Michael L. Printz Award 2008 The White Darkness written by Geraldine McCaughrean (HarperTempest) review

Printz Honor Books

• One Whole and Perfect Day by Judith Clarke (Front Street) review
• Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath by Stephanie Hemphill (Knopf) review
• Repossessed by A. M. Jenkins (Harper) review
• Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet by Elizabeth Knox (Farrar) review

How the Horn Book reviewed the winners

Geraldine McCaughrean  The White Darkness
      HarperTempest
      Reviewed 3/07
Shy fourteen-year-old Sym is, in her peers' assessment, a "misfit weirdo." She's not sex-obsessed, and she loves a long-dead polar explorer named Titus who lives in her head. From this premise McCaughrean builds a completely unexpected book-not just a quirky coming-of-age story, though it is that, but also a page-turning survival thriller; a love story; and not least a scintillatingly observed, unsentimental portrait of Antarctica. Sym and her uncle Victor (the eccentric family friend who has stood in for her father since the latter's death) join a polar expedition, but unlike the other tourists, Victor is there to fulfill his life's obsession: to find Symmes's Hole, the entrance to what he believes is our hollow planet, inside which are alternate worlds. He needs Sym as a sort of polar pioneer Eve to populate the Inner Spheres of the Earth. The story of Sym's escape both from Uncle Victor's insanity and from the hostile and utterly inhospitable Ice is riveting. What makes the book truly stand out is Sym's unique personality; the poignancy of her relationship with Titus; the slow revelation of the depth of Uncle Victor's mad malevolence; and, through it all, McCaughrean's inspired wordplay and powerful imagery: "Here even the common cold germ is put to flight by the uncommon cold"; "God sketched Antarctica, then erased most of it again, in the hope a better idea would strike Him." M.V.P.

Judith Clarke  One Whole and Perfect Day
      Front Street
      Reviewed 5/07
Like an extended treasure hunt, Clarke's novel traces the minds and movements of eight characters through chance meetings, family rifts, and decisive moments to a final, festive celebration of unity. Sixteen-year-old Lily, tired of being sensible, decides to fall in love. Her mother brings yet another "lame duck" old person home for the weekend from her job at an adult daycare center. Red-necked Pop, Lily's grandfather, takes a walk down memory lane; Nan arranges a birthday party; "hopeless" brother Lonnie responds to a smile and decides not to drop out of college after all. Together, these small decisions, actions, and experiences converge in "the kind of miracle that happened in fairy tales and certainly never occurred in families like theirs" — a miracle of identities revealed, kindness rewarded, and apologies accepted. Clarke's conclusion is perhaps unrealistically optimistic but cheering. And although her leaps from one point of view to another may stall the story's momentum for some, her sharp, poetic prose evokes each character's inner life with rich and often amusing vibrancy, as with Lily's devastatingly accurate observation that "having a crush was like a prison. It was like solitary confinement." DEIRDRE F. BAKER

Stephanie Hemphill  Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath
      Knopf
      Reviewed 3/07
Like legions of teenage girls, author Hemphill identified with the brilliant, beautiful, vulnerable, incandescent Sylvia Plath. In this fictionalized biography in verse, Hemphill channels that Sylvia, the romantic version teenage girls want: the one who gets both her art and the "big, dark, hunky boy" (as Plath described poet Ted Hughes in her diary). Things don't work out that way, as everyone knows, and the story ends tragically, with Plath gassing herself in her oven with her children asleep in the next room. Hemphill's verse possesses the same crystalline clarity as Plath's, the same relentless attempt to get to the heart of the matter-with all the words exactly right. The majority of the poems here (about one hundred and fifty) are putatively composed by the people who knew Plath: her mother, her brother, her friends, her many boyfriends, her teachers and professors, her editors, her psychiatrists, her doctors, her husband, her neighbors, the nannies who worked for her, her literary friends. The remainder of the poems are identified as Hemphill herself "Imagining Sylvia Plath." Overall, the effect is palimpsestic, a layering of voices: Hemphill writing Plath writing the characters. Almost surprisingly, the whole thing works. Like Plath, she is metrically adept and able to handle, elegantly, a range of verse forms, including the villanelle and sonnet. She also possesses Plath's eye for figurative language, transforming homely, domestic images into startling metaphors and similes, as in a poem by "Aurelia" (Plath's mother), who writes that "without poetry she [Sylvia] would crumble / like a dried-out lemon cake, / stale and inedible." This poem prefigures a later one in which a lemon cake cooling on the counter ominously suggests the crumbling Hughes-Plath household. At the end of each poem, a prose footnote identifies the incident or source or person-but there is no sense that Hemphill's version is any "truer" than others. Factual truth isn't the point anyway. Hemphill's verse, like Plath's, is completely compelling: every word, every line, worth reading. Kobayashi Issa Today and Today; illus. by G. Brian Karas. LISSA PAUL

Jenkins, A. M.  Repossessed
      HarperTeen
      Reviewed spring 2008
Tired of tormenting the damned, fallen angel Kiriel hijacks a human body. The novelty of life as a corporeal being, specifically slacker teen Shaun, fascinates Kiriel, whose descriptions of human experiences — from eating and bathing to handling a bully and lusting after a girl — are both funny and affecting in this provocative novel. J.M.B.

Elizabeth Knox  Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet
      Farrar
      Reviewed 3/07
The second part of Knox's Dreamhunter Duet, set in a society where capturing and "performing" dreams constitutes the basis of the entertainment, political, and even medical industries, is thoroughly impressive-for its sure, literary prose, nuanced characters, and fully realized Edwardian setting, but even more so for its original, surprising imagery and plot. Having conveyed the terrifying dream "Buried Alive" to a large audience, dreamhunter Laura Hame and her family mobilize an inquiry into the use of nightmares in the "education" of convicts, only to realize that an ambitious politician has plans to take over Founderston by imposing a debilitatingly pleasant dream, "Contentment," on its populace. Laura, helped by her disgruntled lover Sandy and the golem-like Nown (a literal sandman of her own creation), comes to a full understanding of the astounding nature and purpose of the Place-the "Land with consciousness" that furnishes the dreams in which dreamhunters trade. Dreamquake is rife with suspense and breathless moments but is most notable for its vivid interplay of powerful, mythic imagery. Knox uses the New Testament image of buried and resurrected Lazarus as a metaphor to explore some of our deepest urges and fears-sexual and imaginative creativity, consciousness, and the need for a sense of meaning. An involving-and challenging-read, Knox's fantasy is outstanding in its ability to make us think both poetically and analytically about human nature. DEIRDRE F. BAKER

2008 ALA awards