For our Young Adult Appreciation Month, we invited a few bloggers to write a piece on reading and blogging about Young Adult books. This week’s guest is Lenore from the blog Presenting Lenore one of our favorites YA blogs, always with great reviews and features about the genre. Here is what she has to say on reading YA novels: ________________ Last week, upcoming debut author Karen Kincy (OTHER, Flux – July 2010) asked on twitter if romance was necessary in YA fantasy. I replied no. Not counting my brief love affair with Harlequin historicals in my early teens, I’ve never been a big romance reader. For that matter, I’ve never been a big fantasy reader either. So it surprised me when I took a closer look at my reading list that of the 56 YA books I’ve read so far this year, 31 were classified as fantasy or had fantasy/paranormal elements. And a surprising number of those actually contained compelling, believable romances. If you look at the YA market as a whole, and especially at the top sellers, you see that fantasy (and especially urban fantasy) is hot right now. Main characters are finding out left and right that they […]