Youth Media Awards Predictions

Awards season is in full swing!  On Monday morning ALA will have their Youth Media Awards ceremony at the Mid-Winter Conference in Seattle, WA.  For those of us not attending, the awards will be livestreamed on the web.

But I digress.  This post is about what I think will win.  No.  Let's change that.  This post is not for predicting what will win, but promoting what I think should win!  And I'm really just going to focus on the more popular awards that are geared toward teens.  Here goes...

William C. Morris Award
We'll start with this one because I haven't yet had a chance to read all of these books.  My library holds on Wonder Show, Love and Other Perishable Items and After the Snow literally just came in on Wednesday.  So I've only got two titles under my belt.  And The Miseducation of Cameron Post struck such a chord with me (the nineties!) that even though Seraphina is a great book and I really liked it, I have to go with Emily M. Danforth's Cameron Post.

YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults
I've read all five finalists.  I enjoyed all five finalists.  All five are great books.  That's why they made the shortlist.  But my personal favorite, and the one I'd like to win is Bomb by Steve Sheinkin.  For me, it's about the riveting story and the masterful way that Sheinkin wove together the various threads of science, espionage and covert military operations.

Michael L. Printz Award
The biggie.  Over the past year I've read probably young adult 40-50 books that were published in 2012 and thus eligible for this award.  The first YA title that I read in 2012 was John Green's The Fault in Our Stars.  No other novel that I read in 2012 comes close to being as compelling, thoughtfully humorous or devastatingly real as this book.  Heck, no other YA book I've read EVER even stands nearby it in the ranking of my heart and mind.  So yes, I know it's the favorite.  I know that Green has won before and been honored before and that makes some people not want him to win again.  I know everyone is probably sick of reading about it and hearing how much everyone loved it and on and on.  But it truly deserves to win and I hope it does.

And then here are my completely-subjective-based-on-the-very-few-books-I've-read-that-were-eligible picks for a few other awards:

John Newbery Medal: R.J. Palacio's Wonder is the only stand-out title I read, unless the committee goes wild and chooses a nonfiction title...in which case I'm all about Steve Sheinkin's Bomb.

Coretta Scott King Award: Sharon Flake's Pinned was superb.  I was pleasantly surprised by Ann Bausum's Marching to the Mountaintop.  

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