Award Winners
Michael L. Printz Award
The Michael L. Printz Award is given for a book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature.
Dig
by A.S. King
Only a generation removed from being simple Pennsylvania potato farmers, Gottfried and Marla Hemmings managed to trade digging spuds for developing subdivisions and now sit atop a seven-figure bank account, wealth they've declined to pass on to their adult children or their teenage grand children. Now the five teenagers are lost in a tangled maze of family secrets. One of the teens sells pot; one has cancer; all are estranged from the family. As they come together for Easter dinner, will they be able to find their ways back to each other?
The Poet X
by Elizabeth Acevedo
X has loved writing down her thoughts from an early age. Unfortunately, she doesn't get to share them with her family, due to her mother's strict dedication to making sure X is focused on being a good Catholic girl. When X starts questioning her faith and realizes her brother is hiding his own secrets from their mother, she starts figuring out how she can stand up for herself and her beliefs.
by Nina LaCour
Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel. But even thousands of miles away from the California coast, at college in New York, Marin still feels the pull of the life and tragedy she’s tried to outrun.
by Laura Ruby
Everyone knows Bone Gap is full of gaps. So when young, beautiful Roza went missing, the people of Bone Gap weren’t surprised. But Finn knows what really happened to Roza. He knows she was kidnapped by a dangerous man whose face he cannot remember.
by Jandy Nelson
Twins Noah and Jude used to be Noah and Jude—inseparable till betrayal and tragedy ripped them apart. Nelson tells her tale of grief and healing in separate storylines, one that takes place before their art-historian mother's fatal car accident and one that takes place after, allowing readers and twins to slowly understand all that's happened.
by John Corey Whaley
Seventeen-year-old Cullen's summer in Lily, Arkansas, is marked by his cousin's death by overdose, an alleged spotting of a woodpecker thought to be extinct, failed romances, and his younger brother's sudden disappearance.
by Paolo Bacigalupi
In a world in which society has stratified, fossil fuels have been consumed, and the seas have risen and drowned coastal cities, Nailer, 17, scavenges beached tankers for scrap metals on the Gulf Coast. Every day, he tries to "make quota" and avoid his violent, drug-addicted father. After he discovers a modern clipper ship washed up on the beach, Nailer thinks his fortune is made, but then he discovers a survivor trapped in the wreckage-the "swank" daughter of a shipping-company owner. Should he slit the girl's throat and sell her for parts or take a chance and help her?
by John Corey Whaley
In the year 2073, a reporter named Eric is sent to Blessed Island to research a rare flower called the Dragon Orchid. There he finds an insular community of mysterious villagers, a delicious tea that has him losing days at a time, and a beguiling girl named Merle. In just 50 pages, we reach a shattering conclusion-and then start anew in 2011.
National Book Award
The National Book Award seeks to promote the best literature in America.
by Ta-Neishi Coates
Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings--moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield with a rogue historian, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's 'long war on black people,' or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police
by Jesmyn Ward
13 year old Jojo is trying to figure out what it is be a man. The male figures in his life are complicated with his father in prison and the white side of his family absent. His mother, Leonie, cannot seem to put her children above her own needs, chiefly her drug use.
When Jojo's father is released from prison, Leonie packs up the kids and heads through Mississippi on a road trip in which Jojo learns much about legacies, life, violence, and love.
by John Lewis
Congressman John Lewis was a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and played a key role in the struggle to end segregation. Despite more than 40 arrests, physical attacks, and serious injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. This is his first-hand account of the his lifelong struggle for civil and human rights that spans his youth in rural Alabama, his life-changing meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the birth of the Nashville Student Movement.
by Robin Benway
Placing her daughter for adoption left a hole in Grace's heart; her adoptive parents can't fill it, and her birth mother's unreachable—then Grace learns she has siblings. Maya, 15, a year younger than Grace, was adopted by wealthy parents 13 months before their biological daughter, Lauren, arrived. Joaquin, nearly 18, a survivor of 17 failed foster-care placements and one failed adoption, is troubled when his current foster parents express a wish to adopt him. Grace reaches out, and the siblings soon bond. Still, each keeps secrets as the siblings try and build a family without ever experiencing true family.
by Neal Shusterman
Caden Bosch thinks there is somebody at his high school who wants to kill him. But that's not all. There are things happening outside of the typical space and time constraints that he can't understand. He feels at once all-powerful and frighteningly powerless. Caden slowly drifts away from friends and family and deeper into his mind, until his parents admit him to a mental hospital for further evaluation and treatment.
by Steve Sheinkin
From 1964 to 1971, Daniel Ellsberg went from nerdy analyst for the Rand Corp. to "the most dangerous man in America." Initially a supporter of Cold War politics and the Vietnam War, he became disenchanted with the war and the lies presidents told to cover up the United States' deepening involvement in the war. He helped to amass the Pentagon Papers—"seven thousand pages of documentary evidence of lying, by four presidents and their administrations over twenty-three years"—and then leaked them to the press, fueling public dissatisfaction with American foreign policy.
by Noelle Stevenson
Lord Blackheart, a villain with a vendetta, and his sidekick, Nimona, an impulsive young shapeshifter, must prove to the kingdom that Sir Goldenloin and the Institution of Law Enforcement and Heroics aren't the heroes everyone thinks they are.
by Phillip Hoose
Nine months before Rosa Parks history-making protest on a city bus, Claudette Colvin, a 15-year-old Montgomery, Alabama, high-school student, was arrested and jailed for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Hoose draws from numerous personal interviews with Colvin in this exceptional title that is part historical account, part memoir.