Honorable Mention: The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black

I’ll start by saying Happy Halloween! Then, I will point out that this book is not on the 1000 List, nor is on the 2000 list (yes, there is a secondary, much longer list that I refer to as List Beta). The fact that this book is on neither list is actually pretty sad because it reminded me of why I fell in love with Black’s writing when I was in high school. The Modern Tales of Faerie series takes all of the elements of your typical Young Adult Fantasy novel but makes the fae as they are in the old myths. Which, if you’ve read enough Celtic or Germanic mythology, you probably know that the fae are just as likely to trick you and cause you harm as they are to help you. Similarly, Coldtown takes all that pomp and glitter away from vampires to show them as they would have been perceived in the 1800s.

The book was originally published in 2013, and I think I ran across it for the first time while I was a list for last Halloween. You may recognize the author from her collaborative works, like the Spiderwick Chronicles or the Magisterium Series, the former of which had a rather unfortunately directed movie made in its likeness. Coldtown was originally a short story, published in an anthology called The Eternal Kiss, but followed a different girl in the same universe. Black apparently decided to expand the idea while in the South of France with some other writers.