(I wrote this on September 2nd, during Labor Day weekend, but have not been able to post it until now.) I apologize for not updating this thing for a while! It’s not that I haven’t been reading any new YA lately. I have. I just finished Love Off-Limits by Whitney Lyles last night. But with all the new online changes—I am no longer the St. Louis Book Examiner, Xanga has shut down its old site and is working on migrating over to Xanga 2.0 and this site is going through some changes as a result of all these changes—I have not had the time to update. That doesn’t matter because I have been keeping up with my reading and have got to say that Love Off-Limits has made me a new fan of Whitney Lyles. This was a fun Halloween rom-com and nice escape for sure. Natalie is already in a seemingly perfect relationship with Jeremy, the boyfriend who seems to sparkle at everything he tries, especially sports, but lately Nat feels that they may be growing apart. She hasn’t been able to bring herself to break it off with him as Jere’s parents just went through a divorce and he needed her more than ever now. It seems OK to hold off the breakup until she starts falling for his best friend Matt. I’m starting to notice more and more that these stories revolve more around the main characters’ friends and love lives than their families. Is this the self-absorbed teenager I keep hearing about? Maybe I just didn’t have a normal teenage life. Or a different cultural background? Still I found the parts where Jeremy sat on Nat and farted to be absolutely hilarious! Those parts were my favorite because it showed how close as a couple they were and I hadn’t read anything like that anywhere else so far. I didn’t like Brianna though. She made me jealous. I think I was more jealous of her for Nat than Nat was. It shows that outside girls can lure your boyfriend away if given the opportunity to get closer and closer to him. And for some reason, even though I knew they were growing apart, it still...

if i stay is definitely one of the more serious YAs I’ve read in a while. Simple and serious. Girl’s family gets into a car accident one snowy morning and girl is the only one who survives. She ends up at the hospital in a coma and the whole story is about her decision to stay in this world or pass on. I picked up this book at the airport on my way to New York to visit one of my best friends from college back in the end of April. I actually finished reading this a while ago, but only have had time now to update. Let me say that I am new to Gayle Forman, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book. She managed to take a simple concept and answer a question that many have probably had on their minds at some point: what does the body think about when deciding to wake up or not wake up from a coma? I mean, you never know for sure whether it’s Mia’s ghost or what that is walking around taking an outside-looking-in kind of stance, trying to make sense of everything, broken piece by broken piece. I am a huge fan of getting to know what characters are thinking and Forman does this so well I could really sense the urgency of Mia’s dilemma. You just have to know what Mia chooses in the end. To be with her mom, dad and little brother Teddy or to live without them in a world with her boyfriend Adam. I can relate to Mia in that when I was her age, I was also quite serious with a stringed instrument, though admittedly I was not on the track to Juilliard. It was also pretty cool that Adam is part of a band that is slowly rising in fame. I think every girl at some point has had that fantasy of dating a rock star and here Mia is, not one of the groupies, but the actual girlfriend of said rock star. One of my favorite scenes is when she’s remembering the time when she and Adam played each other on the bed like they were playing their instruments. He touched...

Biography YuMin Ye is a freelance writer with a B.A. in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Her short story “Team Bonding” won Honorable Mention in the 2007 Seventeen Magazine Fiction Contest, and she won a Finalist Award from the St. Louis Publishers Association for her manuscript, Oil in the Wok. She is the Columbia Young Adult Fiction Examiner for Examiner.com. The information comes from:...

Hello, hello! So I took a little break from YA fiction after my flood of books I borrowed from the library. I have a couple book review requests for my Examiner page and then we’ll see what I’ll be back at next. Since I’m usually reading 6 or more books at a time, it sometimes takes me forever to finish one, but I did finally finish The Hunger Games. I was so excited after I finished it during our snow day this past Tuesday that I couldn’t wait to get the rest of the trilogy this weekend. But when I got to the store, I found out the paperback versions of the remaining two books are not out yet! Boo! This means I’m just going to have to be patient. Really patient. I’ll deal somehow. So where to start? I feel like it’d be real cliché of me to say the book was really good, but it was. Suzanne Collins perfectly orchestrates a regular teen appropriate story into a futuristic setting. She uses sophisticated language to have that adult book feel to it, yet stays in the teenage mind at the same time. Literally inside her mind. In other words, there’s a lot of action in her story yet she manages to show you what is going on inside Katniss’s mind and reveals her thoughts. As a writer, I envy her ability to do that, but I love her style. Whatever it is, she’s got it. Basically, people shouldn’t go against the government. In this particular case, going against the government means it’s time for a lesson in who’s the boss. The land is divided into 12 districts. Every year each district must send one girl and one boy to participate in the Hunger Games, which is essentially a fight to the death until one child between 12-18 years old is left standing. When Katniss’s sister, Prim, is chosen, she volunteers to take her place. You know she will survive this, but at what cost and what will she be forced to do? And I’ve just got to say this. Perhaps the thing that moved me the most about this story is how Peeta and Katniss cared for each...

So ends the trilogy. What a relief! I stayed up late last night, unplanned, to finish it because the suspense of who she ends up with was killing me. It flowed nicely like book two and this time we see inside Conrad’s head, which kind of gave away the ending. I still wanted to see how she arrives there, though, and drama, drama, drama! There’s a lot of emotion in here. Not the kind that makes you cry when you read it, but you can tell each character went through so much pain and heartbreak. (I liked Belly so much I named my new car after her.) You almost know right away who she’s going to end up with, but there’s a part of you really nervous that she won’t. The story’s not so much about summer as about making big life decisions. It takes place in the summer because that is the time of year the other books took place and it’s the only link between the stories. I was a little disappointed that basically after the first book Cam doesn’t make another appearance and Steve’s role was minor. Every girl’s going to want her own Conrad and Jeremiah. The perfect guy is probably a combination of the two boys. You feel bad for the other one she doesn’t end up with. Her decision was definitely a tough one. I think picking someone to marry is one of the hardest choices to make and you can’t make it all on your own either, which  makes it that much harder. I’m really glad I didn’t peek at the ending first or anything. It has a nice Casablanca feel to it, which I loved. I want to read more Jenny Han! We’ll Always Have...