Young Adult Fiction tends to be my favorite category, particularly the Fantasy books. This year was no different, except that there were some outstanding fantasy books I loved in both the Adult and Children’s categories. I’m glad I’ve set a precedent of separating the categories so I don’t have to rank them against each other! It’s hard enough ranking these. The top three Fantasy novels were books I thoroughly loved. In the end, The Scorpio 
Races won out for my favorite because it channeled so much little-girl Black Stallion nostalgia. An awesome book!
The most bizarre, most distinctive, most, well sonder, was definitely The Order of Odd-Fish, by James Kennedy, and its translation, Der Orden der Seltsamer Sonderlinge. But where to rank it? I’m tempted to put it in a category of its own, which it will actually get when I start blogging about reading the German translation (which I intend to do after I get all the Standouts posted, honest).
As with Adult Fiction, I split the books into two categories: Fantasy and Everything Else. Now, a few of these walk close to the line of fantasy, so I went with gutlevel thinking to decide which book goes where.
I really cut down the list of books I wanted to include. Please remember that books I gave a starred review to are books I think are excellent! And ranking my favorites was difficult, and might change on a different day. Remember that this is extremely subjective, and just a measure of how much I personally enjoyed them. All of these are outstanding, memorable, excellent books:
Fantasy for Teens:
1. The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater
2. Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor
3. Chime, by Franny Billingsley
4. Red Glove, by Holly Black
5. The Trouble With Kings, by Sherwood Smith
6. The Ring of Solomon, by Jonathan Stroud
7. The Order of Odd-Fish, by James Kennedy
Other Teen Fiction:
1. Revolution, by Jennifer Donnelly
2. Shipbreaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi
3. Page by Paige, by Laura Lee Gulledge
4. Beauty Queens, by Libba Bray
5. Lost and Found, by Shaun Tan
I promise I will get the remaining reviews posted as soon as I possibly can!
Happy Reading!