I don’t have a favorite anything: the stuff I love is so dependent on itself and the times I read it, I can’t pull it from that context to compare it to anything else.

However, this series is amazing! I never read a lot of YA growing up (maybe YA wasn’t a fully formed genre as it is now) but if I read this as a kid, let me tell you, I’d be a better person.

It’s not just the friendships (which are lovely and amazing), or the love/hate relationships between family, neighborhood and culture or the wonderful, variety of Brooklyn. It’s not the amazing and courageous protagonist Sierra or her magic – it’s all of it mixed together. I think about this series while in Prospect Park, when I watch dance classes in Ditmas Park, when I drive up and down the highways of NYC, when I sit in coffee shops and feel out of place.

When you put down a book and still think about it days, weeks, months and years later – when you read everything by an author on the strength of his reading, that’s how you know you have a favorite in your hands.