The end of the year means lots of top ten lists of the best, worst, and beyond. Each year American Library Association complies a list of the best books for young adults. The ten top is below. What is your top ten reads in 2010. They don’t have to be published in 2010.
- Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan
Sixteen-year-old Nick and his family have battled magicians and demons for most of his life, but when his brother, Alan, is marked for death while helping new friends Jamie and Mae, Nick’s determination to save Alan leads him to uncover a devastating secret. (ages 14 & up)
- The Orange Houses by Paul Griffin
Tamika, a fifteen-year-old hearing-impaired girl, Jimmi, an eighteen-year-old veteran who stopped taking his anti-psychotic medication, and sixteen-year-old Fatima, an illegal immigrant from Africa, meet and connect in their Bronx, New York, neighborhood, with devastating results. (ages 15 & up)
- The Great Wide Sea by M.H. Herlong
Still mourning the death of their mother, three brothers go with their father on an extended sailing trip off the Florida Keys and have a harrowing adventure at sea. (ages 12 & up)
- The Reformed Vampire Support Group by Catherine Jinks
Fifteen-year-old vampire Nina has been stuck for fifty-one years in a boring support group for vampires, and nothing exciting has ever happened to them–until one of them is murdered and the others must try to solve the crime. (ages 14 & up)
- Alligator Bayou by Donna Jo Napoli
Fourteen-year-old Calogero Scalise and his Sicilian uncles and cousin live in small-town Louisiana in 1898, when Jim Crow laws rule and anti-immigration sentiment is strong, so despite his attempts to be polite and to follow American customs, disaster dogs his family at every turn. (ages 14 & up)
- Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
One day David Small awaoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal chord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die. (ages 16 & up)
- When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
As her mother prepares to be a contestant on the 1980s television game show, “The $20,000 Pyramid,” a twelve-year-old New York City girl tries to make sense of a series of mysterious notes received from an anonymous source that seems to defy the laws of time and space. (ages 12 & up)
- Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork
Marcelo Sandoval, a seventeen-year-old boy on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, faces new challenges, including romance and injustice, when he goes to work for his father in the mailroom of a corporate law firm. (ages 14 & up)
- Lips Touch: Three Times by Laini Taylor
Three short stories about kissing, featuring elements of the supernatural. (ages 14 & up)
- Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland by Sally M. Walker
Written in Bone tells the stories of eight colonists—their lives, deaths, and their place in our country’s history. Even though these people left little or no written record of their live, archaeologists and forensic anthropologists have learning about their lives by reading and revealing the stories that life and death have written in their bones. From these tales I discovered how truly tough life was in those days and gained great respect and admiration for the many different people whose sacrifices ultimately led to the birth of the United States. I have tried to capture the remarkable stories of these people in Written in Bone. – author Sally Walker (ages 12 & up)
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