| Want to go on a blind date ... with a YA book? |
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Are you a teen or adult who is looking for more than just recommendations for a good book to read? Are you looking for a book you can't put down? Are you tired of reading random reviews and unhelpful suggestions? Have you ever considered going on a blind date with a great ... novel? Whether it's Valentine's Day weekend or just a relaxing reading day at home, everything you need is right here! Below are the first few sentences (generally the first paragraph) of amazing young adult fiction novels that appeal to teens, young adults, and adults. Most are chart-topping best sellers. Some are popular works of literature from New York Times or USA Today best-selling authors. Some are hot new indie releases that have reached the top 100, top 10, and even #1 spot on Amazon's best seller lists. Some of these books are mysteries full of suspense, twists, and turns. Most include exciting romance. All feature emotional journeys of great teenage characters, and they are all fantastic and worth the read. They also make perfect gifts! If you like the excerpts you read here, click "Reveal my date!" and you'll be able to see your potential "date" (book) on Amazon.com. You can either turn it down (no hard feelings) or give it a chance (wouldn't that be fun!). Be sure to come back and tell us what you thought of your date! ~Jen at mydreamcametrue.com P.S. If you're a member of Amazon's Kindle Unlimited, the top 13 books below are FREE to read! Do you love dystopian books, like The Hunger Games trilogy (by Suzanne Collins) or the Divergent series (by Veronica Roth)? Have a blind date with a dystopian book! You can also visit my YA Book Bucket List, YA Dystopian Book Bucket List, and my YA Contemporary Book Bucket List OR check out these descriptions of great YA books in ten words or less! |
Meet your potential dates ... |
| When I wake up, the other side of
the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim's
warmth but only finding the rough canvas cover of the
mattress. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with
our mother. Of course, she did. This is the day of the
reaping. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| Screams. Screams. Everywhere.
Everyone is scared. But I don’t know who “everyone” is.
Their voices sound young, so I guess they’re
kids, like me. I don’t hear any older voices. So either the
grownups aren’t scared, or there aren’t any grownups with us
anymore. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| When we got the letter in the post,
my mother was ecstatic. She had already decided that all our
problems were solved, gone forever. The big hitch in her
brilliant plan was me. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| Our teacher, Professor Adam,
doesn’t know we’re just going through the motions. He
doesn’t understand that nothing he’s saying really matters
anymore. This classroom, and everything that happens inside
it, once seemed big and important. Now it all seems silly
and insignificant. I try to pay attention, because we’re
supposed to, but my mind can’t focus on the present. It’s
too busy thinking about the future. A future where every
life in this room is in jeopardy. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| My sweating palms slipped against
the handles of my bike as I cycled at a pace I hoped would
not look suspicious. I tried to fix my eyes ahead on the
perfectly even road and not keep glancing over my shoulder
at the makeshift wooden trailer I was pulling behind me. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| He was right. It made no difference
whether it was 6 months or 6 years. I couldn’t undo what had been done. I couldn’t change the future. I couldn’t even predict it. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| I want to scream. I want to fling
myself down and beat my hands against the ground. This isn’t how things were supposed to be. This isn’t how this story was supposed to end. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| Breathe. My eyes swelled as I
swallowed against the lump in my throat. Frustrated with my
weakness, I swiftly brushed away the tears that had forced
their way down my cheeks with the back of my hand. I
couldn’t think about it anymore—I would explode. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| My high heels dance across the
sticky hardwood floor of the narrow, unlit hallway. The
smell of vomit mixed with beer hangs in the air. By sheer
luck, I dodge a puddle of something—I’m not sure what. My
vision is so blurred that it’s hard to appreciate much of
anything. I’m pulled through a doorway that I almost walk
past. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| Absolute silence. So quiet I can feel it in bones. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| Julie Seagle stared straight ahead
and promised herself one thing: she would never again rent
an apartment via Craigslist. The strap of her overstuffed
suitcase dug into her shoulder, and she let it drop onto the
two suitcases that sat on the sidewalk. It wasn’t as if she
had anywhere to carry them now. Julie squinted in disbelief
at the flashing neon sign that touted the best burritos in
Boston. Rereading the printout of the e-mail again did
nothing to change things. Yup, this was the correct address.
While she did love a good burrito, and the small restaurant
had a certain charm, it seemed pretty clear that the
one-story building did not include a three-bedroom apartment
that could house college students. She sighed and pulled her
cell phone from her purse. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| Terminal Three of Chicago's O'Hare
International Airport was filled with pissed off passengers. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| My own mother is ranked beneath me.
Incompatible. REVEAL MY DATE FREE WITH KINDLE UNLIMITED |
| Late in the winter of my
seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed,
presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a
lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate
infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free
time to thinking about death. REVEAL MY DATE |
| IT WAS ALMOST December, and Jonas
was beginning to be frightened. No. Wrong word, Jonas
thought. Frightened meant that deep, sickening feeling of
something terrible about to happen. Frightened was the way
he had felt a year ago when an unidentified aircraft had
overflown the community twice. He had seen it both times.
Squinting toward the sky, he had seen the sleek jet, almost
a blur at its high speed, go past, and a second later heard
the blast of sound that followed. Then one more time, a
moment later, from the opposite direction, the same plane. REVEAL MY DATE |
|
Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were
doing when they first heard about the contest. REVEAL MY DATE |
|
A sex tape. A pregnancy scare. Two cheating scandals. And
that's just this week's update. REVEAL MY DATE |
| I have no idea how to write this stupid book. Can I just be honest with you for one second? This is the literal truth. When I first started writing this book, I tried to start it with the sentence “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.” I genuinely thought that I could start this book that way. I just figured, it’s a classic book-starting sentence. But then I couldn’t even figure out how you were supposed to follow that up. I started at the computer for an hour and it was all I could do not to have a colossal freak-out. In desperation I tried messing with the punctuation and italicization like: It was the best of times? And it was the worst of times?!! What the hell does that even mean? Why would you even think to do that? You wouldn’t, unless you had a fungus eating your brain, which I guess I probably have. REVEAL MY DATE |
| THERE IS ONE mirror in my house. It
is behind a sliding panel in the hallway upstairs. Our
faction allows me to stand in front of it on the second day
of every third month, the day my mother cuts my hair. REVEAL MY DATE |
| He'd stopped trying to bring her
back. She only came back when she felt like it, in dreams
and lies and broken-down deja vu. REVEAL MY DATE |
| The early summer sky was the color
of cat vomit. REVEAL MY DATE |
|
Dear friend, I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand and didn't try to sleep with that person at that party even though you could have. Please don't try to figure out who she is because then you might figure out who I am, and I really don't want you to do that. I will call people by different names or generic names because I don't want you to find me. I didn't enclose a return address for the same reason. I mean nothing bad by this. Honest. REVEAL MY DATE |
|
At the time I first realized I might be fictional, my
weekdays were spent at a publicly funded institution on the
north side of Indianapolis called White River High School,
where I was required to eat lunch at a particular time —
between 12:37 p.m. and 1:14 p.m. — by forces so much larger
than myself that I couldn’t even begin to identify them. If
those forces had given me a different lunch period, or if
the tablemates who helped author my fate had chosen a
different topic of conversation that September day, I
would’ve met a different end — or at least a different
middle. But I was beginning to learn that your life is a
story told about you, not one that you tell. REVEAL MY DATE |
| ALIENS ARE STUPID. I’m not talking about real aliens. The Others aren’t stupid. The Others are so far ahead of us, it’s like comparing the dumbest human to the smartest dog. No contest. No, I’m talking about the aliens inside our own heads. REVEAL MY DATE |
| They say that just before you die
your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that's not how
it happened for me. REVEAL MY DATE |
| He began his new life standing
up, surrounded by cold darkness and stale, dusty air. Metal ground against metal; a lurching shudder shook the floor beneath him. He fell down at the sudden movement and shuffled backward on his hands and feet, drops of sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool air. His back struck a hard metal wall; he slid along it until he hit the corner of the room. Sinking to the floor, he pulled his legs up tight against his body, hoping his eyes would soon adjust to the darkness. REVEAL MY DATE |
| THE WEEK BEFORE I left my family
and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding
school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a
going-away party. To say that I had low expectations would
be to underestimate the matter dramatically. Although I was
more or less forced to invite all my “school friends,” i.e.,
the ragtag bunch of drama people and English geeks I sat
with by social necessity in the cavernous cafeteria of my
public school, I knew they wouldn’t come. Still, my mother
persevered, awash in the delusion that I had kept my
popularity secret from her all these years. She cooked a
small mountain of artichoke dip. She festooned our living
room in green and yellow streamers, the colors of my new
school. She bought two dozen champagne poppers and placed
them around the edge of our coffee table. REVEAL MY DATE |
| Everyone thinks it was because of
the snow. And in a way, I suppose that’s true. REVEAL MY DATE |
| I had just come to accept that my
life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to
happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and,
like anything that changes you forever, split my life into
halves: Before and After. Like many of the extraordinary
things to come, it involved my grandfather, Abraham Portman. REVEAL MY DATE |
| "Sir?" she repeats. "How soon do
you want it to get there?" I rub two fingers, hard, over my left eyebrow. The throbbing has become intense. "It doesn't matter," I say. The clerk takes the package. The same shoebox that sat on my porch less than twenty-four hours ago; rewrapped in a brown paper bag, sealed with clear packing tape, exactly as I had received it. But now addressed with a new name. The next name on Hannah Baker's list. REVEAL MY DATE |
| Now that I’ve found the way to
fly, which direction should I go into the night? My wings
aren’t white or feathered; they’re green, made of green
silk, which shudders in the wind and bends when I move—first
in a circle, then in a line, finally in a shape of my own
invention. The black behind me doesn’t worry me; neither do
the stars ahead. REVEAL MY DATE |
| MY MOTHER THINKS I’M DEAD.
Obviously I’m not dead, but it’s safer for her to think so. REVEAL MY DATE |
| I hate First Friday. It makes the
village crowded, and now, in the heat of high summer, that’s
the last thing anyone wants. From my place in the shade it
isn’t so bad, but the stink of bodies, all sweating with the
morning work, is enough to make milk curdle. The air
shimmers with heat and humidity, and even the puddles from
yesterday’s storm are hot, swirling with rainbow streaks of
oil and grease. REVEAL MY DATE |
| (Page last updated in February 2022) |
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J.W. LYNNE AUTHOR OF UNIQUE STORIES WITH TWISTS, TURNS, AND SURPRISES |
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