The Book Rave site offers the latest 2012 list, plus lists dating back to 2004. They may help to give a wider understanding of the great literature for teens that has come out in the past eight years than solely the Printz Award nominees and winners.
Some of my personal favorites from the 2012 list include:
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray - A hilarious satire of America's culture of consuming, as told through a group of beauty queens who crashland on a (seemingly) deserted island and must learn how to survive. Think of Lord of the Flies meets Gossip Girls with a heavy heavy twist of Kurt Vonnegut, and you're getting close.
Everybody Sees the Ants by A.S. King - There are a lot of novels for teens about bullying, but this was by far the most powerful one that I read last year. Lucky Linderman dreams of escaping the bullies that torment him every day by dreaming about helping his grandfather escape the jungles and POW camps of Vietnam that he disappeared in during the war. After a particularly brutal assault, Lucky's mother takes him to Arizona for a visit, where he may be able to find out that real life can be worth living.
Divergent by Veronica Roth - If you know anyone who finished The Hunger Games trilogy and is dying for more, this is the direction to steer them in! Insurgent, the second book in the trilogy, was released earlier this year, and a movie has recently been announced, insuring that this dystopian shocker will be on peoples' radar for some time to come. As of this writing, the WCCLS system still displays a whopping 140 - 150 holds on both titles in the series!
A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness (Inspired by an idea from author Siobhan Dowd) - My award for 'best art in a book in 2011' would definitely go to this one! Conor is plagued by a nightmarish monster as his mother's health slowly declines. What does the monster want? Is it a figment of his imagination, or an actual sinister, physical force? The stark black and white drawings compliment the story perfectly, and even the page and text layouts are works of art in and of themselves. A Monster Calls is youth literature in the truest sense of the word.
OYAN Book Raves
