As you all well know, June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month.  So, in keeping with the theme, our Book of the Month for June is Map by Audrey Beth Stein.  It is a Lambda Literary Award Finalists in the Bisexual Nonfiction category.

As a late-blooming, sexually-confused senior at the University of Pennsylvania, Audrey Beth Stein was looking for love, but she never expected it to arrive via email, from someone she first knew only as catrina@juno.com…

It was 1996, a time when the Indigo Girls had just performed their first explicitly gay songs, Ellen DeGeneres was preparing to come out on national television, and eHarmony.com and JDate did not yet exist. A time when being queer was a little bit easier than admitting you’d met someone through the internet.

Using layers of introspection and insight reminiscent of Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep and Wendy Swallow’s Breaking Apart woven into a largely present-tense narrative, this coming-of-age memoir combines the page-turning exuberance of falling in love for the first time, the disorienting clarity of loss, and the triumph of letting go of the training wheels.

YA Reads is proud to be hosting a giveaway for one (1) copy of Map.

The Nitty Gritty:

• Simply fill out the form below with your name, email, and mailing address.  We randomly draw the winners using random.org.
• Giveaway is open only to U.S. residents.
• Ends on June 30, 2010.

As part of our Book of the Month promotion for February, and thanks to HarperTeen, we’ve got five copies of Carolyn Mackler’s fantastic new novel, Tangled, on offer for giveaway.

Blurb from Amazon:

Paradise wasn’t supposed to suck.

Not the state of being, but a resort in the Caribbean.

Jena, Dakota, Skye, and Owen are all there for different reasons, but at Paradise their lives become tangled together in ways none of them can predict. Paradise will change them all.

It will change Jena, whose first brush with romance takes her that much closer to having a life, and not just reading about those infinitely cooler and more exciting.

It will change Dakota, who needs the devastating truth about his past to make him realize that he doesn’t have to be a jerk just because people think he’s one.

It will change Skye, a heartbreakingly beautiful actress, who must come to terms with the fact that for once she has to stop playing a role or face the consequences.

And it will change Owen, who has never risked anything before and who will take the leap from his online life to a real one all because of a girl he met at Paradise. . . .

From confused to confident and back again, one thing’s certain: Four months after it all begins, none of them will ever be the same.

All you need to do is leave your details in the comments field below. Competition open to US residents only and closes on February 28, 2010.

Our Book of the Month for December here at yaReads is the second novel in Lili St Crow’s Strange Angels series, Betrayals.

As part of our Betrayals promo, thanks to Penguin Books Australia we’ve got three copies of the novel to give away to our lucky readers.

All you have to do is leave your name below and let us know whether you’re Team Graves or Team Christophe. If you’re nuetral, say so too!

Competition closes on the last day of December!

The winner of the Vampire Academy giveaway is Cassandra L (Starinatstars03). Congrats Cassandra and look out for your book in the mail!

Courtesy of Penguin Books we’ve got one copy of Richelle Mead’s popular Vampire Academy to give away. All you need to do is email us your name at yareadscontest(at)gmail(dot)com with Vampire Academy as the subject heading and head over here and list your name in the forum thread. All entrants will be tossed in a hat and the winner chosen at random. Competition closes on Thursday, February 26, 2009.

Entrants might also be interested to know that we have some great VA discussion happening on the forum and an interview on the way with Richelle herself. So stay tuned for more exciting VA news.