Printz Awards & National Book Award for Young People

The winner of the Michael Printz Award for excellence in young adult literature was announced last month, along with the honor books. The winner was The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean. I admit I was surprised, as I was pulling for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. That book, by the way, won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. It is excellent.

Check out the winners: http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards/printzaward/Printz.cfm and http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2007.html (scroll all the way down to see Young People's Literature category)

Here is School Library Journal's review of The White Darkness. Personally, I didn't finish as it was not my kind of book, but many people loved it.

• McCaughrean weaves a tale of obsession and personal growth against the backdrop of nature's unrelenting power. Fourteen-year-old Sym Wates is fascinated with the Antarctic and the men who explored it, even to the point of creating an internal confidante in the form of Captain Lawrence "Titus" Oates, who was part of the doomed Scott expedition 90 years earlier. So when her "Uncle" Victor whisks the painfully shy, hearing-impaired teen away on a surprise trip to the South Pole, it seems like a dream come true. But Victor has his own agenda, seeking the legendary Symmes's Hole, portal to the interior of a hollow Earth. The lengths to which the madman pursues this quest provide the book with a dramatic drive and powerful revelations. Sym makes for an engaging (if occasionally melodramatic) narrator, although aspects of her character, such as her hearing loss, are not fully developed. An afterword on Scott's expedition in 1911 is included