My favorite stories were Cassandra Clare’s “I Never” about a group of online role players who organize a real life meeting, David Levithan’s “Quiz Bowl Antichrist” about a quiz bowl team member who doesn’t believe he’s as geeky as the rest of his teammates, and Wendy Mass’ “The Stars at the Finish Line” about two ultra-smart teens in competition to be the best. Honorable mention goes to Tracy Lynn’s “One of Us” about a cheerleader who enlists a group of geeks to teach her what they know so she can impress her nerdy boyfriend.

Definitely give this one a shot if you’re of the geeky persuasion, particularly if you’re a fan of YA short fiction.

Quentin has lived next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman all his life, and has loved and idolized her since they were kids, though they travel in different circles in school and their path rarely cross. One night, she appears at his window, beckoning him toward a night of adventure and revenge, and he believes that everything is about to change, but the next morning she disappears and he devotes himself to solving her mystery and trying to discover who she really is.

There are so many interesting concept to think about in this book, particularly all the reflections on how people see each other and reveal themselves to others. It almost made me want to try reading “Song of Myself” again. Almost. I had a professor in college who loved Whitman so much that we spent about a third of my American Literature class studying him and that kind of killed the poem for me. But regardless, I liked the way it was used in this book. I loved Q and his friends, particularly Radar, and my favorite parts of the book were when they were all hanging out together. Once I reached Part 3, which is the final section of the book, I was unable to stop reading and stayed up far too late to finish it. If you’re already a John Green fan, chances are you’ve already read this. If you haven’t read any of his books, this is a great place to start!

Jackson Meyer has recently discovered his ability to travel through time. He can make small jumps to the past and then back, but nothing he does ever seems to have an effect on the present. However, when two strange men show up looking for him, and his girlfriend, Holly, is shot, Jackson jumps further back in the past than he ever has before, and this time, things are different. Trapped in the past, he starts looking for a way to change the future and save Holly’s life.

I won’t get into the issues I have with the mechanics of time travel here, because I don’t want to spoil anything, but let it be known that I do have some issues. I also have a couple problems with the Enemies of Time, who I guess are the bad guys, although there is some ambiguity and I’m hoping for a little less black and white in future books. Again, I don’t want to spoil anything, but there are two pieces of information given about them that I have trouble accepting. I’ve also read some complaints about Jackson’s complete unwillingness to tell Holly the truth, and I have to agree. I could understand it at first, but after a while it gets pretty irritating. I’m not one hundred percent invested in Jackson and Holly’s relationship either, which for now is more a point of interest than a complaint. I think it would be interesting if the story ended up going in a different direction, but at this point I don’t really think that’s likely.

What I really liked about this book is how many twists and turns it takes. You think you’ve figured out where the story is going and then everything changes yet again. The time travel aspect makes this especially possible, and I like the ways that Julie Cross uses it, both as a method of gathering information and to shift the plot in new directions. There is so much jumping around in time, and I love that. There are also a lot of tantalizing threads left open for future books, and I’m very curious to see what happens.

1. Divergent by Veronica Roth – Easily my favorite of the year, Divergent is a brilliant story about a dystopian future and a girl struggling to find her place in the world. A complex, kick-ass heroine, thrilling action sequences, a fascinating love interest, and a very cool concept put this book at the top of the list and I’ve been recommending it to everyone I can think of.

2. The Legend of the King by Gerald Morris – A fitting end to one of my favorite series. The Squire’s Tales are retellings of Arthurian legends, full of adventure, humor, and romance. The Legend of the King tackles the tragic end of Camelot with the utmost grace. It’s beautiful, sad, and most importantly, full of hope.

3. Plague by Michael Grant – The latest in Grant’s Gone series about a town on the coast of California where everyone over the age of 14 disappears suddenly and the kids are left to fend for themselves. Plague is a thrilling page-turner, just as engrossing as the previous three books.

4. Wren Journeymage by Sherwood Smith – Princes, princesses, pirates, and mages, both good and evil, populate this book, the fourth in a series I loved as a young teen. Wren Journeymage was published many years after the release of the third book, but it’s full of the same adventuresome spirit as the previous books, and I was thrilled to be reunited with the characters I’d loved.

5. Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan – This is a wonderful realistic fiction novel about two very different boys named Will Grayson and their relationships with the large and flamboyant Tiny Cooper. As I wrote in my review, “It’s both funny and painful, light-hearted and serious,” and it’s well worth a read.

6. The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness – I’m counting both this and the sequel, The Ask and the Answer, as one here. I haven’t yet read the third and final book in the trilogy, but I’m looking forward to getting to it soon. The Knife of Never Letting Go is about a boy named Todd, on the verge of manhood, who lives in a mysterious town where men’s thoughts are broadcast aloud, the speech of animals can be understood by all, and there have been no women for over ten years. It’s a fascinating and unique book, and beautifully written.

7. The Ghosts of Ashbury High by Jaclyn Moriarty – The latest of Moriarty’s loosely connected books about the students of Ashbury High. This one tells the story of Emily, Lydia, and Cassie’s final year of high school, during which two mysterious and interesting new students arrive and seem to be at the center of many strange happenings. It’s a mystery, and a love story, and a ghost story of sorts, and I was thoroughly delighted by it.

8. Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden – This is the oldest of the books on this list, but a recent find for me and I am thrilled to have discovered this fantastic series about a group of Australian teenagers forced to become guerrilla fighters when their country is invaded by a foreign army. It’s both exciting and thoughtful, and completely gripping from start to finish.

9. The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale – A fun and interesting retelling of a little-known fairy tale, The Book of a Thousand Days follows the story of Dashti, a lady’s maid who is locked in a tower for seven years with Lady Saren, who has just refused to marry the man her father chose for her. It’s a fast-paced story, full of romance and mistaken identities.

10. Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan – This is technically more adult than young adult, but I wanted to include it because it was definitely one of my favorite things I read this year. I’m also cheating a little by counting it as one book, when in fact, there are ten volumes in this graphic novel series, but I read them all in such quick succession that they all meld into one in my head. In Unmanned, the first volume, a virus of some kind wipes out every mammal on the planet with a y chromosome. Only women and girls are left alive, except for one man named Yorick and his pet monkey, Ampersand. Yorick’s first priority is to find his girlfriend who is on the other side of the world, but while he’s making his way there with the help of a geneticist and a secret agent, he also needs to help them figure out why he alone survived.

Isabel feels inferior to her twin brother Charlie and she leads a somewhat unremarkable life until the day she finds a small bag of silver mosaic tiles and is transported to Talia, an alternate-universe version of Renaissance Italy. The city of Classe in which she finds herself is in imminent danger of attack from the sea and she is thrown into the effort to prepare, without any idea of how she’ll be able to help in the battle. All of the previous Stravaganti are back as Isabel becomes a part of their circle, and she tries to juggle her old life and school work with her new friends and her life in Talia. This is the fifth book in Mary Hoffman’s Stravaganza series, and while each book could technically be read as a stand-alone, since they each center on a new character, there’s enough complex background and a large enough cast of characters that I wouldn’t really recommend jumping in in the middle.

The background is actually complex enough that once again, I had trouble sorting it all out and remembering everything from the last book. There are so many people with similar names and some with the same name that it gets rather confusing. I did discover after finishing the book that there is a list of characters and a di Chimici family tree in the back. I only wish I’d known that at the start – it would have saved a lot of confusion. Aside from that, I don’t really have any complaints. The concept is an interesting one, with the potential to last for many more volumes, and as I said before, this is my favorite of the series. It’s full of swashbuckling adventure, political intrigue, and romance and should be great fun for fans of historical fiction as well as fantasy. You can find my review of the fourth book, City of Secrets, here.

Larkin Pace has plans to be a famous film director, and he has the entertaining but largely useless talent of remembering both facts about and large chunks of dialogue from all of the many movies he’s seen. He desperately wants a camcorder, but his father insists that he earn the money to pay for it. Larkin looks for ways to earn the money, while also trying to win back his girlfriend/best friend from the bully who torments him.

The Accidental Genius of Weasel High was written by Rick Detorie, creator of the “One Big Happy” comic strip, which was one of my favorites as a kid. I hadn’t realized that until I started reading and recognized the drawing style, so that was an unexpected bonus. I liked all of the characters and thought they were very realistic, and I really appreciated the ending as well. It’s a quick read and a humorous one as well, recommended for fans of realistic fiction and teen boys, especially.

London Lane lives a very different sort of life. Her memories of each day disappear every morning at 4:33, so she has no memory of her past, but she can remember the future. She writes herself notes every night so she’ll know what needs to be done each day, and the only people that know her secret are her mother and her best friend. And then she meets Luke, a boy who is inexplicably absent from her memories of the future, and a memory she’s been blocking starts to return, causing her to begin digging into her past and wondering if maybe the future can be changed.

It’s a cool idea—a girl who remembers the future but not the past—but the more you think about it…. I mean, why hasn’t she tried to change the future before, even just in small ways? For example, if on Thursday, she can remember having blisters on her feet on Friday, why would she still choose to wear the shoes that caused them? Wouldn’t you think, ‘Hey, maybe I’ll wear sneakers instead’? Also, and more importantly, how does she survive school? We see her in classes all the time and having problems like forgetting that she needed to bring in a permission slip or gym clothes, but she never seems to have a problem with the fact that she would remember things she will learn in class later in the year but not what she learned yesterday. Wouldn’t teachers notice this? Does she get up really early every morning to relearn everything? There’s no way that’s even possible. And how does she deal with final exams? The harder you think about it, the muddier and more convoluted it becomes.

My other main problem here is that even though, surprisingly, I managed to be convinced by the end that it was plausible for London to forget everything at 4:33 every morning, there was never any attempt to explain why the event that caused that condition would also cause her to remember the future. It doesn’t need to be a good explanation. I would have accepted that she could always remember the future, even when she also remembered the past. I would even have accepted that the future-memories appeared just to fill the vacuum left by the memories she lost, but there wasn’t any attempt to even consider the issue. Confusion aside however, I did enjoy this book. It’s a fascinating concept and questions are answered a little bit at a time, which is as it should be. There’s a bit of a mystery and it ends up being rather gripping and a quick read. I also quite liked the romance aspect, even though, again, I had some misgivings at first. So it’s worth a read; just try not to think about it too hard.

The Murry family’s Thanksgiving dinner is interrupted by a phone call from the White House for Mr. Murry. A threat of nuclear war is imminent, and Charles Wallace feels it is his responsibility to stop it from happening by using an old rune which calls a unicorn to his side.  Together, they move through history, searching for connections between past and present and for the might-have-been which could prevent disaster.

I adore Charles Wallace and the rest of the Murry family, and there are so many things to love here: time travel, Wales, Ananda and the importance of joy, and Meg’s insistence that yes, it would make a difference, universally speaking, if Earth were to be destroyed. However, something keeps me from loving the book as much as I should. Partly, it’s the fact that I listened to the audio version this time around, which is read by the author, and was disappointed that Madeleine L’Engle didn’t really know how to pronounce the word Cymru, which is the Welsh word for Wales (I mean, most people don’t, but I would have expected her to learn, especially if she was going to read the audio version of the book). The other problem, I think, is that the narrative gets a little lost in the philosophy and the convoluted mythology/history that Charles Wallace and Meg are trying to piece together. As I mentioned, there’s a lot going on. That said, it’s a beautiful book and certainly well worth a read, particularly as a part of L’Engle’s Time Quintet.

1. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis – This is the most well-known of the Narnia books, and the one I’ve personally read the most (Embarrassing admission: I haven’t actually read all of them yet. I’m a little afraid to read the last few.). While the parallels are a bit heavy-handed at times, there will always be a special place in my heart for the story of the Pevensie children’s first journey to Narnia and their quest to defeat the White Witch and restore Aslan to power. I also have great affection for the whole Saving Power of Love thing.

2. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – Speaking of the Saving Power of Love…. This is a true classic, the book that introduces the fabulous Murry family, particularly Meg and Charles Wallace as they travel across time and space to rescue their father, accompanied by the wonderful Calvin O’Keefe and three strange women, Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Who. Oh dear, and now I’ve gone paging through it and I’m just about ready to start reading it again. Let’s move on before I get any further.

3. Armageddon Summer by Bruce Coville and Jane Yolen – I already mentioned this one in my list of realistic fiction books, but it belongs here without a doubt. Jed and Marina are each dragged along to a mountaintop retreat by their respective parents, who are followers of a preacher convinced that the end of the world is coming soon and only the select few gathered on the mountain will be saved. The two teens are forced to examine their own beliefs as the foretold Armageddon approaches and conflicts rise.

4. The Quest for the Fair Unknown by Gerald Morris – The eighth volume in Morris’ Squire’s Tales series based on Arthurian legend, this book tells the story of a young man named Beaufils who has lived a sheltered life in a forest until his mother dies and he travels to King Arthur’s court, just as the great quest for the Holy Grail is beginning. As humorous and adventurous as the rest of the series, this one is especially full of spiritual rumination, particularly when it comes to Beaufils’ observations of the world.

5. The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare – Daniel is determined to avenge his father’s crucifixion by driving the Romans from Israel and he joins a band of outlaws hoping to accomplish just that. He is consumed by hatred and anger, until the day he meets Jesus of Nazareth, whose teachings begin to turn Daniel’s heart toward a more loving path. Strictly historical fiction, this book offers a unique perspective on the story of Jesus.

6. Hole in the Sky by Pete Hautman – This is a rather unique post-apocalyptic story, which takes place in a near-future world in which a virus has killed off most of the human race. Even those who survived have been severely affected, like Ceej’s sister Harryette, who lost all of her hair and her ability to speak. While running from the dangerous, cult-like Kinkas, Ceej and his friend Tim meet a Hopi girl named Bella, whose tales of a new world give Ceej hope.

7. The Shell House by Linda Newbery – The most interesting thing about this book is the way it weaves together past and present. Greg is dealing with issues of faith and of his own sexuality and he becomes fascinated by the story of Edmund, a young soldier from World War I. We also get chapters from Edmund’s perspective, as he falls in love with another soldier, Alex, and his struggle with identity mirrors Greg’s. Edmund’s story is somewhat more compelling than Greg’s, but it’s an interesting and unique read nonetheless.

8. Keeper of the Universe by Louise Lawrence – This one is strange and a bit obscure. Christopher is transported away from Earth and held captive along with two other young people from alien worlds. They learn about each other’s lives and cultures as they try to determine the reason for their captivity. Admittedly, this one is a bit light on plot and heavy on philosophy, which is generally a big no-no, but even so, I loved the snatches of beautiful language and found the discussions of free will fascinating.

This book starts out just about where the last book left off, with Todd and Viola being captured by Mayor Prentiss. They are immediately separated and the Mayor does his best to use them against each other as he takes over control of Haven. Todd is forced to work for the Mayor, and Viola is put under the care of a healer named Mistress Coyle, who is developing plans to combat the new regime.

For the first time, we get chapters from Viola’s point of view as well as Todd’s, which is necessary for the narrative and also gives us a better sense of her character. There is constant tension in this story, as Todd and Viola struggle to figure out what’s right and who they can trust, and as they desperately try to find each other again. The strength of their need for each other is so clear and heart-wrenching, and it feels entirely natural. The Ask and the Answer is just as brilliant and powerful as the first book. It is surprising, heartbreaking, and beautiful and the third volume is sure to be even more so.