But this year, I put my editorial foot down - all four judges made it to the semifinals, and had we not included them, the final product would have been the less for it. Usually, readers will vote at least some works by members of our judging panel onto the list, and usually, we let the judges themselves decide whether or not to include them. Which - as we said above - you should ABSOLUTELY read. So as much as it pains me, there's only one Seanan McGuire entry here, and Max Gladstone appears alongside poll judge Amal El-Mohtar for This Is How You Lose the Time War but not on his own for the excellent Craft Sequence. So we say 'not farewell, but fare forward, voyagers' to the likes of Raybearer, Children of Blood and Bone and the Grishaverse books if they don't show up on next year's list I'll, I don't know, I'll eat my kefta.Īnd this year, because we had only 50 titles to play with, we did not apply the famous Nora Roberts rule, which allows particularly beloved and prolific authors onto the list twice. Some books didn't make it this year because we're almost positive they'll come around next year - next year being the 10th anniversary of our original 2012 YA poll, when (spoiler alert!) we're planning a similar redo. (Sorry, Brandon Sanderson! The first Mistborn book was actually on this year's list, until I looked more closely and realized it was a repeat from 2011.) But you should absolutely read those, too.)Īs always, there were works readers loved and voted for that didn't make our final list of 50 - it's not a favorites list if you can't argue about it, right? Sometimes, we left things out because we felt like the authors were well known enough not to need our help (farewell, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman, we hope you'll forgive us!), but mostly it happened because the books either came out before our cutoff date or already appeared on the original 2011 list. They unlocked all the power-ups, caught all the Chaos Emeralds, mastered all the jutsus, and honestly, I'd say it's downright unfair how much they flexed on us with Time War, except I'm so damn grateful they gave it to us in the first place.' (As we noted above, having Time War on the list meant that Max Gladstone couldn't make a second appearance for his outstanding solo work with the Craft Sequence. 'But then along comes a thing so dazzling you can't help but stare at and ask 'how.' Amal and Max wrote a cheat code of a book. And more often than not, I can figure out how the prose happened, how the character arcs are constructed, the story's architecture,' says judge Tochi Onyebuchi. Enemies-to-lovers is a classic romance novel trope, and it's rarely been done with as much strange beauty as poll judge Amal El-Mohtar and co-author Max Gladstone pull off in this tale of Red and Blue, two agents on opposite sides of a war that's sprawled across time and space.

The magic thief book series