(Note: This recommendation was first published in September of 2013. You can see the original version here.)

Maureen Johnson’s 13 Little Blue Envelopes is a novel I’ve read multiple times. It’s also a novel I enjoy every time I read it, for a few different reasons.

Yes, one of those reasons is that I always seem to forget the details. That, however, is not what keeps me coming back.

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Panic, by Lauren Oliver, is one of those books I kept meaning to get to. It had been sitting on one of my bookshelves for months before I did, and not for any fault of its own. I just never seemed to be in quite the right mood to read it.

Finally, about a month or so ago, the right mood struck me. I wanted something in the young adult category, something tense but not terrifying. Something I’d have a hard time putting down.

Boy, did Panic ever fit the bill.

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I can’t remember what initially led me to The Truth About Alice, by Jennifer Mathieu. I may have read a review somewhere, or maybe I just came across it while browsing through a bookstore.

What I do remember is that I fell in love with that cover as soon as I saw it. There’s something in the jagged handwriting and dark silhouette that just sends out so much emotion. It’s clearly a promise–one that the novel doesn’t hold back on keeping.

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