Hey YA readers!
This week’s edition of “What’s Up in YA?” is sponsored by PageHabit — use code “RIOT” for 10% off your first box.
PageHabit is offers a monthly YA book box curated and annotated by authors for the most diehard bookworms. Each box comes with an exclusive, author-annotated new release, a written letter from the author, a bonus short story, fun bookish goods and membership into an active online book community of over 18,000 members. For every box purchased, PageHabit makes a donation to support children’s literacy around the world, so you can read well and do good. Readers can choose from seven genres including Young Adult, Romance, Fantasy, Horror and more. Get 10% off your first box with code “RIOT”.
Let’s take this lazy, hazy mid-late summer day to catch up on the latest YA talk from Book Riot over the last month. Grab your TBR or pop open your favorite bookish app and get ready to scribble down a ton of titles you’ll want to read.
- A request for YA books about soccer led to a round-up of all things YA soccer books.
- Dig into these 100 must-read inclusive science fiction and fantasy YA reads.
- Time for a little social justice in YA lit, with some nonfiction reads as well as some fiction titles.
- Robin McKinley: an ode to a pioneer of YA lit.
- Historical YA fiction gets the Buy, Borrow, Bypass treatment. Which of these titles are worth your time and which should you leave on the shelf?
- Some of the Book Rioters are enjoying a read along of Tamora Pierce’s Tortall series. Here’s one of the posts to go along with the read along, which links back to the starting post for anyone itching to take part.
- How being a parent led one reader to YA books.
- Chances are if you like Meg Cabot, you’ll also like Jenny Carroll. Or if you like Eva Darrows, you might like Hillary Monahan. Because they’re the same people.
- Yes! Here for as much info as possible about the adaptation of Jenny Han’s To All The Boys.
- I love this round-up of books for readers in that odd “in-between” stage of middle grade and YA. This is actually something worth thinking about more broadly and, perhaps, digging into in a future newsletter. Why is that 12-14 age group so underserved? Or is it that they have so many options because they fall between middle grad and YA reading that it can be hard to find that right segment of books for them?
- If you love Sansa Stark, then these books should be up your alley.
- Lift your spirits with these YA rom coms.
- A huge and awesome round-up of Asian American protagonists in YA lit.
- Amazon let me have at some of their data (!) and from it, I pulled together a list of the most popular books in each state and US territory that was published last year. It was kind of surprising to see what came out on top again and again and again.
- 5 contemporary Jane Austen YA retellings.
- And finally, a guest post on the topic of political resistance in teen lit.
Want a good YA book deal? I dug through Kindle’s monthly deals to find a few worth picking up.
Note that you may need to toggle your format to “ebook” when you click the links below.
Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo is a whopping $1.99.
Georgia Peaches and Other Forbidden Fruit by Jaye Robin Brown is $1.99. This has had so many tremendous positive reviews that if it weren’t already sitting on my shelf, I’d one click so fast.
Entwined by Heather Dixon is $1.99 and a retelling of “Twelve Dancing Princesses.”
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Thanks for hanging out and we’ll see you again next week. Perhaps we’ll even talk about one of my favorite things: microtrends. AKA, the weird coincidences that keep popping up in books that aren’t enough to constitute a full-on trend but that are too odd not to talk about.
–Kelly Jensen, @veronikellymars
currently reading The Nowhere Girls by Amy Reed and just finished (and adored!) Like Water by Rebecca Podos.