YA Favorites

There are more Nancy Drews hidden behind this one!

I've been answering lots of interview questions lately, doing promo for my YA novel Glamour, and one that pops up a lot is, of course, "What are your favorite books?" A recent Twitter discussion about The Witch of Blackbird Pond made me realize I have this whole shelf of my YA favorites in my bedroom, so I reckoned I'd share a snap with my tens of readers.

Since I am a terrible photographer (why do my pictures always come out so blurry? Is it because I have shaky hands? I'm dying, I think, that's why I shake, probably) you can hardly see anything here, so I'll just point out the highlights:

Of course, in addition to the aforementioned Blackbird Pond, we have:

My beloved Hitchcock anthologies
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More by Roald Dahl (actually, Matilda is my favorite but I left behind a lot of books when I moved to NYC)
The Booky Trilogy by Berenice Thurman Hunter (If you have not read these books, do it now! This series opens with a ten-year-old in Depression-era Toronto begging her parents not to give away her new baby brother.... because they can't afford to keep him, see? But it's never maudlin! It's delightful! How is this even possible?)
Ghosts I Have Been by Richard Peck
A bunch of Nancy Drews
Some Anne and Emily books by L.M. Montgomery
Three Gordon Kormans (one obviously stolen from the school library)
Grimm's Fairy Tales
The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, my favorite of Madeleine L'Engle's series
And finally, the piece de resistance, the novelization of the 1980 cinema classic Little Darlings

(Notable omissions: The Westing Game, The Long Secret. I think I left my copies of these back home in Canada ten years ago.)

On a side note, my cover of A Little Princess has an illustration from a 1909 edition of the book illustrated by Ethel Franklin Betts, with whom I am now obsessed.

Ethel Franklin Betts 1909 illustration

So that's a window into my soul. How about you all? Which YA classics have a shelf of honor in your house?