Call For Submissions: Y.A. Stand Alone Book

The adults-only book with this same title is...
quite different.

What is the best young adult fiction book?

So, a thing happened in these last two days.

On Tuesday, I announced that Y.A. would be the subject of the next poll, and in just these forty-eight hours, I've had about a dozen people tell me how excited they are about the poll, but that they're not sure how on Earth they're going to keep it down to a few submissions.

So I decided to break up the Y.A. polls a bit.

This month we will do Y.A. stand alone books. Next month we will do Y.A. series, and in November we will do Y.A. authors.

September: best stand alone Y.A. book. 

As many, many, many YA books are eventually given sequels it is not necessary that your nomination be a stand alone book, but simply that you are only nominating the one book.

Thus, if you thought The Hunger Games was the best Y.A. book ever, but you thought that Mockingjay was a cash-cow, bullshit, slapped-together, story with contrived premises and shoehorned characters that was easily one of the worst books you've read since White Teeth, you can nominate JUST The Hunger Games.

Also, if you really like a series as a whole (like Divergent), I encourage you to wait until next month when the poll will be Y.A. series.

The definition of "young adult fiction" is pretty elastic. It is not kids books and it is not adult books but it's pretty tough to define exactly where either of those demarcations begins or ends exactly. Even the most iconic and best selling young adult series of all time (Harry Potter) arguably starts out as a children's book (and a case could even be made that Deathly Hollows is an adult book, not a young adult book). So, as usual, I'm depending on you all to use your best judgement in the nomination process.  If you nominate The Tommyknockers or Green Eggs and Ham you obviously missed the point but if you think an advanced Roald Dahl or easy Steinbeck novel is Y.A., I'm not going to argue.

If you feel very strongly about what is or isn't Y.A., you are welcome to open a discussion in the comments but I would ask that you play very nice with the people who have made nominations that you wouldn't. Nothing pours cold water on a possibly awesome conversation like "Clearly you don't even know what Soandso even MEANS..."

The rules:

1- You may nominate two (2) books. (If you nominate more than two books, I take your first two nominations and ignore the rest cause I'm a megalomanic on a power trip who insists you have reading comprehension and follow rules.) If you have "a dozen favorites," I would recommend waiting for a few days to see if some of them don't get nominated by other people first. If you can't possibly limit it down to two books you may try bribing me with sexual favors, but I'm actually pretty picky, so it really helps to look good in a pleated skirt.

2- As stated above, this is about individual books, but they can be books in a series.

3- You can second as many nominations as you like, and in fact, you should. Given the interest in this poll, it is highly unlikely that I will be able to take every nomination, so only the ten or twelve with the most "seconds" will be going on to the poll.

Please don't forget to make your nomination as a comment on this post rather than as a reply on the social media where I cross post the blog. I'll take them from any medium, but you are much less likely to get a second if you just reply to this on G+ or Facebook.