A Tough Genre to Like

So, I love to write young adult fantasy.
That's not all I write, but that's my favorite.
Why? Because I love creating and using fantasy worlds. And I like young adult fiction, because if it's done well you can enjoy it no matter how old you are, whether 12 or 86.

Yet if you look at the list of books I recommend, a rather small percentage of them are young adult fiction.

Is this because I don't like to read young adult fiction? Not at all. Some of my favorite books are in that category.
The problem is that there are very few good books in the category.
This genre is full of a lot of garbage.
Now of course there's plenty of garbage in every genre. But if I tell someone that I want to write young adult fantasy, I get kind of embarrassed because I wonder if they'll get the wrong idea. Like some weird Twilightey romancey thing that has no substance, or anything else.
Maybe I think this because someone at a writing workshop mentioned it.
At that time, I explained that I liked to write young adult fantasy, but I wanted to write good stories since there were a lot of lame ones out there. And the lady said "I'm glad you clarified that, because I agree that there's not much good out there."
And for the rest of that workshop, I think I pressed a bit too hard that I wanted to do GOOD young adult fantasy...

I'm bringing this up again because of Seraphina (I got the second book in Portland! Yaay~ Gotta finish a couple other books first though. I like to leave a bit of space between books in a series). Because when I read Seraphina, I realized how nice it was to read a very good book in my genre. It hadn't happened in a long time before that.
I wonder what the last one was. I think Uglies might count as more of sci-fi.
Maybe it's the Seventh Tower series. But I haven't gotten to the end yet, so I'm not sure if it will be something I add to my "recommended list."

And amazingly enough, I think I might have found another good fantasy.
If it does end up good, I'll post about it. ^-^