The Printz Award Winners: 2001

Today I continue my survey of books honored by the Michael L. Printz Award, given annually by the American Library Association (ALA) to "the book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature." Here were the awards in 2001, given to books published in 2000:

Winner:

Kit's Wilderness by David Almond

Honor books:

Many Stones by Carolyn Coman

The Body of Christopher Creed by Carol Plum-Ucci

Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison

Stuck in Neutral by Terry Trueman

I couldn't manage to read all five of these books, not least because I couldn't get my hands on them. My local library, which has a pretty huge collection, only had the Plum-Ucci in house; the Almond was only available as an audio book, and the Rennison had been lost. I guess this shows how much influence the Printz Award had at the time ... not much. My local bookstores didn't have the Almond in stock (I had to mail order), and the Rennison didn't have the medal on the front, like most winners do ... but more on that later. Here are my thoughts on the books:

Coman's Many Stones (honor book): I don't know why my library didn't have this book about a girl whose trip to post-Apartheid South Africa with her father helps her heal family wounds. It sounds interesting and Coman is a previous Newbery Honor winner, too. But I was already investing in the winner, so I didn't spring to buy this one, too. (Many Stones was also a National Book Award finalist.*)

Plum-Ucci's The Body of Christopher Creed (honor book): This was a great read, differing from what you might usually think of as a mystery. It opens with the narrator Torey Adams, a self-described "formerly Mr. All-American Football Kicker, Blond Geeky Haircut for Little League and All That," writing from his senior year at a boarding school, where he has obviously been sent to avoid some issues back home. The bulk of the story is his account of his junior year back home in small-town New Jersey, and what happened when the class weirdo, Christopher Creed, suddenly disappears with no evidence but a mysterious note. Was it suicide? Murder? The casual high-school gossip about Chris bothers Torey, and as he becomes involved with a fellow student who others assume is involved in the disappearance, Torey comes under suspicion himself. This may sound like a traditional mystery setup, but as the book progresses, it's more about small towns and gossip and how people twist the truth to fit what they need to believe. The start was a little slow, but the book became thoroughly engrossing by the totally believable ending. (The Body of Christopher Creed was also a finalist for the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.)

Rennison's Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging (honor book): As you might be able to tell from the title, Rennison is a Brit, and this comic novel is veddy British indeed. In fact, it reminded me of nothing so much as a Bridget Jones's Diary for the teen set. The main character, fourteen-year-old Georgia, even tells her story in diary format. She has weird parents and an incontinent little sister, isn't great at school, and is obsessed with boys and kissing (snogging)—ie, not much different than your average teen. The book was the first in a now ten-volume series, so that's why there's no Printz medal on the cover—they're marketing directly to teens, not to librarians.

Trueman's Stuck in Neutral (honor book): This slim volume has an intriguing concept: what if a severely disabled fourteen year old, despite the cerebral palsy that leaves him unable to communicate with the outside world, is really an articulate genius? Shawn has a sense of humor about his situation, although he worries about the toll it takes on his family. His father left because he couldn't stand seeing Shawn suffer—at least, he thinks Shawn is suffering. Shawn finds much to enjoy about his life, despite his limitations, and worries his father may try to put him "out of his misery." As the author develops the relationship between Shawn and his often-absent father, he also leaves it open whether or not the story ends with Shawn's death. It's a very unique book, but had somewhat limited appeal for me once it answered the "what if" question about what kind of mind could exist within a body incapable of communication.

Almond's Kit's Wilderness (winner): Almond was on the honor list the previous year for his story Skellig, and this novel had a similar element of magical realism throughout. Kit Watson has returned with his family to live in the old mining town where his grandfather spent his career. Kit falls in with a group of kids led by John Askew, a tough son of a mining family, and they play a game called "Death," where they meet in an abandoned mine and then leave one child alone in the dark to see how long he will wait before coming out. After his turn in the mine, Kit seems to see ghosts of workers (many of them children) lost during the mine's history. When his grandfather becomes ill and John Askew runs away, Kit uses these ghosts—or it is just his storytelling ability—to bring them home. As he shares with a friend, "Telling stories is a kind of magic." Kit's Wilderness has multiple layers, as Kit's grandfather shares ghost stories and Kit writes his own tale of a prehistoric boy separated from his family, although it's not that challenging to follow, in Almond's simple yet evocative language. I found it an intriguing book, but the mining-town setting and complexity might be a bit much for some young readers. (Kit's Wilderness was also a Carnegie Medal shortlist.)

So how would I have voted that year? (Considering I didn't get to read all the books, that is.) Well, the Rennison was amusing but lightweight and the Trueman somewhat one-dimensional (although the one dimension was interesting). The Almond was certainly the most literary of the bunch, but I think I would have favored Plum-Ucci's The Body of Christopher Creed, which managed to use the mystery genre format to explore larger issues of interest to teens.

*Only one overlap between the Printz and the NBA lists this year, as opposed to two in 2000. The winner was Gloria Whelan's Homeless Bird, a book for ages 8-12 about an Indian girl's arranged marriage.

Photo of the Week--7/26/10

There weren't any pigeons, or even seagulls, in this little corner of Nova Scotia that we visited in the summer of 2003. Boy was growing out of the seagull chase, anyway (his and everyone else's efforts at camp this past week to protect our picnic tables notwithstanding). Luckily, I don't think anyone ever outgrows the desire to throw rocks into the water! It reminds me of an old Peanuts cartoon that always made me chuckle: Charlie Brown picks up a rock on the shore and throws it into the water. Linus watches and says, "It probably took that rock two million years just to make it to shore and here you go and throw it back." So sorry, rock, if it took you a long time to reach the Nova Scotia shore, but it's just too much fun chucking you into the Atlantic!

Cookie of the Month: Pfefferneusse

Finally, I found the time to try making pfeffernuesse. Why pfeffernuesse? Why not pfefferneusse? It's pfun to say pfefferneusse. It sounds exotic, and with pepper in the recipe, it is kind of exotic. So I turned to my trusty Better Homes & Gardens cookbook:

4 cups all-purpose flour
½ cup granulated sugar
1¼ teaspoons baking soda
1½ teaspoons ground cinnamon
½ teaspoon ground cloves
½ teaspoon ground nutmeg

dash of pepper
¾ cup light molasses
½ cup butter or margarine
2 eggs
sifted powdered sugar

Combine flour, sugar, soda, spices, and pepper. In a saucepan combine molasses and butter; heat and stir until butter melts. (I actually used my trusty microwave, instead, to the same effect) Cool to room temperature, then stir in eggs. Add dry ingredients to molasses mixture; mix well. (I was sooooo glad to have my handy-dandy KitchenAid mixer for this step, because the dough got really, really stiff, and I saved my elbow from severe pain this way.) Cover dough and chill several hours or overnight. When it's thoroughly chilled, it will look very stiff and solid, as in the picture:

The next step is to grease a cookie sheet, and shape the dough into 1-inch balls. Notice the instructions don't say, "roll the dough." This is because the dough is so hard I couldn't use my trusty click scoop to grab an inch-worth of dough for me. No, I literally had to break off a piece of dough and warm it in my hands before I could roll it into something approximating the shape of a ball. It took me a bit of time, but I finally got 30 balls ready to bake, which you do in a preheated 350F oven, for 12 to 14 minutes. Take them out and cool on a wire rack. It was at this point I was really glad I had TSU translate "pfefferneusse" for me. I knew the "pfeffer" referred to the pepper, but I couldn't quite pin down "neusse," although it sounded familiar. I had an "ah-ha!" moment when he told me it meant "nut," because that's what these little cookies looked like.

There was one last step to finish these tasty little nuggets: Roll in sifted powdered sugar. Or, in my case because I don't own and am too lazy to use a sifter, unsifted powdered sugar. The result is a tasty little nut-shaped cookie that tastes a lot like gingerbread. It's dense but chewy, and not quite as sweet as my mom's gingersnap cookie recipe. But I loved the spicy flavoring—cloves are one of my favorite scents—and it would be very very easy to down half a dozen of these at one sitting. Luckily for my waistline, I took the bulk of these up to camp to share with my family.

For me, I give them the following rating: nom nom nom (three noms out of five).

Photo of the Week--7/19/10

Now this is the way to go after pigeons! Well, if there actually were any pigeons in Iceland, I'm sure you could get a good chasing going atop a pony. Although Boy was skeptical at first, he was soon riding like a pro—not that is was very hard, these animals knew exactly where they were going, so the only thing you really needed to do was hang on and keep your pony from stopping to eat the grass along the side of the path. Which, of course, turned out to be an impossible task for me, much to Boy's amusement.

More random thoughts

I wonder whether the little acrobat ants that keep finding their way into my kitchen have started developing legends about it:

"Yes, children, there are endless vistas of sweets in the Kitchen of Plenty, but you must beware! Hidden dangers await you, not least ... I shudder to mention it..."

"What is it, Ant-ie? What is it? Cans of Raid?"

"No, children, it is: THE GIANT BLUE SPONGE OF DEATH. It will descend from the skies in a mass of wet and if you don't drown in the water, it will squish you to death. Beware!"

I've also been wondering how acute my cats' sense of smell is. I know they can tell when I've been visiting other cats at the shelter, because they sniff my hands in curiosity when I get back. But can they also smell how cute those cats are? Because lately I've been ending my shifts by cuddling kittens in the nursery. This means I'm often handling the 6-week-old, too-small-to-be-adopted-yet, super-cute kittens. And when I get home, Clio not only sniffs my hands, she insists on climbing into my lap, rubbing herself all over me, and generally demonstrating she is just as cute as any young whippersnapper of a kitten.

Last thing I've been wondering: we will have decent fishing this year at our new campsite? Because I've sorely missed the nightly fish fry of tasty panfish, perch, and bluegill that we used to have up at Canada's Rice Lake. I don't even need it nightly this year, just one will do. The big fish we managed to catch on Lake Superior last year just didn't taste the same ... and it was not worth the horrible nausea I endured, fishing in 5-foot-waves, to catch those big ones. No, give me the little tasty morsels, especially if someone else has caught and cleaned them. I'll be happy to cook. And thus I shall conclude with a haiku in their honor:

Bluegill, panfish, perch

Tasty, flaky, salty, sweet

Catch them in my mouth

The Printz Award Winners: 2000

So I mentioned I was taking a break from reading and blogging about Austen and remedial classics to try something new this summer. I'd been thinking about revisiting classic children's books from my childhood, or going through all the Newbery winners, or maybe reading sci fi novels that won the Nebula Award (I had a couple winners/nominees as biography subjects). But then I realized what made the most sense would be to look at the winners of the Michael L. Printz Award, given annually by the American Library Association (ALA) to "the book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature." After all, I have been reading quite a few YA novels lately, including some that have been Printz honor books, but I've only read a couple of the winners. The Printz medal was first awarded in 2000, so that gives me eleven years of books to read, a manageable number. I figure I can cover one year every one or two weeks, reading the winner and one or two of the runners-up (maybe more if I have time or have read some previously).

So I'm starting with the first awards, given in 2000 to books published in the U.S. in 1999. The books recognized were:

Winner:

Monster by Walter Dean Myers

Honor Books:

Skellig by David Almond

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

Hard Love by Ellen Wittlinger

My first thought after finishing a couple of these books was, "Boy, am I glad I didn't have to choose between these books!" Not only were they uniformly excellent, they were so very different in their subject matter and tone. Here are my thoughts on each:

Almond's Skellig (honor book): I first read this in 2006, coming home from the SCBWI New York conference at which the author, a Brit, gave two very interesting presentations. I picked up a couple of his books and began reading this one on the flight home. What a short flight it was! I was hooked within the first page, in which the young narrator Michael talks about the day he discovered a creature living in the dilapidated garage of his new home: "He was filthy and pale and dried out and I thought he was dead. I couldn't have been more wrong. I'd soon begin to see the truth about him, that there'd never been another creature like him in the world." Whether the creature is a monster, an angel, or something in between is never answered, but the story about how Michael and his new friend Mina return him to health is interwoven with the story of Michael's severely ill baby sister in a beautiful, poetic language. This book reminded me of the best magical realism ... although I have to admit the title did not stick with me. I checked the book out of the library last week and realized two pages in I'd read it before. I was just as hooked the second time, though, and devoured the book in one sitting. (Note: Skellig also won the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Book Award, Britain's two highest literary prizes for children's literature.)

Anderson's Speak (honor book): This book, the first novel written by the Edwards Award-winning Anderson, has a towering reputation. (The Edwards Award is given by the ALA for lifetime achievement in young adult literature.) It was groundbreaking in its subject matter, portraying how a girl deals—or rather, fails to deal—with a traumatic event. (I'm not going to be specific about it, in case you haven't read the novel yet, because the event isn't revealed until midway through the novel.) The story of how freshman Melinda became an outcast and how she finds a way through her pain is told in language that is vivid, emotional, and witty. ("I stand in the center aisle of the auditorium, a wounded zebra in a National Geographic special.") To give you an idea of the effect the book had on readers and the YA market in general—it became a bestseller and has become a staple of the high school curriculum—two years later Anderson's publisher named a new imprint after the book, creating "Speak" Books to publish "classic and cutting-edge YA fiction to the forefront of the paperback list." When I first read it last year, I thought it lived up to its considerable hype—a pretty tall order, considering I'd been reading and hearing wonderful things about the book from people in the know. (Note: Speak won the SCBWI's Golden Kite Award and was a finalist for both the National Book Award* and the Edgar Award for best YA mystery of the year.)

Wittlinger's Hard Love (honor book): This book is definitely the most dated of the set, as it concerns a teen boy who meets a girl through their common love of writing zines and falls in love with her even though she is a lesbian. Since zines (small, self-published magazines) have largely been superseded by the internet and blogs like this one, this book is fast becoming a relic of the "turn of the century." That wasn't why I found this the hardest of the four books to get into; I think it was the closed-off nature of the narrator that made it difficult to get involved—that, or the funky typesetting. That said, I decided to read a few pages before turning one night and ended staying up to finish the book. This novel had a clear character arc that made sense, allowing the narrator to grow on me, and it was fairly groundbreaking in its portrayal of a lesbian character. (Note: Hard Love also won a Lambda Literary Award (given the best LGBT fiction) for children's YA fiction.)

Myers's Monster (winner): I have to confess, I hadn't read any of Myers's books before this year. (Since he's also an Edwards Award-winner, a two-time Newbery Honor medalist, and five-time Coretta Scott King Award winner, it's pretty sad that I overlooked this pioneering African American children's writer. My excuse is that his books are so ... full of boys doing boy things. Not that I don't like reading about boy characters, but I usually prefer them in fantasies, not realistic fiction.) But I read his Newbery Honor-winning Scorpions (1988) earlier this year, and enjoyed his tale of a young boy struggling to find his place in a dangerous neighborhood. Monster follows similar themes, telling the story of a 16-year-old New Yorker who is on trial for felony murder, standing accused of playing lookout for a robbery gone bad. The most interesting thing about Monster is not that Myers never fully answers whether his protagonist Steve was involved or not, but that he has Steve present his story in screenplay format. It's Steve's way of both trying to figure out how he has ended up in this situation—in jail, on trial with his life on the line—and distancing himself from the "monster" the prosecution claims he is. It's a striking, affecting way to tell the story, and definitely made me think. (Note: Monster was also a King Honor Book and a National Book Award finalist*.)

So, how would I have voted that year? Hard to say; I would have had a tough time deciding between Skellig, which is right up my fantastic alley, and Speak, which was emotional and clearly groundbreaking. Judging on the past ten years, though, I think Speak would win the day; it definitely holds up well and has had lasting significance, whereas Monster seems more a product of its time.

Coming up next time: Almond wins, and I read two books by authors unfamiliar to me.

*The winner of the National Book Award for Young People's Literature that year was When Zachary Beaver Came to Town, by Kimberly Willis Holt. The NBA is awarded to children's novels for all ages, and Holt's book seems targeted for a slightly younger than YA audience, which may be why it doesn't overlap with the Printz list ... although it made that year's ALA Best Books for Young Adults list. "YA" is in the eye of the beholder, though, and the dividing line between "middle grade" (ages 9-13—??) and "young adult" (13 and up??) is very poorly defined.

Photo of the Week--7/12/10

According to Wikipedia, there are some 155 species of birds near Voss, Norway, where this photo was taken. I don't think that pigeons are one of them, however; nor did we see any loch monsters in the lake behind us. It was June 2002 and we took a very lovely cruise up and down and into the coast of Norway. You wouldn't know it from the clouds in the picture, but at this point we were almost to experiencing the "midnight sun," we were so far north. Maybe that is why we did not see many pigeons, because they are vampiric creatures who scorn daylight.