Best of 2025 (based purely on opinion and what I've read)

 I've put together this list to share my favorite titles of 2025.  This is a purely subjective list and is based on what I've read in 2025 not necessarily when the book was published.  So....here we go....in no particular order.....

Stark's Karate Prom is amazing!  It's full of laughs and action and makes a great escape read.   I love that is inclusive without making it obvious; it just is....like the fact that the girl is the best martial artist, and the male main character is actually smitten by her from her first punch.  The silliness of ninja assassins attacking a prom is taken seriously with all the characters doing their best to fight them off.  

I highly recommend this!

This book looks (at first glance) adorable; but then you realize that the trail is blood, not kool-aid and then.....(if you're me) you dive in to see how thsi works.  Horvath styles the animals very much with a feel of a Richard Scary beauty....a lovely town with no problems.  Samantha loves her town, but she has needs.....including the need to kill.  She makes sure that she leaves town and grabs random people (so they don't find her by type) and is very careful to keep her hardware store self and her killer self very separate.  Then someone ELSE starts killing people, IN HER TOWN!  Samantha is both upset and worried, as inquiries could lead to her own exposure but also; this is her safe space and it has been invaded.  Horvath writes a tale delving into the hidden lives of the people in this idyllic town and the unraveling of everything through the eyes of one serial killer looking for another.  Not for the faint of heart but a fascinating and well done story (and the art is so lovely).

Age 16 is an amazing journey of a book, encompassing the lives of a daughter, her mother and her grandmother.  Each story focuses on what happened at the age of 16 for each of them, and it makes it easy to see the generational trauma and how it affects each successive generation.  It is a story of being a girl, being an immigrant and just wanting to be yourself.  

Displacement features Kiku (also the author's name) as she struggles with her family but then is abruptly slipped back through time into the Japanese internment camps.  As she slips back and forth in time, she finds the links to the present and the reasons for her family's behavior around certain topics....and also acquires a much more comprehensive understanding of what it meant to be in the Internment camps (and why her family never talks about it).  This is a fictional novel based on the author's real family and really brings the tragedy and horror of the camps to life for a present day audience.

Faruqi brings a sweet story to life in Saving Sunshine.  Zara and Zeeshan fight all the time and their parents are tired of it.  On their Florida vacation they determine that they have to spend all of their time together and try to learn to get along.  A lot of the reasons for fighting are their own individual ways of dealing with the bullying and anti-immigrant pressure the siblings are under; and as they are forced to find a way to get along they also find a common cause when finding Sunshine,  an ailing turtle who needs help.

This is a sweet book with a really solid foundation in reality.

Guardian of Fukushima is the true story of Naoto Matsumura, a farmer evacuated from the deadly radiation zone after the tsunami in Japan.  He elected to return to the danger zone in order to look after his beloved animals, and ended up also helping numerous other animals abandoned in the wake of the disaster.  The author includes some details and photos in the afterward.  This was a factual story I wasn't aware of and it resonated with me in a deep way.

Big Black is a graphic novel memoir from Frank “Big Black” Smith, a prisoner at Attica State Prison in 1971, whose rebellion against the injustices of the prison system remains one of the bloodiest civil rights confrontations in American history.  I had no information about any of this and found this memoir both enlightening and horrific; especially as we can still see many of the same issues in the prison system to this day.  I definitely encourage anyone to read about Frank Smith and the Stand at Attica.

Almudena has never known her father nor anything about her ancestry beyond the vague knowledge that her father is of Latin/Hispanic descent.  She has spent her entire life with her mother, who is white.  Therefore, it comes as a shock when her mother announces that her dance school is going on a tour of Europe and that Almudena is spending the summer with her father in New York.  When she arrives, she finds that she is very lost, being unable to speak Spanish, finding that her assumption of being Mexican is wrong and that there were reasons for her father's absence.  She learns more about herself, her assumptions and her father....

This book won the Printz Award for 2025, and reading it you will know why.  The journey, both emotional and physical is enlightening for the character and the readers.  

The blurb on Goodreads says this is a "story about self-discovery, self-reliance, and the choice to live when it feels like you have no place in the world."  I cannot think of a better way to explain it.

Ash feels like he doesn't belong anywhere and that the only person who understood him was his grandfather.  When his grandfather dies, Ash decides to try and find a cabin his grandfather always talked about building and plans to live there.....just them and their dog.  Journeying into the wilderness and surviving alone is not easy and is much more difficult when one is a middle schooler who has never done anything like this before.  This journey is heart-wrenching and beautiful.

Thanks for reading!

Saleena Longmuir

South Brunswick Public Library