For a long time, I didn’t read much YA. I’m old enough that our modern, awesome version of the genre didn’t exist when I was a teen—I often joke that all we had to read were Newbery Award-winning books about dead dogs. I got into adult SFF at a fairly young age and made that my home for quite a while. Aside from Harry Potter and a few other mega-hits, I didn’t pay much attention to YA.
When I became a professional writer, I started reading a little bit more widely, and found that so much great SFF was happening in YA there was a pretty big gap in my knowledge. So I recruited a couple of friends to give me reading lists and went on a binge to find out what I’d been missing. These are a few of the books that I absolutely loved—but no means exhaustive, of course, because I still have a lot of catching up to do! So many books, so little time…
