The article offers a variant of updating the modern school literature program by including modern texts aimed at “young adult literature”. In contrast to the foreign practice of publishing and discussing literature for teenagers and “young adults”, in which new children’s literature has long been working with the established taboos of the adult world (themes of death, sex, bullying in the collective, domestic violence, etc.), in Russia the value of such literature is a debatable issue, although a number of popular texts (P. Sanaev, N. Abgaryan, D. Sabitova et al.), obviously, correspond to this trend. Based on an experiment with grade 8 students, who were offered modern works of three thematic blocks (texts dedicated to unknown and tragic pages of the history of the XX century, family themes and topical issues of relations between peers), the potential of modern domestic and foreign literature young adult to encourage interested reading and dialogue with the student is shown. The article presents comments on excerpts from school essays, in which they tell about the texts they read and offer to include in the school course works that are understandable and close to the modern teenager.