Armchair BEA 2012: Best of 2012--So Far

The second day of Armchair BEA is about the best books we've read so far in 2012 and doing giveaways if we have any to give. (Or was it just awesome 2012 books we've read? I've seen about three or four different ideas of what Day 2 is supposed to be about. Fuck, I don't even know anymore, so I'm doing this.) Unfortunately, I do not have a giveaway, but I do have plenty of fantastic books I've read in 2012 that I can babble about.


Stolen by Lucy Christopher: Beautiful, engrossing, absorbing--I am at a lack of adjectives for this book. You should have seen me go on the warpath when I found someone was plagiarizing this book with a story they were posting online! But that story is gone now and my rage is soothed.









Angelfall by Susan Ee: So all my friends jumped on this bandwagon and I grabbed onto someone's leg, crawling my way into the wagon three months after everyone else had gotten on. Like ninety percent of the people who have read this novel, I'm impatiently awaiting the sequel's release.









Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein: Word for this = I can't even. Unreliable narrator, epistolary novel, fantastic characters, tear-jerker moments--this has it all. Out of all of these books I'm listing, this is my #1 favorite.










Cracked Up to Be by Courtney Summers: Friends have been praising her for years, but I only just got around to reading Summers's novels after I loved This Is Not a Test. I was so happy to see this come up as a deal on Amazon that you can't even know. Though it was definitely weaker than the novel that made me buy Cracked Up to Be in the first place, I still loved it very much.






All the books below this point haven't had their reviews posted yet, but leaving them out of this list when they were some of the best I've read this year would be a crime.


 
This Is Not a Test by Courtney Summers: I'm really not into zombie novels or zombie anything (that is my older brother's department), but I went for it anyway and WOW. Wow. Summers tapped into the darker sides of her characters the way I wish I could with my writing. My experience with this novel made me put everything else she's written on my to-read list. I read Cracked Up to Be up there because of this.






Spark by Amy Kathleen Ryan: I didn't care much for the first book in the series, but I kept on with it because after all, I read Glow in the first place because I knew I had an ARC of Spark coming. I impressed with where the story went. It was even better than Glow! Spark made me a fan of the series, and that is why I sometimes persist with series I dislike or feel ambivalent about.







Unspoken by Sarah Rees Brennan: There really aren't any words for this one but EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! I'd previously been disinterested in her Demon's Lexicon series after a so-so experience with the first book, but Unspoken was so good I bought the other two books of the Demon's Lexicon trilogy. The power of good books is strong like that.

What's Left of Me by Kat Zhang: Took me completely by surprise. I was on vacation the weekend I read it and when I should have been out getting a tan and entertaining some children, I curled up inside with my computer instead in order to finish reading this book. Look for it when it comes out--the relationship between Eva and Addie is fantastic and the way the romance was but an undercurrent to the main issues of the novel was perfect.