Printz Award 2022

Firekeeper’s Daughter By Angeline Boulley Winner of the 2021 Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in Young Adult Literature is Angeline Boulley's Firekeeper's Dauhter -- published by Henry Holt, an imprint of MacMillan. An enrolled member of Sault Ste. Tribe, Chippewa Indians, Angeline Boulley draws on heritage in a fast-paced novel of drugs, murder, deception.  When Daunis puts her medical studies on hold to care for her mother, she’s drawn into an FBI investigation. As deaths and deceptions grow, Daunis discovers her strengths and cultural connections. "A rare and mesmerizing work that blends the power of a vibrant tradition with the aches and energy of today’s America. This book will leave you breathless!" — Francisco...

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Printz Award 2021

  Everything Sad is Untrue (a true story) By Daniel Nayeri Winner of the 2021 Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in Young Adult Literature is Daniel Nayeri's Everything Sad is Untrue -- published by Arthur A. Levine, an imprint of Levine Querido. In an autobiographical novel, middle-schooler Daniel, formerly Khosrou, tells his unimpressed and at times cruel classmates about his experience as an Iranian refugee. "A modern masterpiece - as epic as the Iliad and Shahnameh, and as heartwarming as Charlotte's Web. It's for the kids at the lunch table; the heroes of tomorrow, just looking to survive the battle of adolescence." — New York Times Book Review "A journey as intimate as it is epic. A remarkable work that raises the...

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Printz Award 2020

Dig By A.S. King Winner of the 2020 Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in Young Adult Literature is A.S. King's Dig -- published by Penguin Random House. "King’s narrative concerns are racism, patriarchy, colonialism, white privilege, and the ingrained systems that perpetuate them. . . . [Dig] will speak profoundly to a generation of young people who are waking up to the societal sins of the past and working toward a more equitable future." — Horn Book Review "With her inimitable surrealism and insight into teenage experience, A.S. King explores how a corrosive culture of polite, affluent white supremacy tears a family apart and how one determined generation can save themselves."  — by Karen Jensen, School...

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Printz Award 2019

The Poet X By Elizabeth Acevedo Winner of the 2019 Michael L. Printz Award for excellence in Young Adult Literature is Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X -- published by HarperTeen, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. "The force and intensity behind her words practically pushes them off the page, resulting in a verse novel that is felt as much as it is heard. This is a book from the heart, and for the heart." — New York Times Book Review "Acevedo has amplified the voices of girls en el barrio who are equal parts goddess, saint, warrior, and hero."  — author, Ibi Zoboi "Crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice."  — author, Justina Ireland From the publisher: Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to...

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Printz Award 2018

WE ARE OKAY By Nina LaCour Published by Dutton Books for Young Readers -- an imprint of Penguin Young Readers -- Nina LaCour's We Are Okay has won the 2018 Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. "In luminous, spare prose, LaCour folds literary and artistic references into an intimate, haunting story of betrayal and grief,” said Printz Award Committee Chair Angela Carstensen. You go through life thinking there’s so much you need… Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother. Marin hasn’t spoken to anyone from her old life since the day she left everything behind. No one knows the truth about those final weeks. Not even her best friend Mabel. But even thousands of miles...

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Printz Award 2017

March:Book Three By John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell John Lewis: "This book is for all of America. It is for all people, but especially young people, to understand the essence of the civil rights movement, to walk through the pages of history to learn about the philosophy and discipline of nonviolence, to be inspired to stand up to speak out and to find a way to get in the way when they see something that is not right, not fair, not just." March: Book Three won several other honors, including the Robert F. Sibert Award for the most distinguished informational book for children, the Coretta Scott King Author award, and the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults. ...

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Printz Award 2016

Bone Gap By Laura Ruby Told from alternating viewpoints, Bone Gap perfectly melds elements of fairy tales, myths, gothic romance, and magic realism into the story of Finn, who lives in a town with gaps in the very fabric of time and place.   (from the YALSA website). Maile Meloy for the New York Times Book Review: "It’s a novel about actual changes in worldview, and all its science and myth and realism and magic are marshaled, finally, to answer crucial questions about empathy and difference, and the ways we see the people we love...

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Go Set a Watchman

Harper Lee Regardless of when Harper Lee wrote Go Set a Watchman, it is impossible to believe it was not meant to serve as a second novel, follow-up on To Kill a Mockingbird.  How else to explain its deftly placed updates on our favorite characters and the subtly interjected flashbacks? Without knowing the big-hearted, larger than life Atticus lionized in TKAM, how would the reader of GSAW understand the depths of Scout’s emotion seeing Atticus reduced to the size of a small-minded bigot? Despite the book’s terrifically funny first chapters, Scout is mortally wounded mid-way through – and then left for dead by the unnamed narrator, who is presumably an older Jean Louise. Read as a companion piece to Mockingbird’s...

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Printz Award 2015

I'll Give You the Sun By Jandy Nelson Once inseparable, twins Noah and Jude are torn apart by a family tragedy that transforms their intense love for each other into intense anger. Timelines twist and turn around each other in beautifully orchestrated stories of love and longing (from the YALSA website). Lauren Oliver for the New York Times Book Review: "Bold, even breathtaking. You get the sense the characters are bursting through the words, breaking free of normal metaphors and constructions, jubilantly trying to rise up from the prison of language . . . The book celebrates art’s capacity to heal, but it also shows us how we excavate meaning from the art we cherish, and how we find reflections of ourselves within it. . . . I’ll...

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Printz Award 2014

  Midwinterblood By Marcus Sedgwick Doomed love circles back through the centuries in a series of seven intricately plotted, interlocking stories set on a mysterious, isolated island. Forgetting and remembering, blessed and cursed, modern and ancient, these dualities brilliantly infuse the novel’s lush landscape (from the YALSA websit...

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Printz Award 2013

In Darkness By Nick Lake Fifteen-year-old Shorty awakens beneath the ruins of a crumbled hospital in Haiti, where his weakening mind begins flashing back through his own violent history, the loss of his twin sister, and his mystical connection to Toussaint Louverture, the nineteenth-century revolutionary who helped liberate his country (from the YALSA site)....

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2012 Printz Winner!

And the Michael L. Printz Award goes to . . . John Corey Whaley -- "Where Things Come Bac...

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01. Mock Printz Award Winner

Monster By Walter Dean Myers Annotation: Jurors must determine if Steve Harmon is a monstrous menace to society or an innocent victim of it. He’s young, Black and on trial. What else do they need to know? Recommendation: HAMLET: Denmark's a prison. ROSENCRANTZ: Then is the world one. HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons.              -- Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act II, scene ii Part screenplay, part diary, part philosophical fable -- Walter Dean Myers has crafted a truly novel courtroom drama in the creation of his Monster. The story of Steve Harmon's murder trial is told from the 16-year-old African American photographer’s own shattered perspective:...

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02. Graphic Novel

American Born Chinese By  Gene Luen Yang Annotation: The separate and simultaneous self-discovery journeys of Jin Wang, an Asian American middle school student growing up in a White suburb, and ancient Chinese folk hero . . . the magical Monkey King! Recommendation: It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what Gene Yang’s cosmic, coming-of-age comic book is – or why American Born Chinese is so great. Yang’s multi-story, multicultural graphic novel draws on traditions as varied as Ancient Chinese mythology and bad TV situation comedy to create an entirely new kind of contemporary fantasy. Unlike its protagonist, Jin Wang -- the teenage son of Chinese immigrants who is desperate to fit in at his predominantly White school...

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03. Coming of Age · Search for Identity

How I Live Now By Meg Rosoff Annotation:A journey. A statue. A feeling. A war. A soul mate. A day. A difference. A phone ringing. A garden. A chance. Recommendation: This is one of the things I most dislike about nature,namely that the rules are not at all precise. Art, it has been said, is anything you can get away with. If so, Meg Rosoff has gotten away with a novel for young people that has violence, incest, war and . . . cigarette smoking! Rosoff even gets away with murder in her novel, How I Live Now, as she has penned a truly brilliant work of literary art. When a book is really good, you're compelled to keep turning its pages. When the writing is exquisite, you're forced to pause, and sometimes grab a bookmark and stop reading for...

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04. General Nonfiction Text

Getting Away with Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case  By  Chris Crowe Annotation:In August 1955, two White men kidnapped and killed a Black child in the Mississippi Delta but were acquitted at trial by an all-White jury – sparking such national outrage, the story became a cause célèbre of the civil rights movement. Recommendation: Looking at its well-designed cover -- Brigham Young University English professor, Chris Crowe, is listed as the writer responsible for Getting Away with Murder. Positioned beneath the dramatic title is a sepia-fashioned photo collage, and a subtitle: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. The book is unambiguously billed as a work of nonfiction on the outside jacket flap. What's actually inside,...

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05. Multicultural Work

Sons By  Alphonso Morgan Annotation: Aaron is an African American teenager living in Brooklyn NY. While attempting to come to terms with his secret homosexuality, he must come to terms with survival in a world where people routinely disappear, or go to prison, or turn up dead. Recommendation: As is the case with every fine work of young adult literature, Sons by Alphonso Morgan, captures the intensity of adolescence -- but his novel is unique in many ways. Minnesota-born Morgan uses unique plot, language, structure and character development to evoke a seldom examined type of coming of age intensity: urban, Black and gay. Sons introduces us to the hidden humanity of the bold, Black and gold, larger-than-life thugs...

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06. Supernatural · Horror Title

Queen of the Cold-Blooded Tales Stories by Roberta Simpson Brown Annotation:A collection of stories about scary people, haunted places and creepy things.Recommendation: Roberta Simpson Brown has every right to call herself Queen of the Cold-Blooded Tales. The twenty-three chilling stories in her collection are macabre and marvelous. Well-written and well-paced, each yarn is a quick, five to ten pages in length. Though original, they are patterned in a well-known oral literary tradition. Roberta Simpson Brown's tales are set in familiar, normal places: living rooms, schoolyards, campgrounds, shops, farm houses. The students, housewives, hotel clerks and other characters in Brown’s stories are all familiar people – but that’s where "normal"...

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07. Science Fiction · Fantasy Work

Black Juice by  Margo Lanagan Annotation: Ten glimpses into the darkness of the human condition. Recommendation: Black Juice, by Margo Lanagan, is a disturbing and disturbingly difficult read. I have repeatedly forced myself back through the slog and slap of the book’s ten (mercifully) short stories, and yet they still remain foreign to me. I cannot fully determine the meaning or the mission of this phantasmic fiction. That isn’t to say Ms. Lanagan's writing is of low quality – but rather, that I am unable to read it. The inability to read a text is a stark and humbling kind of horror. Along with feelings of personal inadequacy and shame, there is a sense of futility, and a frustration that prompts anger -- or potentially,...

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08. Challenged · Censored Text

The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison Annotation:Claudia MacTeer recalls Lorain, Ohio in the summer of 1941, and the psychological devastation of a young African American girl, Pecola Breedlove, who believed life would be better if she only had blue eyes.Recommendation: Toni Morrison is considered by many to be one of the preeminent novelists of our day. Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, is not a book one is ever finished reading. Like all great works of art, the initial encounter with this text mainly conveys the sense that there is more on the page than meets the eye. Just as a great piece of sculpture cannot be absorbed in a single viewing, the first read of Morrison’s novel is only the beginning of a conversation. The Bluest Eye is a complex...

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