I read Beautiful Creatures because it's vampire YA, and I tend to like that sort of thing, but what I liked most about it was the depiction of life in a small southern town. Although authored by women it's told from a teenage boy's point of view. Since I mostly eschew books written by men, don't meet a lot of male narrators, and it's kind of neat to spend time in a dude's head once in awhile.
A companion to Life as We Knew It, The Dead and the Gone tells us what it was like in Manhattan after the moon got knocked out of place and messed up life on Earth.
A young adult novel about a smart loner girl's last summer before college, this book felt substantial while I was reading it, but ended up a teen romance. Not that a teen romance has to be a bad thing.
The girl is a necromancer--not the sexiest supernatural power to have, and kind of scary until you figure out what's what. After an incident at her performing arts high school, protagonist Chloe finds herself remanded to a group home for troubled teens.
My holds hadn't come in, so I grabbed this book from the YA shelf at the Tompkins Square branch of NYPL because I remembered the name Susan Beth Pfeffer from reading her YA books when I actually was a young adult. Weirdly the book didn't list all of her earlier works, just one recent publication, so I wasn't sure I had the person I remembered. I was shaky on her name and thought maybe Susan was the daughter of the Someone Beth Pfeffer I was thinking of. The Wikipedia page I viewed today didn't indicate any of the works I remembered either, but with a little digging, I found that she is indeed the author of classics like Marly the Kid, The Beauty Queen and Starring Peter and Leigh, none of which has a science fiction theme, btw.
Blue, a poor girl from a family of psychics meets up with a bunch of boys from a fancy private school that are trying to use ley lines to find a dead Welsh king. There's a lot going on in this story--a murder mystery, doomed romance, the hunt for the king, family drama, class issues, child abuse, and a bunch of magic. It's actually a bit too much, at least for my little brain.
My biggest problem with this book is that the eponymous character isn't actually named Digit; she's called digit, rather than her real name, Farrah. Digit/Farrah is a high school math genius hiding her ability from her seemingly shallow friends, hoping to live a normal life until she meets her destiny at MIT. But destiny can't wait.
So Yale-bound Allee isn't as Yale-bound as she'd like to be because her family is too rich for financial aid and too poor for the Ivy League...until she gets discovered in a model search at a mall. Before hitting the Miami casting scene Allee, who is of Jewish and Cuban distraction, is nerdy and not at all interested in fashion.
A long-time best-friendship between a teenage boy and a girl is tested when the latter comes out and their school makes a stink about her wanting to wear a tux to the prom with a girl as her date.