Recommend to me a "young adult" novel from your era

Tell me what I should read from your past in order to understand you. More specifically, what was young adult fiction like during the years when you would have been in its target audience? What decade would that have been? Recommend a particular book.

A couple of months ago girlboymusic and quirkytaverna, 10,000 miles away from each other but of the same generation, each separately posted the trailer for Tomorrow When The War Began, and wrote enthusiastically about their memories of the Tomorrow stories. So I went to the Denver Public Library and borrowed the first two in the series, and was so engrossed that I've just now got three and four. Anyhow, today on one of Dave's threads I started describing to girlboymusic how I thought it differed from the young adult books of my childhood (my years for "young adult" were actually kid years, age 8 through 12, '62 through '66; what I read was on the borderline of boys' adventure and young adult; but by age 10 I was already jumping to science fiction and Agatha Christie and C.S. Forester and the like, and even some Dickens and Poe; and at age 12 or 13 I stopped reading books that were specifically targeted to young people, though I'm sure the Leon Uris etc. I then read was also read by a lot of teens).

( When I was your age, guerrilla war was for boys only )

( Are teen vampire stories a way to make the teen romance novel more appealing to boys? )

( Taut, but conversational )

My own recommendation is John R. Tunis's The Kid From Tomkinsville, though I haven't read it since I was about nine. I'll say something about it in the comments.