For many of us, one of our first speculative fiction love affairs was with Madeleine L'Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time. Her warm, emotional approach to time travel and other science fiction ideas helped set the scene for today's YA science fiction boom, and she made tesseracts a household word.

The era of post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels for young adults may be winding down at last — but one of the best thing to come out of the trend has only just arrived. The anthology After, from editors Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, is one of the most dazzling collections of stories we've read in ages.

This weekend, the final (we think) Twilight movie hits theaters, and then it's all over. Maybe you love Twilight as much as Mitt Romney, or maybe you're not crazy about it. But either way, you can't deny the huge impact that Twilight has had on pop culture.

Most startling news of the day: Grey's Anatomy producer Shonda Rimes is creating a new TV show, based on an as-yet-unpublished young-adult novel, Mila 2.0 by Debra Driza. That novel, about a teenage girl in the Midwest who finds out she's really a cutting-edge artificial intelligence, comes out in March but is already…

A great character can often elevate a perfectly pleasant book into an excellent read. And Libba Bray's The Diviners is not what you'd call a pleasant read — it's creepy good fun — but its characters really are the book's strongest part. The cast is gloriously wide-ranging, including everyone from the socialist daughter …

There have been a ton of young adult fantasy novels lately where one person stands against a dystopian world, or faces a terrible menace, and they're sort of the chosen savior. But Gwenda Bond's YA debut, Blackwood, takes a very different tack: Her heroine, Miranda Blackwood, is the cursed one, who bears the mark of…

There's a lot to love about Seraphina, the new young-adult fantasy novel by Rachel Hartman. The book comes up with a cool new spin on a well-worn fantasy world, in the medieval-esque country of Goredd. It has an appealing heroine, the young assistant music master Seraphina who investigates a secret plot to undo 40…

Almost exactly a year ago, all right-thinking people were upset by the fact that a prominent literary agent told two beloved authors that they needed to remove a gay character from their young-adult novel — or just turn him straight. The good news? Now Stranger by Rachel Manija Brown and Sherwood Smith has gotten…

YA books, like everything else for teens, are subject to the whims of trends and fashion. Remember when they were all about vampires? Or all about magical boarding schools? Or magical boarding schools with vampires? Or hyper-violent anti-authoritarian post-apocalypses? Those trends are all in the past — and they've…

The new novel Saving The Pearls: Defending Eden sounds like something that someone made up as a prank. Victoria Foyt's self-published novel takes place in a world where, due to global warming, most white people are dead. The world is ruled by black people, called "coals" in the book. The remaining white people, called…