Young Adult Novels are Awesome

I've been gorging on young adult novels this summer, researching a pet project. I never read YA as a kid, and had no idea how fantastic and thriving a genre it is. Many of the books listed below are darker than mainstream adult fiction, and they're all a heckofa lot smarter.

Hunger Games (Suzanne Collings)
Harry Potter (J. K. Rowling-- except for those fifty million people, who knew?)
Feed (M. T. Anderson)
Scott Westerfield's Uglies, Pretties, and Specials series
The Chocolate War (Robert Cormier)
A Great and Terrible Beauty (Libba Bray)
House of the Scorpion (Nancy Farmer)