Best teen-historical fiction books according to redditors

Agreed on your Bella Swan point -- she's terrible. Sabriel by Garth Nix has a slightly more admirable female (though sadly, character development isn't his focus / forte, so not much to dive into there), as do the sequels). Anna of Byzantium, while perhaps a bit young, is an awesome historical female figure, as are the various heroines of Caroline Meyer, or perhaps The Queen's Own Fool by Yolen & Harris - or Dove and Sword, a novel about Joan of Arc (caveat, these may have 1-2 racy scenes -- nothing as "bad" as Twilight, but as you are a teacher, wanted to flag), or The Many Lives and Secret Sorrows of Josephine B. -- wow I just went a tear of historical, fictionalized heroines...

John Green - I encourage Papertowns as that seemed the least form factor, but I certainly hear what you're saying. For more "unexpected" I'd refer to the Crutcher books or to Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Pessl or An Uncommon Education by Percer - the latter two having that prep school / sheltered feel to them but being unique / interesting in their own right.

Continue the good fight against Bella...

Anything by Karen Cushman--I think I started reading her books around age 9, and I loved them. They're historical fiction about strong-willed, clever young girls doing cool stuff and rejecting traditional gender roles. The Ballad of Lucy Whipple is a good one to start with; I think I read Catherine, Called Birdy about six hundred times before the book fell apart.

I wrote a paper on Spiegelman for some terrible war lit class I took a couple of years ago. In Metamaus, Spiegelman basically said that he assigned some of the animals basically off-the-cuff, and I think actually mentioned how he felt bad about the perceptions that resulted from making the Poles pigs. I couldn't give you a page reference, but I worked from this Google Books snippet copy so it is probably in there. Part of his logic, I believe, was to make them clearly Gentiles, a.k.a. non-kosher.

EDIT: From the TV Tropes page sans citation: "As for the Poles, Spiegelman's reasons are complicated—he's ambivalent towards Poland because of his upbringing, so he wanted an ambivalent animal; pigs are not part of the cat-mouse food chain (but cats will eat pork), and are thus neutral towards mice (though mice will eat pork too); pigs are simply not as negative in American culture (his example being Porky Pig); the Nazis called the Poles "swine," which makes pigs a logical choice, given that the Jews, who were called "vermin," are mice; the metaphor works because pigs are not exterminated like mice, but still exploited; and so forth."

EDIT EDIT: This concept didn't not appear in pop culture, at least youth culture.

The Golden Goblet and Catherine, Called Birdy were both extremely pointless books with predictable plots. TGG is about an orphan who gets beaten for 200 pages, then the books ends. CCB is about a girl from the Middle Ages who hates her life; the end. That is all there is to the plot. At least they aren't as bad as The Shadow God....

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas made a big impression on my son and both his male and female friends at school.

Edit: and me, reading it as an adult. On my little boy's recommendation - his favourite teacher told him to show me.

Edit 2: It transcends gender and age and race - and is a really powerful story.