Run by Daisy Whitney at daisywhitney.com

You know those summer reading lists they give you at the end of the school year? Kafka and Orwell and so on? Well, throw it out. Because here’s the real summer must-read list for teens!

• Best Kissing: Perfect You by Elizabeth Scott
• Best Summer Lovin’: Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler
• Best Page Turner: Cracked up to Be by Courtney Summers
• Best YA with Grace & Beauty of The Lovely Bones: If I Stay by Gayle Forman
• Best Overall Romance: Along For the Ride by Sarah Dessen
• Best Romantic Comedy: Suite Scarlett by Maureen Johnson
• Best Everything Changes YA: One Lonely Degree by C.K. Kelly Martin
• Best Escape: The Season by Sara MacLean
• Best Fantastically Tragic Protagonist: The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp
• Best Life Lesson: North of Beautiful by Justina Chen Headley
• Best “Boy” Book The Girls Will Like Too: Carter Finally Gets It by Brent Crawford
• Best Post-Apocalyptic Thriller That Will Make You Think the Noises Your Cats Make in the Night Come from Zombies: The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Carrie Ryan
• Best Better-Than-Twilight Book: Evermore by Alyson Noel

Now go to the library, the book store, your best friend and read!!!

The list was compiled this list with the help of four writing friends: Trish Doller, Suzanne Young, Courtney Summers and Mandy Morgan. And no, Courtney didn’t pick her own book for the list. I picked it! The list includes books published in 2008 and 2009.

What constitutes beauty — perfection or flaws? The answer, or answers, in all of their sizes and shapes are worthy of a book and now they are in a novel. In Justina Chen Headley’s “North of Beautiful,” the protagnonist has been at war with beauty for all of her 17 years. That’s because she was born with a port-wine stain on her face, descending from her eye down to her jaw. She and her mom have spent thousands of dollars on countless procedures and all Terra has to show for it is a Beauty Box full of magazine photos of fashion models and the most expensive makeup to cover up one half of her face.

It isn’t until Terra travels halfway around the world to China that she learns what true beauty is and she finds it over and over in unlikely places and people and things.

“North of Beautiful” isn’t about the story so much as about the ideas. It’s a meditation, in fictional form, on art, beauty and the maps that lead us to who we are, who we aren’t and who we can be.