Hello and welcome to a new series within the podcast, Catching Up! It's where we talk about an important book within the YA canon that one or both of us somehow missed reading. This week, Kenzie makes Emily read her first Judy Blume book. 

If you have any classic YA or important novels you want us to talk about on Catching Up, let us know on twitter @shelf_involved

First of all, we had meant for this episode to release the day before Thanksgiving, but the holidays got the best of us, so we needed to delay the release. So apologies for the Thanksgiving-centric sign off, but the sentiment still stands.

This week we're talking about families as the central plot in YA. It's not super common, but when it happens, we love it so much.

Tell us your favorites, as always, on twitter @shelf_involved.

This week we're talking about a blog post from a teen reader that garnered some interesting responses from YA authors as they talked about how YA excludes many of its teen readers and why that's the case. YA has become more than just a genre in many ways, and obviously we had a lot of thoughts about this.

For the blog post we're referring to: 

https://vickywhoreads.wordpress.com/2018/11/01/how-ya-isolates-teens/

Find us on twitter @shelf_involved

This week we're talking about the *few* YA books that feature MCs in college. We also spend some time talking about the way YA skews and the NA categorization. 

Tell us your favorite college YA books on twitter @shelf_involved

We're doing it! We're finally going to talk about the quintessential (in our opinion) YA dystopian series. The Hunger Games turned ten this past month, so we wanted to celebrate by talking about all of the (many) reasons we love it and how we've seen it affect the YA genre over the past decade. 

If you haven't read it: spoilers, but also, why haven't you read these books yet?

Find us on twitter @shelf_involved

We're talking about a fairly massive topic this week, but hoping to narrow it down as we talk about how this concept is presented in a few of the books we've read recently that really stuck with us. Tell us your thoughts on twitter @shelf_involved

This week we're talking about found families, the types of friends that you would literally (and sometimes do?) kill someone for and why they're so important for young people to read about. Tell us your favorite found families in YA. You know we'll read them.

You can find us on twitter @shelf_involved

This week we're talking about retellings of classic tales and what keeps us coming back to stories that we already know the endings to. Tell us your favorite retellings on twitter @shelf_involved

You can find Emily on twitter @emilysaysgo

You can find Kenzie on twitter @kenziehalwen

This week we're talking about love stories we love to hate, one of our favorite tropes (but aren't they all?): enemies to lovers! We try to dig into why this is so compelling and why love and hate aren't so different from each other.

Tell us what you think on twitter @shelf_involved

This week we're talking about unlikable characters, and surprise! We have strong feelings about this topic. "Unlikable" characters are some of our favorites to read, and we get frustrated by critics/readers being more willing to let boys in YA be a little bit shitty and not girls. Hopefully we can sell you on some prickly teens.

Tell us what you think on twitter @shelf_involved

You can find Emily on twitter @emilysaysgo

You can find Kenzie on twitter @kenziehalwen