Daisy Whitney Shares Her Ten Favorite Reads of 2010, And More!

Daisy Whitney is the author of the young adult novel The Mockingbirds. She's looking forward to 2011 when she'll be doing copy edits/page proofs for Mockingbirds 2, which will come out some time in the fall. Right now she's editing/revising a manuscript to show to her agent in January and hopefully sell to Little Brown in early in 2011!! It's another teen novel as well, totally un-Mockingbirds related! "Then more books I hope! I have lots of ideas...."

My to-read pile is ridiculously huge and it’s teetering with many books that were published in 2010 that I wish I had read already like Mostly Good Girls by Leila Sales, Dash and Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan, and Things A Brother Knows by Dana Reinhardt. And many of the best books I read this year come out next year like Gayle Forman’s Where She Went, Suzanne Young’s A Need So Beautiful and Victoria Schwab’s The Near Witch.

But I read what I read this year. So without further ado, here are my ten favorite reads of the past 12 months.

Anna and the French Kiss
This book is simply perfect. It is romantic, funny and full of rich, realistic and fully realized characters. Do not miss this book whatever you do! (When I visited Paris a few weeks after reading this, I full expected to see the main characters strolling near the river Seine holding hands, that’s how brilliant a job Perkins does bringing her characters to life.)



Lunch in Paris
Oh, have I mentioned I have a thing for Paris? Elizabeth Bard’s delicious memoir about food and love in the city of lights is full of moments where you’ll be nodding your head and thinking “Yes, that’s exactly what it must be like to be an American woman marrying a French man.” Even if you’re not, you know, an American woman marrying a French man.

Heart of the Matter
Emily Giffin can do no wrong in my book. She is one of the few authors who continues to deliver homeruns in every single book. Each of her five novels, including this latest one, has made me laugh, cry, sigh, hope and race through the pages to know the ending. She is the tops and she paints incredibly nuanced characters facing challenging crossroads in their adult lives.



The Sky is Everywhere
I would like to live inside Jandy Nelson’s head for an hour and know what it’s like to craft sentences like she does. Every single sentence is gorgeous and poetic. I reread passages over and over and am still astonished at how she pulls off some magnificent writing. And, the story is incredibly sexy and romantic and tingly.



Before I Fall
This book is on pretty much every best-of-2010 list and with good reason. Lauren Oliver is in a class by herself. She captures the voice of a teenager so authentically you’d swear she is one. She’s not - she’s just a phenomenal talent and this book is evidence of it.




Dirty Little Secrets
This book is a fascinating and gripping look at how a parent’s disorder - in this case compulsive hoarding - can impact a child. It’s a page turner that shows artfully how the choices parents make affect their kids, but also how kids can make their own choices to move beyond.

Paranormalcy
What amazed me most about this book is how a story brimming with humor, fun and adventure can also make subtle statements about how we treat classes of people who are different and how we should treat them.





Fall For Anything and Some Girls Are
Courtney Summers has a ridiculous amount of talent. And she also had two books published in 2010 and I loved both! Summers writes about tough, edgy, complicated characters who face difficult situations and must find the way and the will to navigate a sometimes cruel world.

Big Nate: In A Class By Himself
This is just a good book. I loved reading this with my son!