10 Best Art Story-themed Young Adult Books Blending Art and Narrative
Hey there, art enthusiasts and book lovers! We've got a fantastic selection lined up for you. We've hunted down the creme-de-la-creme of young-adult reads that expertly mingle art and storytelling into their narratives. These stories don't just tell you about art; they immerse you in it, using vibrantly illustrated pages to color the prose or weaving detailed descriptions that leave you thirsting for the brush and palette.
Our selected books feature charismatic characters who are artists themselves, or those inexplicably drawn to art. You'll cherish the exhilarating journeys they embark on, careening between love, loss, angst, and triumph. From narratives set against the backdrop of prestigious art schools to others set in small towns with hidden artistic treasures, there's something in here to strike everyone's fancy.
These books have one thing in common - they play with our emotions, making us root for the characters as they navigate the messy and colorful world of art. They prove that art isn't just a hobby; it's a lifeline, a form of expression, and a source of inspiration and hope. So, grab a cup of your favorite beverage, snuggle into a cozy corner, and prepare yourself for a wild, art-filled ride!
『Artifice』
A dramatic story of duplicity and resistance, betrayal and loyalty, set against the backdrop of World War II, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Light in Hidden Places. Isa de Smit was raised in the vibrant, glittering world of her parents' small art gallery in Amsterdam, a hub of beauty, creativity, and expression, until the Nazi occupation wiped the color from her city's palette. The "degenerate" art of the Gallery de Smit is confiscated, the artists in hiding or deported, her best friend, Truus, fled to join the shadowy Dutch resistance. And masterpiece by masterpiece, the Nazis are buying and stealing her country's heritage, feeding the Third Reich's ravenous appetite for culture and art. So when the unpaid taxes threaten her beloved but empty gallery, Isa decides to make the Nazis pay. She sells them a fake--a Rembrandt copy drawn by her talented father--a sale that sets Isa perilously close to the second most hated class of people in Amsterdam: the collaborators. Isa sells her beautiful forgery to none other than Hitler himself, and on the way to the auction, discovers that Truus is part of a resistance ring to smuggle Jewish babies out of Amsterdam. But Truus cannot save more children without money. A lot of money. And Isa thinks she knows how to get it. One more forgery, a copy of an exquisite Vermeer, and the Nazis will pay for the rescue of the very children they are trying annihilate. To make the sale, though, Isa will need to learn the art of a master forger, before the children can be deported, and before she can be outed as a collaborator. And she finds an unlikely source to help her do it: the young Nazi soldier, a blackmailer and thief of Dutch art, who now says he wants to desert the German army. Yet, worth is not always seen from the surface, and a fake can be difficult to spot. Both in art, and in people. Based on the true stories of Han Van Meegeren, a master art forger who sold fakes to Hermann Goering, and Johann van Hulst, credited with saving 600 Jewish children from death in Amsterdam, Sharon Cameron weaves a gorgeously evocative thriller, simmering with twists, that looks for the forgotten color of beauty, even in an ugly world. "War, resistance, and art are Cameron's canvas; her palette is a balance of trust and perfidy, beauty and defiance, new life and old. Artifice is a vibrantly-hued and many-layered story, exploring our very human inability to spot a fake when we long to believe that the object of all our desire is the real thing." -- Elizabeth Wein, New York Times bestselling author of Code Name Verity * "Painterly prose...filled with rich intrigue depicts constantly shifting issues of trust in this complex, absorbing tale." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review
Author | Sharon Cameron |
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Price | $12.99 |
Publisher | Scholastic Inc. |
Release Date | Nov 07, 2023 |
Source | Google Books |
『Now Is Not the Time to Panic』
Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner—is determined to make it through yet another sad summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist who is as lonely and awkward as she is. As romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, Frankie and Zeke make an unsigned poster that becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. Copies of their work are everywhere in town, and rumours start to fly about who might be behind the ubiquitous posters: Satanists? Kidnappers? Soon, the mystery has dangerous repercussions that spread further afield, and the art that brought Frankie and Zeke together now threatens to tear them apart. Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge—famous author, mother to a wonderful daughter, wife to a loving husband—gets a call that threatens to upend everything: a journalist asks if Frances might know something about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Could Frances’ past destroy the life she has so carefully built? A bold coming-of-age story, written with Kevin Wilson’s trademark wit and blazing prose, Now Is Not the Time to Panic is a nuanced exploration of young love, identity and the power of art. It’s also about the secrets that haunt us—and, ultimately, what the truth will set free.
Author | Kevin Wilson |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Text Publishing |
Release Date | Nov 15, 2022 |
Source | Google Books |
『What I Want You to See』
A college freshman is swept into shaky moral territory within the cut-throat world of visual arts in this razor-sharp novel. Winning a scholarship to California's most prestigious art school seems like a fairy tale ending to Sabine Reye's awful senior year. After losing both her mother and her home, Sabine longs for a place where she belongs. But the cutthroat world of visual arts is nothing like what Sabine had imagined. Colin Krell, the renowned faculty member whom she had hoped would mentor her, seems to take merciless delight in tearing down her best work—and warns her that she'll lose the merit-based award if she doesn't improve. Desperate and humiliated, Sabine doesn't know where to turn. Then she meets Adam, a grad student who understands better than anyone the pressures of art school. He even helps Sabine get insight on Krell by showing her the modern master's work in progress, a portrait that's sold for a million dollars sight unseen. Sabine is enthralled by the portrait; within those swirling, colorful layers of paint is the key to winning her inscrutable teacher's approval. Krell did advise her to improve her craft by copying a painting she connects with...but what would he think of Sabine secretly painting her own version of his masterpiece? And what should she do when she accidentally becomes party to a crime so well-plotted that no one knows about it but her? Complex and utterly original, What I Want You to See is a gripping tale of deception, attraction, and moral ambiguity.
Author | Catherine Linka |
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Price | $8.99 |
Publisher | Little, Brown Books for Young Readers |
Release Date | Feb 04, 2020 |
Source | Google Books |
『Starfish』
From a debut author comes a gorgeous and emotionally resonant debut novel about a half-Japanese teen who grapples with social anxiety and her narcissist mother in the wake of a crushing rejection from art school. 5 1/2 x 8 5/16.
Author | Akemi Dawn Bowman |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Release Date | Sep 26, 2017 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Tiffany Girls』
New York Times bestselling author Shelley Noble wows with a gripping historical novel about the real-life “Tiffany Girls,” a fascinating and largely unknown group of women artists behind Tiffany’s most legendary glassworks. It’s 1899, and Manhattan is abuzz. Louis Comfort Tiffany, famous for his stained-glass windows, is planning a unique installation at the Paris World’s Fair, the largest in history. At their fifth-floor studio on Fourth Avenue, the artists of the Women’s Division of the Tiffany Glass Company are already working longer shifts to finish the pieces that Tiffany hopes will prove that he is the world’s finest artist in glass. Known as the “Tiffany Girls,” these women are responsible for much of the design and construction of Tiffany’s extraordinary glassworks, but none receive credit. Emilie Pascal, daughter of an art forger, has been shunned in Paris art circles after the unmasking of her abusive father. Wanting nothing more than a chance to start a new life, she forges a letter of recommendation in hopes of fulfilling her destiny as an artist in the one place where she will finally be free to live her own life. Grace Griffith is the best copyist in the studio, spending her days cutting glass into floral borders for Tiffany’s religious stained-glass windows. But none of her coworkers know her secret: she is living a double life as a political cartoonist under the pseudonym of G.L. Griffith—hiding her identity as a woman. As manager of the women’s division, Clara Driscoll is responsible for keeping everything on schedule and within budget. But in the lead-up to the most important exhibition of her career, not only are her girls becoming increasingly difficult to wrangle, she finds herself obsessed with a new design: a dragonfly lamp that she has no idea will one day become Tiffany’s signature piece. Brought together by chance, driven by their desire to be artists in one of the only ways acceptable for women in their time, these “Tiffany Girls” will break the glass ceiling of their era and for working women to come. This historical fiction novel set in the Gilded Age of New York City is a perfect gift for any woman interested in art, history, or strong women breaking the glass ceiling of their era.
Author | Shelley Noble |
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Price | $15.99 |
Publisher | HarperCollins |
Release Date | May 09, 2023 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Blue Period』
"From rowdy Barcelona barrooms to the incandescent streets of turn-of-the-century Paris, Pablo Picasso experiences the sumptuous highs and seedy lows of bohemian life alongside his rebellious poet friend with a shadowy past, Carles Casagemas. Fleeing family misfortune and their parents’ expectations, the two young artists seek their creative outlet while chasing inspiration in drugs, decadence, and the liberated women of Montmartre—creatures far different from the veiled ones back home."--from publisher's description.
Author | Luke Jerod Kummer |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Little A |
Release Date | Jan 01, 2019 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Birth of Venus』
Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.
Author | Sarah Dunant |
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Price | $11.99 |
Publisher | Random House |
Release Date | Nov 30, 2004 |
Source | Google Books |
『The Painted Girls』
1878 Paris. Following their father's sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opera, where for a scant seventeen francs a week, she will be trained to enter the famous ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work as an extra in a stage adaptation of Emile Zola's naturalist masterpiece L'Assommoir. Marie throws herself into dance and is soon modelling in the studio of Edgar Degas, where her image will forever be immortalized as Little Dancer Aged Fourteen. There she meets a wealthy male patron of the ballet, but might the assistance he offers come with strings attached? Meanwhile Antoinette, derailed by her love for the dangerous Emile Abadie, must choose between honest labour and the more profitable avenues open to a young woman of the Parisian demimonde. Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural and societal change, The Painted Girls is a tale of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of 'civilized society'. In the end, each will come to realize that her salvation, if not survival, lies with the other. 'A dark valentine to Belle Epoque Paris' Vogue 'Buchanan does more than just write about what she knows; that same verisimilitude wends through the whole book: the grinding poverty in which the sisters live, the interaction between them, the daily life of a Parisian all come to life in her capable hands' Huffington Post 'Will hold you enthralled as it spools out the vivid story of young sisters in late 19th century Paris struggling to transcend their lives of poverty through the magic of dance. I guarantee, you will never look at Edgar Degas's immortal sculpture of the Little Dancer in quite the same way again' Kate Alcott, author of The Dressmaker 'Cathy Marie Buchanan paints the girls who spring from the page as vibrantly as a dancer's leap across a stage . . . The Painted Girls is a captivating story of fate, tarnished ambition and the ultimate triumph of sister-love' The Washington Post
Author | Cathy Marie Buchanan |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Hachette UK |
Release Date | Jun 06, 2013 |
Source | Google Books |
『To the Lighthouse』
The subject of this brilliant novel is the daily life of an English family int he Hebrides.
Author | Virginia Woolf |
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Price | unknown |
Publisher | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
Release Date | Jan 01, 1981 |
Source | Google Books |
『Sunflowers』
Sheramy Bundrick’s Sunflowers is the beautiful tale of a young French prostitute’s passionate, doomed relationship with troubled artist Vincent van Gogh. July 1888, Arlens, France. Seeking refuge from the pressure of Paris society and new visual inspiration for his paintings, Vincent van Gogh meets the perfect subject in Rachel Courteau. Reborn with creative vitality, the painter produces works at a feverish pace, keeping the darkness threatening to consume him at bay. Rachel, burdened with the shame of being the village pariah, finds solace in van Gogh’s company as she brings joy into his life. Their growing friendship blossoms into love but she is unsure whether she—or their love—is strong enough to save his tortured soul. “Lays bare in rich, compelling scenes the mystery of the turbulent and misunderstood final two years in van Gogh’s life.” —New York Times bestselling author Susan Vreeland “Conjures a poignant but ill-fated romance. . . . Fans of Girl With a Pearl Earring, take note.” —USA Today “While infusing well-known historical moments (like van Gogh’s infamous self-mutilation) with vivid details, humanizing van Gogh and putting his famous works in context, Bundrick generates an impressive volume of suspense, delight and heartbreak.” —Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Author | Sheramy Bundrick |
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Price | $9.99 |
Publisher | Harper Collins |
Release Date | Sep 25, 2009 |
Source | Google Books |
Well, there you have it! Ten sensational reads that blend the vivid world of visual artistry with the immersive narrative of young adult literature. There's something truly special about watching a story unfold through not just words, but pictures as well. With each book on this list, you won't just be observing art; you'll also be leaning into compelling narratives that tug at the heartstrings and provoke deep thought. Whether you're a full-blown art fanatic, a casual doodler, or simply an avid bookworm, there's a story tailored for you in this collection. But don't just take my word for it; grab a title or two, or why not all ten, and dive into the beauty that comes when art and story mix. You might just discover your next favorite book. Or even better, you might be inspired to create your own masterpiece. After all, the beauty of art and stories is they both have the power to change us, encourage us, paint worlds beyond our wildest imagination and, ultimately, make us appreciate the finer nuances of life. Enjoy the journey and start painting your own adventure today!
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