I love this list, Cara! I'd love to meet Melina Marchetta, too! And Books of Wonder is the most wonderful bookstore in the whole wide world! Yes, you must come to BEA next year!!

oohhh now I like *that* cover of DARK INSIDE! looks like a great stack :)

SEAN GRISWOLD'S HEAD was great! Glad it made your list :)

Hey! So, so, so glad you are loving it. Yay!

Love the new name! Very catchy :P

I've heard a heckuvalotta good stuff about BLOOD RED ROAD and absolutely nothing about DSC. Hope you enjoy both!

This is a magnificent post!
I'm with you, I mostly hate them. I think that has to do with the fact that I haven't really seen it executed very well. My problem is when the girl plays both of them at the same time. It's like, if you don't know who you are and what you want, figure it out, but don't go tonguing both of them! Grossness.
I also think it's problematic because it seems like the girl very rarely takes the guys' feelings into consideration. A lot of times authors present not one, but two too-good-to-be-true love interests that the girl just totally disregards. I don't know, I guess I wish that the girls in love triangles would realize that relationships aren't one-sided. The other person has feelings, too!

This is uncanny, Cara! You and I are like exactly alike on that. I hate to admit it, but I am SO drawn to pretty covers, and I bet I miss a lot of good books because their covers are a little...not pretty.
And I like cool-sounding names too! For me, 1-title books are my least favorite, unless it's a cool-sounding word, like "Divergent" or "Incarceron." THE ADORATION OF JENNA FOX and THE UNBECOMING OF MARA DYER are among my favorite titles! (formula seems to be "the" + cool verb + "character name")
Unfortunately, MARA DYER was a huge disappointment, and I couldn't finish more than 100 pages. The love interest, for me, was the smarmiest, disrespecting douche I've ever read in my life.
(sorry for the language!)
Covers, cool names, and if my really good friends praised it.
Love this post!! Thanks for sharing your cool thoughts :D

Love this Aly!
This is going to sound so mean, but oh well: I systematically "un-follow" blogs if I see constant 5-star reviews + ARC review copies only. I'm very suspicious of blogs where 1) everything is a 5-star book and 2) the site owners don't $BUY$ the majority of their own books. If everything you get is given to you by the Almighty Publisher, how likely are you to really, REALLY say your two cents?
That's not to say that I love reviewers who constantly belittle books/authors, though. But I have a hard time really "trusting" reviews that are ALWAYS positive. And author/pub-stalkers. Also suspicious!
You and I have a lot in common because I love blogs with personality, too! You and Ky are sites that I absolutely love reading because everything seems so genuine and not at all generic. :D
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

Haha, "oh no she di'int!" Hmm, that sounds exactly like a conversation I had with one of my friends!
On one hand, I sort of - SORT OF! - just a teeny-weenie bit - see what she may have been saying. Young Adult is a genre just like any other - it's driven by money. At the very heart of most publishing ideas is the question, "will there be an audience? will there be a profit?" As a result, I think that there are some -*SOME* - books that kind of just repeat the same old patterns over and over again. I think those are the books that outsiders think about when viewing the whole YA genre. Girls who fall head-first in love with dark, mysterious brooders? Only a teen would fall for that, amiright? That seems to be the idea. Lots of books in the genre perpetuate angst and stuff like that, and as soon as some adults grow up, they like to think that angst/emotional stuff and whatnot is "teen stuff!" And unfortunately, I think they generalize and assume that the WHOLE genre is like that, just because some patterns exist. Is every YA author an original-work genius? No. Is every "litfic"/adult-fiction author a genius? No. Not every moviemaker is a genius either. Some folks are just copycats. The problem is when the assumption is made that ALL books are like that.
I don't know. That's my huge two cents. Can you tell I really liked this post, haha? :D I read YA (and MG) almost exclusively (I blame it on the fact that I have Peter Pan Syndrome), and I can't imagine reading anything else! If there's every a generalization that I'd buy into, it's that YA is the most creative genre! :D Don't grow out of YA, Cara!