the life of a human boy named Shay, and the plan starts to crack.
Nightshade is the book for anyone who wants a love triangle with actual teeth. It's also a story about a girl realizing that the people who raised her have been lying about what she is and who she serves. That kind of reveal never gets old for me.
For fairy-tale fans: Sisters Red by Jackson Pearce
Little Red Riding Hood, but the girls carry hatchets. Scarlett and Rosie March survived a wolf attack as kids, and Scarlett still has the scars. Now they hunt the Fenris, werewolves who prey on girls, in the streets of Atlanta.
The sister bond is the heart of it, and the book asks a sharp question: what happens when one sister wants a life outside the hunt? Fair warning, the werewolves here are firmly villains. If you want your wolves dangerous and unredeemed, start here.
For something sharp and modern: Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold
Another Red Riding Hood spin, and a very different animal. Bisou Martel is attacked by a wolf on the night of homecoming, and the next morning a boy from her school is found dead. She discovers she's part of a line of girls who hunt wolves that are really predatory men.
Red Hood is bold, bloody and angry in the best way. It's written in second person, which sounds gimmicky and isn't. This one is for older teens and adults, and it pairs well with any conversation about who the real monsters are.
For magic school fans: The Last Wolf (Moonshifter Academy)
Okay, here's mine. The Last Wolf is my werewolf academy book, and its heroine is an outsider even among monsters. Kat Borisyuk is sixteen, Russian-born, living in New York, and possibly the last wolf shifter alive. She's been taking a suppressant pill called Diurnal her whole life to keep her wolf asleep. It gives her splitting headaches. She stops taking it. Things go sideways fast.
Moonshifter Academy is a hidden school for magical creatures in Central Park. Kat arrives with a blood mage on her trail and no idea who to trust. Along the way there are bears, a wolverine best friend, faeries with opinions, and a romance that gets more complicated with every book. The series runs three books plus a prequel, and the whole thing is in Kindle Unlimited.
If you like academy settings, my list of fantasy academy books to read after Hogwarts has more.
Want to test the water first? Before the Moon, the prequel, is free. It covers how Kat ended up in New York in the first place, and it introduces Wilbur, the rat who lives in her coat pocket. Wilbur is probably one of my favorite things I've written.
Which werewolf book should you read first?
Quick cheat sheet, based on what you're in the mood for:
- Slow-burn romance and snow: Shiver
- Pack drama and a heroine with no claws: Raised by Wolves
- A love triangle with a betrothal: Nightshade
- The genre's dark, gorgeous roots: Blood and Chocolate
- Fairy-tale monster hunting: Sisters Red or Red Hood
- Magic school, found family and a wolf who might be the last of her kind: The Last Wolf
If you're curious where all these rules about silver, moons and bites came from, my tour of werewolf mythology around the world covers everything from ancient Greece to the Irish wolves of Ossory. And if you can't decide what kind of reader you are, your favorite fantasy tropes might say more about you than you think.
A note on the November supermoon
Here's your excuse to read one of these on schedule. The full moon on November 24 is the Beaver Moon, and it's a supermoon, the first of three in a row. The third lands in January, and that one has the best name of the year: the Wolf Moon. That gives you about two months of big, bright moons to work through this list.
So which one are you starting with? And what YA werewolf books did I miss? Tell me in the comments. I'm always looking to add to my own to-be-read pile, and I promise not to howl at anyone who picks Team Vampire.
Happy reading until next time,
MSK