YA Award Winners

Last year, when the Printz nominees were announced, we did a big display in our library's YA space dedicated to award winners.  We segregated them out by type (last year we had a space for Printz winners and nominees, Morris winners and nominees, and National Book Award winners and nominees) with descriptions of what, exactly, each of those awards meant.

We could not keep the display stocked with books.  No sooner did we get a cart back to refill the display that the books were seemingly gone again.  It was, by far, the most successful display we've put up in the last year.

Most of the time, I totally agree with the awards committees.  I may not like a book, but I can usually appreciate that the writing was amazing even when I don't enjoy the story line.  I try to read all of the Printz nominees each year and I haven't read one yet that I thought was a bad book.

Two of my favorites from our reading list:

Over the last two years, I have basically become a Maggie Stiefvater fangirl.  The first book I ever read that she'd written was Shiver, which is a paranormal romance, and I thought it was so good.  She goes to a whole new level in The Scorpio Races, though, which makes me love her even more.

This story is set on the fictional island of Thisby and mainly has two main characters: Puck and Sean.

Every year on this island, the capaill uisce, or water horses, begin coming up onto the land.  This generally happens in the fall.  The water horses are typically extremely dangerous and kill pets and people each year.  A few people will capture the water horses and attempt to train them leading up to November 1, the day which the Scorpio Races are held.  Someone dies every year, without fail, but many people consider it worth it due to the large financial prize.  This is also the island's main source of income as rich people from all over the world come to watch and bet on the races.

Puck's parents were killed several years prior when they went out fishing and met a water horse out on the ocean.  Since then it has just been her and her two brothers, one older and one younger, trying to eek out a living doing this or that.  Her oldest brother is the only one who has graduated from school and, as such, is the only stable money earner in the household.  One day, he approaches Puck and says he cannot live island life anymore; he's moving to the mainland and he's doing it alone.  Puck, of course, is terrified by this news.  It only becomes compounded when the island's wealthy stable owner, Mr. Malvern, comes to their home to evict them because they haven't been paying the mortgage.  The only way Puck sees to save her home and make a life for herself and her younger brother is to enter the Scorpio Races.  But when she tries to see about riding a water horse, she just can't do it.  She's the first girl to ever enter the race and she just cannot find a good horse that she feels stable on, so she decides to ride her own trusty horse, Dove.  It is a first on lots of grounds.

Sean is all alone in this world and the best stable hand that Mr. Malvern has.  Sean has won the last two Scorpio Races on his water horse, Corr.  He loves Corr desperately and wants to buy her from Mr. Malvern but, being the greedy man he is, Mr. Malvern always refuses.  As Sean prepares for this year's Scorpio Races, he is not only trying to figure out how much money, exactly, it'll take to buy Corr, but he gets to know Puck and is intrigued by her as well.

Both Puck and Sean need the money and, as their friendship blossoms, they both realize they cannot both win it.

This story is full of suspense and is written in such a way that, even if you aren't a "horse person" you can understand the love that Sean and Puck feel for Corr and Dove.  And I also think it has the best first line of any book I've read.  Ever.

I love The Beatles, so selecting this book to read for this module was a no-brainer.

At its core, this book is just a biography of John Lennon's life.  I didn't know much about Lennon before reading this book; he was murdered several years before I was born.  There was a special quality about this book, though.  The fact that it was practically covered in pictures from Lennon's birth to death really added to the depth of Lennon's life story.  I also loved all of the quotes from interviews that the author did and letters that she quoted.

The author was able to portray Lennon, I think, very truthfully.  I always had this image in my head of The Beatles being a very clean cut, squeaky clean type group and this was a long way from the truth.

Lennon spent a lot of his youth feeling kind of lost and, by the time he seemed to get things figured out, he was murdered.  By the end of this book, I was a weepy mess.  I actually got online and listened to some of his solo works and was so moved.  This book was truly moving.

Classic YA Literature

I will be the first to admit that I am not a fan of the classics.  I slogged through them in high school and the sharp analysis I was required to do of each syllable of each word (ok, not really, but that's what it felt like) left a bad taste in my mouth.  And it didn't help that they were hard to read and interpret.

However, the classics are a lot different than YA classics.  I mean, we're talking the difference in Shakespeare and Judy Blume, here.  I found the YA classics that I read this week to have a very easy to read quality and the themes transcended time; they were things I could still relate to even though these books were written as far back as 1908.

I wish, in the deepest recesses of my heart, that they'd reissue this book with a better, updated cover.  This book was great and would have HUGE appeal for boys, but the cover is simply boring and gives no indication of what the book is about.  In my library, I think I have been the only one to check it out in the last year.

Jerry, our main character in this book, is having a tough year.  His mother died the previous spring and now he's being sent off to the all-boys Catholic high school.  He also wants to play football, even though he's not particularly physically well suited for it, and ends up sore and injured after each practice.

Alternatively we have Archie, who isn't the leader of the underground student organization that operates in the school (called the Vigils), but might as well be.  Archie is in charge of deciding which students to bully and how to bully them.  The school does not officially acknowledge the existence of the Vigils.

Each year, the school does a big chocolate sale to raise funds.  This year the principal is ill and on leave so the vice principal, Brother Leon, is in charge.  He got a great deal on the chocolate so the boys are now expected to sell twice the number from the year before.  Brother Leon approaches Archie to see if the Vigils can help bolster the student body into selling all the chocolates. 

Archie sees this as an opportunity to gain power within the school.  The acting principal not only acknowledged that the Vigils exist, but asked for their help!  Archie, being the person he is, takes the chance to make a major power play and does it using Jerry.

Jerry is instructed that, for two weeks, he isn't to sell the chocolate.  When Brother Leon asks for his total number of boxes sold each day, Jerry is to decline publicly.  After two weeks, however, Jerry continues to refuse, which makes Archie furious.  How dare he go against Vigil orders!  To make things worse, the other boys see Jerry refusing to sell and they start doing the same.  Brother Leon comes down on Archie who, in turn begins a very systematic bullying approach that ends with a bloody and beaten Jerry (mentally and physically).

I know very well that this is the optimist in me, but I would have enjoyed this book a lot more had Archie, the Vigils, and Brother Leon gotten their "just desserts" in the end.  On the flip side, this book had a very good lesson in it: the people who should "get theirs" often don't.  Regardless, it was a good book that kept me reading.

I also read:

With this book being among the oldest on the reading list, I was both intrigued and terrified that I wouldn't like it.  What I found, though, was a super sweet story about friendship and the making of a family.

Marissa and Matthew are siblings who live together and run their family's farm.  They know someone in their town who has adopted a child and they decide, since they are getting older, it might be a good idea to adopt a young boy to help around the farm.  When Matthew arrives at the train station after making arrangements with the orphanage, he ends up coming away with a red-headed girl who talks almost constantly.

Anne almost immediately endears herself to Matthew but Marissa is set to send her back to the orphanage.  They needed a BOY and, as sad as this young girl's story is, they need a boy.  Matthew is so taken with Anne, however, that he ends up going to bat for her and Marissa relents, deciding if it is that important to Matthew that they can keep Anne.

Most of the book is full of Anne, her adventures, and Marissa or Matthew's reactions.  Initially, Marissa is generally cold toward Anne but it doesn't take long for her to consider Anne a daughter.  After Matthew's unexpected death, Anne gives up her very coveted college scholarship in order to help Marissa continue to run the farm.  It is truly the story of a young girl coming into her own and a family being made in a relatively nontraditional manner.