Every year, we celebrate inner beauty with our Beautiful Girls magazine issue, and you can keep the celebration going with these books for beautiful girls!

At New Moon Girls, we believe what REALLY makes a girl beautiful is what’s inside — her courage, smarts, determination, sense of humor, and unique personality. This month’s books feature girls who shine for their inner qualities, as well as some books to help you find your own ways to shine!

Ways to Make Sunshine

Book cover image for Ways to Make Sunshine by Renee Watson

Ryan Hart makes a point of seeing the best in people, even if her life isn’t going quite the way she wants it to. Money is tight, which means her family had to move into a different house and sell one of their cars. But Ryan is determined to “make sunshine out of setbacks” in this series paying tribute to Ramona Quimby, starring a Black girl.

Pippa Park Raises Her Game

Book cover image for Pippa Park Raises her Game by Erin Yun

When Korean-American Pippa Park gets a scholarship to a private school, she decides to reinvent herself. No one needs to know her immigrant family owns a laundromat and struggles with money. But when she starts to receive hateful messages on social media, her carefully crafted image is threatened in this retelling of the Charles Dickens’ classic, Great Expectations.

Dress Coded

Book cover image for Dress Coded by Carrie Firestone

Molly is fed up with the way her principal scrutinizes girls’ clothes, yelling at one girl and letting another off the hook even though they were wearing the same outfit. Or the way a classmate got an F on a math test because the principal stopped her in the hall for what she was wearing. Or the difficulty she has finding clothes that fit the school’s dress code in the first place. So she starts a podcast where girls can tell their stories, starting a revolution at her school.

A Many Feathered Thing

Book cover image for A Many Feathered Thing by Lisa Gerlits

Clara loves to draw, but she feels like she hasn’t had enough hard experiences to be a “real artist.” Then she accidentally breaks a neighbor’s lawn decoration, and she decides to start pushing through every hard thing in her path — starting with knocking on her neighbor’s door to confess. What happens next changes everything.

Step Into Your Power

Book cover image for Step Into Your Power by Jamia Wilson and Andrea Pippins

If you’re ready to let YOUR inner beauty shine, pick up a copy of this book of “23 Lessons on How to Live Your Best Life.” It includes tips on finding a mentor, letting go of difficult experiences, trusting your gut, connecting with true friends, and more.

More Books for Beautiful Girls

Thirteen-year-old Frankie is neurodiverse, which means things don’t go as easily for her as for her twin sister … but she’s sure that she’s the only one who can find her missing best friend in Cat Patrick’s Tornado Brain.

Yumi Chung knows she has a Netflix comedy special in her if she can just push past her shyness in Stand Up, Yumi Chung by Jessica Kim.

The experiences you go through every day shape you into the beautiful girl you are. Record “one day in the life of you” and peek into the lives of real kids around the world in This is How I Do It by Matt Lamothe.

Celebrate all the things you can do, from riding your bike to performing magic tricks, in The Sky is the Limit, an illustrated inspirational book by Lisa Swerling and Ralph Lazar.

Many of the ideas about how girls “should” look and act come from fairy tales. Shake those stories up with Power to the Princess: 15 Favorite Fairytales Retold with Girl Power by Vita Murrow and Julia Bereciartu.

What about you? What are your favorite books celebrating the power of inner beauty? Tell me if you’ve read any of the books above or recommend your own books for beautiful girls in the comments below!

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  1. I really liked how molly in this book saw something wrong and decided to do something about it.
    If I was in those situations I would have done the same thing.
    Overall, the characters are so relatable and the book is written so well I would recommend this book to anyone, anywhere, anytime.