Libba Bray has won this year’s Michael L. Printz Award for her book Going Bovine!! You probably know her from the amazingly popular Gemma Doyle trilogy (A Great and Terrible Beauty, Rebel Angels, The Sweet Far Thing) or her visit here to the Iowa City Public Library in 2007. Going Bovine is a road trip story about a guy with Creutzfeld Jakob’s (aka mad cow) disease…and it’s so super good that it “exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature.” So let’s all get reading!
Just heard that the Iowa City Community School District has released their annual Summer Reading Booklists. Thanks to the ICCSD Teacher Librarians for putting these together! The links to the pdfs are here. I can personally recommend Graceling and The Hunger Games (others too, but those were my faves from the lists!). Strangely, these two both have companion books coming out in the fall…you better believe we’ve got ‘em preordered!
The Hunger Games sequel comes first in September with Catching Fire. Cashore’s prequel to Graceling follows in October with Fire.
The 2009 Iowa Teen Award winner has been announced! This year’s award goes to Rick Riordan for his super amazing novel The Lightning Thief which is the first in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. Thanks for voting all you Iowa teens! If you haven’t yet read these books then I pity you…no wait, I envy you! ‘Cause you will be coming fresh to these novels whereas the rest of us can only reread them over and over. And over. My point? This book = good stuff. You have chosen wisely.
The Michael L. Printz Award is an award for a book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature. It is named for a Topeka, Kansas school librarian who was a long-time active member of the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association.
2009 Award Winner
Jellicoe Road
by Melina Marchetta
Abandoned by her drug-addicted mother at the age of eleven, high school student Taylor Markham struggles with her identity and family history at a boarding school in Australia.
2009 Honor Books
The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks
by E. Lockhart
Frankie Landau-Banks at age 14: Debate Club. Her father’s “bunny rabbit.” A mildly geeky girl attending a highly competitive boarding school. Frankie Landau-Banks at age 15: A knockout figure. A sharp tongue. A chip on her shoulder. And a gorgeous new senior boyfriend: the supremely goofy, word-obsessed Matthew Livingston. Frankie Landau-Banks. No longer the kind of girl to take “no” for an answer. Especially when “no” means she’s excluded from her boyfriend’s all-male secret society.
Nation
by Terry Pratchett
After a devastating tsunami destroys all that they have ever known, Mau, an island boy, and Daphne, an aristocratic English girl, together with a small band of refugees, set about rebuilding their community and all the things that are important in their lives.
Tender Morsels
by Margo Lanagan
A young woman who has endured unspeakable cruelties is magically granted a safe haven apart from the real world and allowed to raise her two daughters in this alternate reality, until the barrier between her world and the real one begins to break down.
