The most prestigious honors in children’s literature, the Newbery and Caldecott medals, were awarded to Tae Keller for When You Trap a Tiger and Michaela Goade for We Are Water Protectors on January 25, 2021, at the American Library Association’s virtual midwinter meeting. Also announced at the gathering were the...
Alex Award [for the ten best adult books that appeal to teen audiences] Black Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga Press/Gallery Books/Simon) The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune (Tor Books/Tom Doherty Associates/Macmillan) The Impossible First: From Fire to Ice - Crossing Antarctica Alone by Colin O'Brady (Scribner/Simon)...
Winner Honeybee: The Busy Life of Apis Mellifera by Candace Fleming; illus. by Eric Rohmann Primary Porter/Holiday 40 pp. 2/20 978-0-8234-4285-0 $18.99 e-book ed. 978-0-8234-4304-8 $11.99 A worker bee breaks out of her honeycomb cell and begins a task-filled life in her colony. The “teeming, trembling flurry” of bees within...
Winner Furia by Yamile Saied Méndez High School Algonquin 368 pp. g 9/20 9781616209919 $17.95 REVIEW TO COME Honor Books Never Look Back by Lilliam Rivera High School Bloomsbury 320 pp. g 9/20 978-1-5476-0373-2 $18.99 e-book ed. 978-1-5476-0374-9 $13.29 Pheus is an...
Winner ¡Vamos!: Let’s Go Eat by Raúl the Third; illus. by the author; color by Elaine Bay Primary Versify/Houghton 40 pp. g 3/20 978-1-328-55704-9 $14.99 e-book ed. 978-0-358-33070-7 $9.99 Little Lobo and his canine sidekick Bernabé, whom we met in ¡Vamos!: Let’s Go to the Market (rev. 3/19),...
Winner Efrén Divided by Ernesto Cisneros Intermediate, Middle School Quill Tree/HarperCollins 272 pp. g 3/20 978-0-06-288168-7 $16.99 REVIEW TO COME Honor Books Lupe Wong Won’t Dance by Donna Barba Higuera Intermediate, Middle School Levine Querido 272 pp. g...
Winner Everything Sad Is Untrue: (A True Story) by Daniel Nayeri Middle School Levine Querido 368 pp. g 8/20 978-1-64614-000-8 $17.99 e-book ed. 978-1-64614-002-2 $9.99 Framed loosely as his twelve-year-old self’s responses to a series of school assignments, Nayeri’s fictionalized memoir swirls through his own memories as well as stories from his family...
Winner R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Aretha Franklin, the Queen of Soul by Carole Boston Weatherford; illus. by Frank Morrison Primary, Intermediate Atheneum 48 pp. g 8/20 978-1-5344-5228-2 $18.99 e-book ed. 978-1-5344-5229-9 $10.99 This impressionistic picture-book biography of Aretha Franklin (1942–2018) consists of a series of rhyming couplets following the iconic singer through her life. Weatherford employs...
Winner Before the Ever After by Jacqueline Woodson Intermediate Paulsen/Penguin 176 pp. g 9/20 978-0-399-54543-6 $17.99 In her latest novel in verse, Woodson (Locomotion, rev. 3/03; Brown Girl Dreaming, rev. 9/14) explores the impact of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) on football players and their families from the...