Best YA Fiction Marketed to Young Women

In a reflection of the (lack of) value that our society places upon young women in general, the trends and tastes marketed to young women are often under the the greatest amount of scorn. The way young women talk is "not really English." The music young women listen to is "bubble gum nonsense." The movies marketed to them are "teeniebop." The literature marketed is argued to be Mary Sue or emo. Of course, the interests of young men are rarely described with such vitriol and are often folded into nostalgia markets or given more mainstream markets.

Even the criticism that is often leveled against "bad writing" or "clichè tropes" is disproportionately brought down on things young women more typically like. Take the heroine with the choice of two hot guys–how often does a dude with two hot women go unremarked upon? Or heroines with some kind of "chosen one" power? Because that never happens to men in fiction. Even our own "Worst Page-Turner" poll had more than its fair share of titles from that particular niche.

So this month's poll is the best fiction marketed to young women. To avoid a quagmire of gender essentialism the conditions for "marketed" will simply be this: a YA novel where the main protagonist is a woman. (That's the MAIN protagonist: Hermione might be very important, but the series is named Harry Potter.)

The Rules:

You may nominate TWO (2) books. Obviously the fifteen books you love can't all be the best you've ever read. Any nominations you give me beyond your first two will be ignored because I'm a despot. (Though I will count them as "seconds" if someone else nominates the same book.)

As usual, I leave up to you what "best" means. But I do want to stress that if you nominate Divergent it should be because you think Divergent is really good, and I wouldn't mind finding a lot of good fiction in this genre that isn't a bit on the formulaic side.

I'm also going to leave it up to you what "YA" means. You may have to make a case for your suggestion in order to get anyone to go along with giving you a second, but genre policing is a big waste of energy.

You may, and SHOULD, "second" as many of the existing nominations as you wish. Nothing will go on to our poll if it doesn't have a second, and sometimes, in the interest of keeping a poll to one month (like a HALLOWEEN POLL...nudge nudge), instead of running semifinals, I may limit the final poll to every title that got three or more "seconds." SO PLEASE SECOND STUFF YOU WANT TO SEE ON THE POLL!

While I technically take nominations from anywhere, you should make a comment to this post. Comments left on social media where I cross post (like my Facebook page) don't tend to get seconded there because they are so quickly buried beneath ever spewing content.