The best young adult audiobooks for beginners, ranked by the data
Ranked by weighted listener rating, the best young adult audiobook for beginners in our dataset is The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton, Jim Fyfe, Jodi Picoult: 4.37★ across 131 ratings and 5.7 estimated listening hours. We scored every published young adult audiobook under 8 hours (a weekend-size first listen): 47 qualify (young adult-shelved titles with full pages here), carrying 2,831 listener ratings between them. The top 15 are below. No opinions: the formula in the method note decides the order.
The top 15
The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
About 6 days at an hour a day, 32% shorter than the average young adult audiobook.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
About 7 days at an hour a day, 19% shorter than the average young adult audiobook.
Nick and Charlie by Alice Oseman
About 5 days at an hour a day, 40% shorter than the average romance audiobook.
Turtles All the Way Down by John Green
About 8 days at an hour a day, 14% shorter than the average young adult audiobook.
That Was Then, This Is Now by S. E. Hinton
About 4 days at an hour a day, 52% shorter than the average young adult audiobook.
Big Nate Blasts Off! by Lincoln Peirce
About 7 days at an hour a day, 24% shorter than the average young adult audiobook.
Dear Martin by Nic Stone
About 5 days at an hour a day, 45% shorter than the average young adult audiobook.
Alanna by Tamora Pierce
About 8 days at an hour a day, 37% shorter than the average fantasy audiobook.
Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli
About 7 days at an hour a day, 19% shorter than the average romance audiobook.
The Woman Who Rides Like a Man by Tamora Pierce
About 8 days at an hour a day, 32% shorter than the average fantasy audiobook.
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
About 8 days at an hour a day, 13% shorter than the average young adult audiobook.
The Witches by Roald Dahl
About 7 days at an hour a day, 45% shorter than the average fantasy audiobook.
The Demigod Files by Rick Riordan
About 5 days at an hour a day, 59% shorter than the average fantasy audiobook.
Point Blanc by Anthony Horowitz
About 6 days at an hour a day, 54% shorter than the average thriller audiobook.
Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard
About 8 days at an hour a day, 15% shorter than the average romance audiobook.
How this ranking works
Every published young adult audiobook under 8 hours (a weekend-size first listen) qualifies: 47 books. Each is scored by its Open Library listener rating weighted by its rating count: score = (v·R + 50·C) ÷ (v + 50), where R is the book's rating, v its number of ratings, and C = 4.03★ the mean across all 2,181 published books we measured. Fewer ratings pull a score toward that mean, so a high rating on a handful of votes can't outrank a slightly lower one backed by hundreds. A book ranks here only when its own Open Library subject data confirms the young adult shelf; surfacing in a young adult search alone doesn't qualify it. Children's titles, memoirs and autobiographies are excluded from these rankings; they keep their regular book pages. No editorial picks, no sponsored placement. Dataset build 2026-10-12; rankings recompute with every data refresh. Full methodology · All young adult audiobooks we measured
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