One thing that I know is that some parents want their kids/teens to read clean fiction. It’s sometimes a request I get at work when parents are trying to find books for their teens. Some young adult books I’ve gone through in the past sometimes aren’t that appropriate for teens… or at least I’d think they weren’t. Yes, they might depict real life, but there can be a way to handle tough topics but still be considered clean fiction. And I do realize that teens swear (probably more than adults sometimes) but does the f-bomb really need to be dropped every other word? I don’t think anyone in real life actually says it that often.

So where does one find out what’s clean fiction?

There’s always Amazon, of course. You can check what categories a book falls under in order to see if it’s clean fiction or not. Take The Silence Between Us by Alison Gervais for example. You’ll see that under Product Details that it ranks #29 in Teen & Young Adult Clean and Wholesome Romance. That’s a fairly simple way to see if a book might be appropriate or not.

While you’re shopping, whether online or in-person, there’s always the Christian Fiction sections to look in. While that section in bookstores usually targets adult readers, if you have a Christian bookstore nearby, they might have a teen section for fiction. The one in my state does, though it’s not very big. In that case, there’s always Christian Book Distributors that will most likely have some clean fiction for your teen.

Another way is to obviously scan the book yourself or read it first if you’re up for that. I can see that this might be a daunting task if you don’t really want to read an entire book before your child does, unless it sounds like something you’d like to read as well. I’ve seen some parents that do this, but not that many. There is the option of asking a librarian as they can easily look up the information if you cannot find it (or just don’t feel like it).

Lastly, there is one publisher I know of that only publishes clean young adult fiction. That would be Blink YA, which is an imprint of Zondervan (a division of HarperCollins Christian Publishing). I noticed that some of their books are in fact some popular books that I’ve seen on the bookshelves at my nearby bookstores. In fact, The Silence Between Us was published by Blink, so you can definitely be sure it’s clean fiction. However, that doesn’t mean that regular publishers don’t release clean fiction, they just don’t exclusively publish it.

So really, it’s not all that hard to find clean fiction. You just have to know where to look for it. To send you off, I’m going to list some clean young-adult books I know of that might be interesting. You can click on the images to read the synopsis of them if you wish to do so.

In addition, you can always Google search lists of clean books for young adults/teens and there’s a ton of good lists out there. Here are a few I found in my own search:

• Delicious Reads: 40 Clean Reads for Teens
• Clean YA Books for Teens, Tweens, or Anyone
• Gather Lemons: Clean Books for Teens

There’s actually a lot more clean fiction out there than most people (including myself) realize, and in quite a few different genres too, so there’s something for everyone. I hope this post and lists help some people looking for clean fiction!