Justine Larbalestier asked last week for YA novels about girls' and women's sports; she then interviewed the book blogger Doret Cannon, who recommended several, including Nina Revoyr's The Necessary Hunger, a detailed and psychologically astute, if perhaps poorly paced, story of high school hoops in L.A. in the 1980s. It's about young people, but I'm not sure it counts as YA.

Most of the books on Keri Mikulski's list of recommendations at Pretty Tough sound like YA novels through and through; anyone read any? which ones sound good? The same site promotes Liz Tigelaar's YA series too: we'd love to know if they're brilliant, exploitative, challenging, predictable, not really for young readers, not really for grownups, etc. Write if you've read 'em.

I'm in the middle of P.V. Beck's Sweet Turnaround J, so far a meticulous, week-by-week, game-by-game account of a fictional HS hoops season. in New Mexico. I may say more about it when I'm done. For now, I can say I'm enjoying it: it obeys many YA conventions, but gives more sports detail than most YA writers (penned in by trade houses' word limits) can do.