RIYL stood for “Recommended If You Like” and it appeared at the end of every album review, providing a little extra shorthand-y context for the reader, leading music store staff to albums they could suggest to loyal customers and leading listeners to new music they might otherwise miss. I didn’t know what to call it at the time, but RIYL was listener’s advisory.

Fast-forward to, well, now: I only pick up Rolling Stone when I’m in an airport, Magnet is published quarterly, SPIN lives exclusively online, and my beloved CMJ is long since dead. OR IS IT?

The spirit of CMJ lives on in everyone who participates in reader’s advisory. Sure, RIYL was primarily about sweet tunes, not life-changing books, but the kernel of the idea lives, and remains powerful. Recommended if YOU Like. Not what I like. Sure, these are books I like, but I’m recommending them through the lens of what I imagine you will enjoy, in three general categories: Awesomely Creepy, Adventure!, and What It Feels Like For a Girl. I hope you find something that works for you!

Awesomely Creepy

The Haunting of Alaizabel Cray by Chris Wooding

ZOMG you know how there’s something in the back of your closet? Or under your bed? Like, you can’t see it, but you know it’s there and it is the scariest, absolute worst thing ever and it is definitely out for your blood? That’s a pretty awesome feeling when you’re reading about it and not having to experience firsthand, isn’t it? Bonus points for having used “Cray” in a book title before Kanye & Jay-Z popularized it.

RIYL: Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, the August Van Zorn sections of Wonder Boys, Cthulthu

Oh, man. I will confess, this is a personal favorite. Two sisters, bound by devotion and love and something more sinister, in a tiny Hudson Valley town, and not incidentally, some of the best damn literary creepiness I have ever read. I mean, just look at how Suma establishes Ruby’s power over everyone here: “The night shut up for a beat. The fire stopped its crackling. The kids beside it stopped talking. The wind stopped spitting up gravel and howling at the trees. You heard ground crunch under your shoes if you couldn’t keep you fet from moving, but other than that you heard nothing. Then, breaking up the absolute stillness, you heard a breath in and a breath out. You heard her.” (p.89) I might not be completely coherent or rational about the awful majesty of this book, though I will acknowledge that it reveals its mysteries at its own pace and basically tells you to take a flying leap if you don’t like that. BUT. If you like stories that are as beautifully sad as they are gooseflesh-inducing, ones that reward re-reads and will stay with you for months & months after you read them, Imaginary Girls could be just the ticket.

RIYL: The Twilight Zone, Shirley Jackson, Twin Peaks

The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff

The world is divided into two types of people: those who see this cover and recoil as if from a snake (“wait, are those knives over that bassinet? Moving on!”) and those who see it and say, “Sold!” The town of Gentry is blessed with economic prosperity and cursed with a child’s death every seven years. Residents are as supersitious as they are wilfully ignorant of the cause of the child deaths. Changelings, blood sacrifice, some scary-ass fairies and sibling love are all in the delicious mix in this urban fantasy.

RIYL: The Unexpurgated Grimm’s Fairy Tales

Adventure!

The Abhorsen Series by Garth Nix

I read the first three novels in this series with my ears, as Teri Lesesne would say. They are tremendous, not least because they are performed by the outrageously talented Dr. Frank N. Furter, himself, Tim Curry. It’s a classic hero’s journey (Sabriel learns that she’s got to save her father and possibly the world by keeping the spirits of the dead bound where they belong, rather than walking among us) with romance and humor nicely woven into the tapestry. For my money, Nix has few peers as a world-builder and his plotting is top-notch. These are big books, but they’re page-turners, too. As a twofer, I’d include a very upper-middle grade recommendation for Nix’s Keys to the Kingdom series, which I’m going to have to reread in its entirety because I didn’t read the last two and it’s been so long that I need to go back to the beginning.

RIYL: The Lord of the Rings, early Tamora Pierce

The Returning by Christine Hinwood

What is peace? Is it merely the absence of war? Or is it a goal every person must work towards? How does a community heal after a war? To whom does war do more damage — the winners or the losers? What does it mean to be A People? Do wartime & its aftermath create time and space (both emotional and physical) for people to make their own destinies, find their own loves and fates? The Returning asks all of these questions, and answers most of them, in 17 interlocking chapter-stories about two communities and their peoples’ experiences before, during and after a long war. This is a book in search of a specific kind of reader, one who enjoys seeing how things unfold in their own time. It reminded me very much of the filmmaker Robert Altman. You know how in his movies, there are all these characters and it takes you a while to see how they & their respective plot lines intersect and fit together? And how utterly satisfying it is when you finally do see it? That’s what it’s like reading this book.. Full disclosure: this was one of the Printz Honor titles the year I was on the committee, so, you know. I feel strongly about it.

RIYL: Alternate history, Robert Altman.

What It Feels Like For A Girl

Not That Kind of Girl and Same Difference both by Siobhan Vivian

Oooh, do you see what I did there? Recommending two books by the same author. I’m wild! I’m on fire! You can’t stop me! It is so important to have books like these, which prompt readers to think about the kind of people they want to be. Both Natalie and Kate think they know, find their self-perceptions challenged, and rise to those challenges — messily, imperfectly, realistically. Vivian gets better with every book. The only reason The List isn’t on here is that I haven’t read it all yet (it’s on my nightstand, where it’s sat for months, a casualty of my post-Printz reading mojo loss).

RIYL: Sassy Magazine, Marisa de los Santos, Nora Ephron, Jennifer Weiner

The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks by E. Lockhart

Sometimes, a little creative civil disobedience is just what the doctor ordered. Frankie, a sophomore at a ritzy boarding school, discovers that her popular senior boyfriend is a member of a secret society. A boys-only secret society. And she proceeds to take it over, with an elan and panache the boys themselves had been unable to muster. A lively skewering of gender assumptions, filled with humor, witty wordplay and challenging questions.

RIYL: Straight Man and other campus farces, P.G. Wodehouse, wordplay in general.

Uses for Boys by Erica Lorraine Scheidt

Do you like sad books that are also filled with guts and hope? Do you like to meet a character whose life is so outwardly fine but inwardly desolate that you just want to lift her out of the pages, make her a nice cup of tea and give her a big hug? (After you let her go through your wardrobe and choose a sweater or two to take home, I mean.) Do you want to stick with her, through her struggles to figure out how to be in this world where she is utterly alone? Do you want to see her through the crummy times (doling out handjobs on the school bus, realizing the guy who’s gotten her pregnant is not The One, not by a long shot) and the blessed, eventual good times? Sure you do. Read this debut novel and try — just try — not to fall in love with Anna. A Morris Award contender, for sure, and a life-changing read.

RIYL: Ellen Hopkins, My So-Called Life.