Me on Top Ten Tuesday (2)

Top Ten Tuesday is a bunch of weekly fun hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. :)

This week's topic is "Top 10 Books I'd Recommend to Someone Who Doesn't Read X." I'll make it YA, since that's what I review here. And I'm going to try and mix it up a bit, give examples of the different types of YA novels. :) This might as well be a list for my sister, who reads (she likes chick lit, like Sophie Kinsella and some Nora Roberts), but not YA. I've slowly been trying to get her to read it, and the ones she actually reads (instead of skipping to the end) are few and far between.

1. Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi. Dystopian with a bit of paranormal/X-Men type abilities. Juliette can't touch anyone or she'll kill them, draining the life out of them. The world outside her cell is dying, grey and bleak, cracked and dried up. Then Adam gets tossed into her cell and she's forced to confront the outside world, a world that pushed her to the brink of sanity. This was, in my opinion, the best book of 2011. It was all about identity and potential and the need to survive and fight, plus some really hot kissing scenes.

2. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins. Contemporary romance. Sweet and funny, it's a bit less about the romance and more about Anna figuring out who she is while in Paris for a year and figuring out that sometimes the perfect boy is really flawed, and that he might be perfect. Same goes for Lola and the Boy Next Door.

3. Delirium by Lauren Oliver. A little dystopian lite plus romance. Yes, controlling society, but it

4. Once Every Never by Lesley Livingston. A mix of contemporary and historical, time travel for pop culture nerds. Average (Canadian) teenager Clare heads off to England for the summer with her friend and ends up able to travel back to the time of Boudicca and the Celts. (My sister actually liked this one.)

5. The Space Between by Brenna Yovanoff. Dark fantasy/paranormal plus romance. Daphne is the daughter of Lucifer and Lilith, living in Pandemonium. She heads to Earth to find her brother and searches for his last charge, a broken and bleeding human boy named Truman. If Shatter Me was my #1 of 2011, this was my very very very close #2. Heart-wrenching and breathtaking, all about discovering your purpose in life, about fighting your way back from the edge even if the fall left you broken and twisted, about good and evil and the grey areas, and most of all, about love. What is the space between the dark and the light? This book is about the area where the lines are blurred

6. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. Straight-up dystopian. No magical powers, just dismal and dark and brutal and teenagers fighting to the death.

7. Blood Red Road by Moira Young. A little more post-apocalyptic than dystopian, but still just as brutal and dangerous. It's written in dialect, so be warned, but once you get used to it it's an amazing story. Saba's searching for her kidnapped brother and encounters some unique and dangerous people along the way. Like Jack. (What is it about girls in YA books meeting guys that rub them the wrong way but he's totally into her? I'm not saying it sucks, but it happens quite a lot.)

8. Across the Universe by Beth Revis. Science fiction. Honest science fiction. Traveling through space hundreds of years in the future science fiction. And there's the huge mystery of where they are and who's killing the people in sleep stasis.

9. Forgotten by Cat Patrick. Half mystery, a little paranormal, a little romance. London remembers the future but not the past. Every morning at 4:33AM, her memory resets, everything from the day before gone. Then Luke moves to town.

10. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Contemporary, some romance thrown in. This book is quite possibly John Green's best. A book about cancer kids and the harsh reality. It's not all make-a-wish and Disneyland, sometimes it's about the suffering, the honest pain and isolation, the need to live in the infinite numbers between 0 and 1 and love as hard as you can for as long and your body will let you live. This book was raw and emotional. Everyone needs to read this book. It's mid-January and I'm wondering if any book in 2012 will top it.

Other suggestions, for braver souls and those who will honestly read anything, include Bleeding Violet by Dia Reeves, Harmonic Feedback by Tara Kelly, Daughter of Smoke & Bone by Laini Taylor, Anna Dressed in Blood by Kendare Blake, White Cat by Holly Black, Matched by Ally Condie, and Divergent by Veronica Roth. :)