2012 Printz Winner!

And the Michael L. Printz Award goes to . . .

John Corey Whaley -- "Where Things Come Back"

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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: "Sometimes I feel like I have walked into the middle of a movie." In contrast to the dark danger and crowded confines of his situation, the spacious landscapes of language in Harmon's multimedia meta-narrative create a broad-ranging, bright, and often illuminating look at life without the possibility.

Despite advice from his high school film club coach -- Mr. Sawicki -- to "keep it simple," Monster ends up being a profoundly complex work.

The disjointed dialogue fragments and quick-cuts through time and place offer almost no clues about the person calling the shots. It hardly matters. We're satisfied to busily piece together the moving parts of this murder mystery, since we are aware that the protagonist could be any one of the thousands of powerless young Black men written off by the American justice system every year.

But at some point, the fill-in-the-blank, film format shifts the focus back to us -- the viewers. The jury. We're forced to rewind and re-think some of our assumptions about what we are reading -- and what we think we know about the writer.

HAMLET: Assume a virtue, if you have it not.
That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,
Of habits devil, is angel yet in this.

             -- Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act III, scene iv

This monster turns out to be more like a modern-day Hamlet of Harlem. He has us contemplating identity, culpability, moral ambiguity, objective vs. subjective truth and the relationship between perception and reality. His ingeniously conceived movie manuscript/suicide note forces us to respond, reflect, evaluate, and face the dilemma of truth or consequences.

To become, or not to become. That is the question.

Like all good literature, Monster transports us to new places and provokes new understandings. One of the most effective scenes on the way to Steve Harmon's final verdict on himself -- is the testimony of Mr. Sawicki. Speaking to the court, and through his student, Sawicki advises that "to make an honest film one has to be an honest person."

Steve Harmon has honestly compiled his collection of sounds and images, thoughts and feelings. He has told his truth, his whole truth, and nothing but his truth. You decide the facts. The work itself rings true and is finally the only evidence we should need of Steve Harmon's humanity, his depth of character, and his innocence.

Walter Dean Myers' Monster manages to provide a new perspective on what a novel can be -- and do.

While the book's cinematic format, deadly serious subject matter, and poetic power give it wide appeal, this work is likely to be particularly engaging for young adults of color. One of the central issues Steve Harmon grapples with is the idea that the color of his skin automatically assigns him a level of guilt. This, of course, aligns the book with the central tenet of the American jury system -- the presumption of innocence -- something even Steve Harmon has to learn to give Steve Harmon.

---

Nomination: Yes

Genre Classification: Printz Winner, Realistic/Edgy, Multicultural

Citation: Myers, Walter Dean. Monster. New York: Amistad, 2001. Print.

Video Book Trailer!


Walter Dean Myers biography

http://www.walterdeanmyers.net/bio.html

Words of a Feather

Invisible Man 
by Ralph Ellison

The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man
by James Weldon Johnson

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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 -- the book is determined to assert its uniqueness at every turn. The medium is truly the message here. The story of self-acceptance and self-realization starts out looking like the very sort of cartoon fantasy Jin might be reading during lunch while sitting alone at an isolated cafeteria table; it begins with the crazy-good adventures of the Monkey King.

The force and power of the Monkey King’s story is so great, it pulls you, funny-bone first, into Yang’s novel. The awesome antics, splendidly rendered, make the Monkey King simply irresistible. Although the book moves on to Jin’s journey, the Monkey King stays with us.

Before we can get a handle on Jin’s situation, we’re introduced to the star of yet a third storyline -- Chin-Kee -- a walking collection of negative Chinese stereotypes who is ruining his cousin Danny’s life with his yearly visits.

Somehow, the various people and plotlines in Gene Yang's book are magically transformed into a single, satisfying conclusion.

For all its over-the-top bizarreness, American Born Chinese is an amazingly subtle novel about the cost of pretending to be somebody you are not. The writing is flawless. The pictures are perfect. Yang’s work is a warm, insightful and thoroughly delightful masterpiece of young adult literature.

---

Nomination: Yes

Genre Classification: Graphic Novel, Printz Winner, Multicultural, Humor

Citation: Yang, Gene. American Born Chinese. Color by Lark Pien. New York: First Second, 2006. Print.


Gene Yang info:
http://geneyang.com/

Words of a Feather

Yummy: The Last Days of a Southside Shorty
by Greg Neri, Illus. by Randy DuBurke

Maus
by Art Spiegelman

Pride of Baghdad
by Brian K. Vaughan and Niko Henrichon

Watchmen
by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons


.

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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 a while -- so you can think, or breathe, or just let it wash over you. It took me a long, long time to read Rosoff's short 200-page novel. I kept stopping to linger in the magical reality of her world of words -- and to laugh at the surprisingly funny observations of her protagonist: Daisy.

Daisy, a sophisticated, 15-year-old New Yorker, is on vacation visiting relatives in the English countryside when terrorists attack London, plunging the world into prolonged war. That's what the plot's about. The story however, is about personal culture, perseverance, self-acceptance, love, loss, chance and change.

But the summer I went to England to stay with my cousins everything changed. Part of that was because of the war, which supposedly changed lots of things, but I can’t remember much about life before the war anyway so it doesn’t count in my book, which this is. 

Mostly everything changed because of Edmond. 

And so here’s what happened.

 
Powerful, provocative and poetic, it is a timeless story, beautifully told. As for the taboo romance, violence and cigarette smoking . . . that's how we live now. America's youth are growing up while trying to make sense of a post - 9/11 world at war. Meg Rosoff's masterful work of art may well be of some help in that endeavor, for in the reading of her novel, we learn what it is to experience more than we understand.

---

Nomination: Yes

Genre Classification: Coming of Age Novel, Printz Winner, Realistic/Edgy

Citation: Rosoff, Meg. How I Live Now. New York: Random House, 2004. Print.

Meg Rosoff info:
http://www.megrosoff.co.uk/

Words of a Feather

What I Was 
by Meg Rosoff

Love
by Toni Morrison

Shattered: Stories of Children and War
ed. by Jennifer Armstrong

Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People, and War
by Yukio Tsuchiya,  illustrations by Ted Lewin

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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, however, proves to be a different story.

Along with the old adage to "never judge a book by its cover," Crowe's slickly packaged but poorly synthesized research points to another, equally meaningful old maxim:

That which is probable
is the greatest enemy to truth.

Chris Crowe’s handsome publication features dozens of photos and drawings. Text and tone are appropriate, as is Crowe’s thesis – that Till’s case was for many, "the last straw in centuries of racial oppression and abuse." The information is well organized and easy to read. Using a creative nonfiction format, Crowe employs primary sources -- testimony, news reports and interviews -- to produce a narrative story.

Theoretically, this book could be used in classrooms as a history text as well as a model of research techniques. However, Crowe clearly did not know Till's full story, and he filled in the blanks of his research with his own assumptions about what probably happened.

Crowe failed to critically analyze previously published material on the matter. He also missed an opportunity to introduce young people to the real Emmett Till -- the fun-loving, 14-year-old at the center of the most infamous act of racial violence in U.S. history.

Regardless of the prose and photos, in order to succeed, a book – any book – must finally deliver the truth. That’s actually harder to do in a work of nonfiction than in a novel. One cannot objectively check the facts in a novel, any more than one can objectively judge the colors in a painting. But the facts in Crowe’s colorful account of Emmett Till’s story are verifiable.

In many instances, Crowe’s facts are wrong.


Along with several arguably minor factual errors and name misspellings, Crowe’s nonfiction narrative includes two major falsehoods: the claim that Curtis Jones accompanied Till on his train ride (pages 35, 47, 55), and the assertion that Jones was an eyewitness to Till’s alleged "wolf whistle" toward Carol Bryant (page 55). Jones publicly recanted his statements in 1985, almost twenty years prior to Professor Crowe's publication.

Significantly, other than Jones, Carol Bryant is the only adult who claimed Till made the lewd remarks and whistles that later led her husband to seek revenge. Carol Bryant’s testimony is questionable, since her tale changed and grew over time.

A probable story
is the first weapon of calumny.

Of course, legally, the truth about Till’s behavior is not even at issue. But socially and culturally, the "wolf whistle" is central to this story. It goes to the truth of Emmett Till’s character.

In Crowe’s story, "the boy who triggered the civil rights movement" was playing with fire. Crowe first admits "it’s impossible to know exactly what was said or done in a small country store some fifty years ago," but then says the "evidence suggests" Emmett Till was guilty of disrespecting the White female – an offense which, for a Black man in 1950s Mississippi, was considered by many to be a capital crime. In the court of public opinion -- if you play with fire, you get burned.


In truth, there is no evidence to prove, nor any reason to believe Emmett Till let out with a suggestive “wolf whistle,” or that the happy-go-lucky boy threatened Carol Bryant in any way.

Crowe has built his narrative on rumors and reports which characterized Till as an uppity Black from the North, unaware that his boldness would get him killed in the Deep South. Those were lies, yet Professor Crowe writes of Till's "cocky and naive indiscretion in Money, Mississippi."

Getting Away with Murder also uncritically includes the two confessed killers' outrageous depiction of their victim as combative and relentlessly mouthy throughout the kidnapping, torture and killing. Chris Crowe's implication, that Till showed heroic resolve by repeatedly standing up to his abusers, is a clumsy cultural misstep, and a factual improbability. Most importantly, such behavior is inconsistent with the upbringing, good sense, and true character of Emmett Louis Till.

---

Nomination: No

Genre Classification: General Nonfiction, Multicultural

Citation: Crowe, Chris. Getting Away With Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case. New York: Dial, 2003. Print.

Emmett Till info:
http://www.emmetttillmurder.com/

Words of a Feather

Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America
By Mamie Till Mobley and Christopher Benson

The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative
Edited by Christopher Metress 

Website:
Famous Teenagers in History

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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 that run the streets of New York. Running among them is Aaron, the sensible, secretive 16-year-old at the heart of this story.

Aaron's tightly-held policy of ignoring his emotions has successfully concealed his homosexuality, from  himself and everybody else. However, it has left him unprepared to handle a confrontation with the toughest brother on the block -- Sha -- and the exquisite mix of emotions in the romantic relationship that develops.

Rarely explored, the language of urban gay-only-for-pay hustlers, Black drag queens and boys "on the down low" is raw and cryptic, electric and dazzling. Morgan's manipulation of the obscure street code to reveal emotion is astonishing. Even more amazing is the supremely complex, spoken-wordiness of the book. Although the hyper-hetero Brooklyn badboys rarely and reluctantly articulate their feelings, words fight for a space in their lives, and in Morgan's novel.

There are times when the landscape of language in Sons places you at a decided distance. Particular plot developments, poetic motifs and points of social commentary rise up to dominate the story’s skyline, providing definition and dimension. But there are moments in Morgan’s novel when the language becomes so thick and dense, it closes in like a bank of behemoth buildings encircling you in mid-town. Images appear and disappear, and come back to vie for your attention, echoing the effect of graffiti, billboards and store-front ads on a city block, each determined to assert its own message and meaning.

Structurally, the narrative feels like an impulsive improvisation. Without warning, the setting changes, or the perspective shifts. To turn a page of Morgan’s book is to blindly turn the corner in a big city. You never know what funny, or pitiful, or lucky thing you'll encounter.

While reading the book, you realize you’re in a motel, or a drug store, or a stairwell, but don’t remember how you got there. This sort of disorientation would be easy to accomplish with murky shadows and moonlight, but Morgan’s mystery takes place in the sun. Aaron's vulnerability, youth and energy control the overall tone of the piece.  Whatever slick transitions or structural foreshadowing there is to be done -- by Morgan or his characters -- will have to be done in the bright, dawning light of day.

Characterizing and contextualizing the complexity, in what initially seems to be a completely different book, is Aaron’s little sister, Anise. Smart, funny, impetuous, resentful and capable, Anise is so well dramatized, and so delightful, she nearly overtakes the novel. Anise contends with her own secret joys and horrors, quite separate and apart from Aaron’s journey. The parallel plots eventually merge -- but only through theme and feeling. The developing emotional inner-life of the people in Morgan's novel is beautifully crafted and strikingly original. I know of no sub-plot that works so well to highlight emotion and extend meaning in the main storyline without direct involvement in it.

The mystery and misery of the metropolis make the City, not just a setting, but another central player. The City empowers and protects its children -- hugging them, hiding them, guiding them, shining on them "the glitter of history, the certain gleam of a future."

In the end, this is Aaron’s story. It is not a story so young and vulnerable a boy should have to negotiate. And it is not a story just anyone can read. There is strong language. There are sexual episodes. There is sudden violence. How could there not be in a coming of age saga set in the streets of Brooklyn? At no point is the book salacious or sinister. It is, in fact, lyrical -- not sweet -- but literate and gracious.

The adolescent sons and daughters in Morgan’s manifesto grow up too fast and die too soon. It isn’t light, but it is enlightening. The author accurately renders the real world and real lives of millions of urban young adults. Their complex stories do not make for easy reading.  After I finished this book, however, I knew I would read it again and again.

I have never encountered a book quite like Sons. Alphonso Morgan’s work is electrifying from start to finish. The rhythm, the poetry, the ideas, the pacing – all of it working together in a way that brilliantly brings the action to life.

Morgan’s book feels more like a movie – a movie of words, starring teenagers that most of America does not know. They are the big city's fast, explosive, fatherless Black sons. They shine so brightly, these Brooklyn sons – that we cannot see them for the glare. In this rare opportunity, when we can finally get a good look, we see that they are just children. Just young boys. Nervous. Goofy. Rough. Optimistic. Normal. Morgan has allowed us to recognize that these are our brothers. These are our sons.

---

Nomination: Yes!

Genre Classification: Multicultural Work, Coming of Age, Realistic / Edgy

Citation: Morgan, Alphonso. Sons. New York: Lane Street Press, 2005. Print.

Alphonso Morgan website:
http://www.alphonsomorgan.com/

Words of a Feather

	Will Grayson, Will Grayson  John Green & David Levithan

Babylon Boyz
Jess Mowry


Annie on My Mind
Nancy Garden

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