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Picture books:
- Tess's Tree, Jess M. Brailler (HarperCollins)
- When nine-year-old Tess invites her friends, family, and neighbors to celebrate her beloved maple tree's life before it must be cut down, she learns that it has meant a lot to other people, as well.
- Under the Snow, Melissa Stewart (Peachtree)
- Animals in forests, ponds, and fields survive the winter and the snow by slowing down their metabolisms and resting in such places as burrows, nests, stone fences, at the bottom of ponds, under leaves, or in the mud.
- A Book, Mordicai Gerstein (Roaring Brook)
- "Once in a book by Mordicai Gerstein ... there lived a family of characters." This is the tale of one little girl's search for her own story.
- Pennies for Elephants, Lita Judge (Disney-Hyperion)
- Story based on the 1914 newspaper headlines about the children of Boston raising more than $6,000 to buy the first elephants for the Franklin Park Zoo.
- Living Sunlight, Molly Bang (Scholastic)
- Demonstrates how sunlight plays a part in giving energy and life to every living thing on the planet we all share through vibrant illustration and accessible verse.
Middle grade:
- Newsgirl, Liza Ketchum (Viking Children’s Books)
- In the spring of 1851 San Francisco is booming. 12-year-old Amelia Forrester has just arrived with her family and they are eager to make a new life in Phoenix City. But the mostly male town is not that hospitable to females and Amelia decides she will earn more money as a boy. Cutting her hair and donning a cap, she joins a gang of newsboys, selling Eastern newspapers for a fortune.
- ****Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin (Little, Brown) WINNER
- Minli, an adventurous girl from a poor village, buys a magical goldfish, and then joins a dragon who cannot fly on a quest to find the Old Man of the Moon in hopes of bringing life to Fruitless Mountain and freshness to Jade River. Newbery Honor Book
- Sticky Burr: The Prickly Peril, John Lechner (Candlewick)
- Scury and Spiny Burr team up with an exiled and bitter burr in an attempt to take over Burrwood Village and get rid of nice guy, Sticky Burr, once and for all.
Young adult:
- Reality Check, Peter Abrahams (HarperCollins)
- After a knee injury destroys sixteen-year-old Cody's college hopes, he drops out of high school and gets a job in his small Montana town, but when his ex-girlfriend disappears from her Vermont boarding school, Cody travels cross-country to join the search.
- Marcelo in the Real World, Francisco X. Stork (Scholastic)
- Marcelo Sandoval, a seventeen-year-old boy on the high-functioning end of the autistic spectrum, faces new challenges, including romance and injustice, when he goes to work for his father in the mailroom of a corporate law firm.
- The Other Half of Life, Kim Ablon Whitney (Knopf)
- In 1939, fifteen-year-old Thomas sails on a German ship bound for Cuba with more than nine hundred German Jews expecting to be granted safe haven in Cuba.
- Secret Keeper, Mitali Perkins (Delacorte)
- In 1974 when her father leaves New Delhi, India, to seek a job in New York, Ashi, a tomboy at the advanced age of sixteen, feels thwarted in the home of her extended family in Calcutta where she, her mother, and sister must stay, and when her father dies before he can send for them, they must remain with their relatives and observe the old-fashioned traditions that Ashi hates.
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Judges for the 10th MassBooks in Children’s/Young Adult Literature: Jen Cusack, Foundation for Children’s Books; Faith Kaufman, Forbes Library, Northampton; Ted Schelvan, Norwell High School Library
The Massachusetts Book Awards are a program of the Massachusetts Center for the Book, on the web at www.massbook.org. |
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5/10
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