The 2017 ALA Youth Media Awards were announced a week ago--I watched them live, although I had some technical difficulties and missed Leave Me Alone!'s Caldecott Honor. I was happily surprised by it later; it was one of my favorites, and was honored at our mock Caldecott, too. Our group read all of the Caldecott Honors, but sadly, and for the first time, not the winner: Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by Javaka Steptoe (Little, Brown). The public library only had two copies, both of which were checked out to librarians for their mock Caldecotts! I hope no one was too disappointed; and I also hope they will seek out Radiant Child. I bet the library is buying a lot more copies. Congratulations, Javaka Steptoe!
We also had a lot of the eventual Newbery Honors on hand, as well as the winner, Kelly Barnhill's The Girl Who Drank the Moon (Algonquin). This was my daughter's favorite, so I'm especially glad it won. I was just about her age when Robin McKinley's The Hero and the Crown (also a fantasy novel) won the Newbery, and it's still a favorite of mine, too.
The award I'm most invested in, though, is the Batchelder, which (as readers of this blog may know) is for "an outstanding children’s book originally published in a language other than English in a country other than the United States, and subsequently translated into English for publication in the United States." This year's winner is Cry, Heart, But Never Break (Enchanted Lion), a book about death--which is also, of course, a book about life. I'll take a closer look at Cry, Heart and all of this year's Batchelder books in another post.
Lastly, I want to give a special shout-out to my brother-in-law David Milgrim, whose beginning reader Go, Otto, Go! (Simon Spotlight) is a Geisel Honor book! Go, David, go!
