Dear Teen Peeps,
In years past, I have faithfully posted a Top Ten Books list. But this year, I haven’t read nearly as much YA as I wanted to/should have, due to number of tedious reasons, the main one being that I was was supes busy working on many other adult-ish writing/reviewing projects. (Adulting. So boring, yet so necessary. You’ll see what I mean soon enough.)  So here is a leaner, meaner list of my top five best YA reads of 2016. I mean, I could have dragged the list out to ten, but that would have taken away from the absolute awesomeness of these five, utterly top-notch books. Please note that there has been absolutely no attempt to balance this list by age, gender or genre. These are just my “from-the-gut†favorites of the books I read this year. (Also, The Underground Railroad was not published as a YA book, but is a book that in my opinion, all YAs should read) Click on the title to go right to the review.
Burn Baby Burn by Meg Medina
The Passion of Dolssa by Julie Berry
Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys
The Sun is Also a Star by Nicola Yoon
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Travis isn’t laughing much this summer. He lives in a trailer with his beloved grandma, who has terminal cancer. His grandpa is high all the time on his grandma’s medicinal marijuana. He searches the streets weekly for his mother, a homeless drug addict, and dreams of giving her all his saved landscaping money for a down payment on an apartment. When he’s not working, he’s performing endless basketball drills to prove to Coach that he’s not just a former juvie with an anger management problem, but a dedicated baller who deserves to be on the varsity team in the fall. Basketball and his best friend Creature are the only things that keep Travis going when everything else is falling apart. Then Travis meets Natalie. And for a moment, his life seems to be taking a turn for the better. But kids like Travis and Creature know that there’s no guarantees in a world where grandmas suffer, dads disappear, moms care more about drugs than their children, and Mr. Tyler down the street can get away with calling Creature, “a dirty coon.” But they’re going to do their best, not only to survive, but thrive. Even if that means shooting free throws eight hours a day, or pissing on Mr. Tyler’s porch when he’s not home. Because like Natalie, who ‘s fighting her own personal demons, says, “This is the part where you laugh. You just have to. When things are so shitty that there’s nothing you can do, there’s no other way to react.” It’s a pleasure to read a story about down-and-out teens that subverts stereotypes and provides an in-depth and heartbreaking look at how addiction fractures families.  While this fresh novel will probably make you cry more than laugh, its a strong testimony to the power of hope and the resilience of the human spirit.
In the future, humans have managed to eliminate poverty, disease, war, crime and even death. Any physical pain or injury is healed through “nanites” in the blood, and all wants and needs are provided for through the Thunderhead, a god-like global cloud computer that benignly monitors life and keeps everyone safe and content. But since no one dies of natural causes and aging is a choice, there are a select group of humans called Scythes (like, you know, the 
Ever since her older brother Noah disappeared, Molly feels like she doesn’t have a friend in the world except her service dog Pixel. So when Red, a fun-loving homeless teen and Christo, a super cute new guy, come into her life on the same day, she feels as though she’s hit the jackpot. There’s just two small problems: 1) Red suffers from