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Pyrite Vote Commencing!
We’ve revisited our top 11 Pyrite Nominees, and those of you headed to MidWinter are likely already en route (or snowed in, which I hope isn’t too many of you), and all that means
(insert drumroll)
it’s voting time!
The plan: We’ll use the comments for voting, with polls to close Friday at midnight or so. We’ll tally everything Saturday morning, post the result, and run the honor vote with super tight turnaround. Our final slate will be up by Sunday evening, just before the (bound to be unexpected) Youth Media Awards announcement on Monday morning.
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Technical details, voting procedure, and the full nominee list after the jump.
Process notes:
- RealPrintz votes are weighted: first place votes receive 5 points, second place 3 and third place 1. To be declared a winner, a book must have at least five first place votes (which we have interpreted as 50% + 1 to accommodate our larger numbers) AND at least a five point lead over any other title in raw numbers (which we have followed strictly rather than scaling for larger voter numbers).
- The vote is ONLY for the winner. You may have a book you love as an honor only, and you can save it for that vote.
- RealCommittee votes are blind (often the table is littered with small squares of paper by the end, between straw polling and real polling and revoting and honor votes), but since our purpose is to transparently have the kinds of conversations and experiences that the RealCommittee has (although obviously not identical since we are always wrong!), we’ll vote transparently as well, using the comments. Number your votes 1, 2, 3 for clarity, and consider carefully the order in which you list your picks.
- We always recommend voting BEFORE looking at any other responses to avoid the temptation to do math and strategize. That’s what second votes are for, and we will go to a second vote if we don’t get a decisive winner.
So go! Vote! And may the best book win.
The Pyrite Nomination list, for those who didn’t memorize it already, follows (in no order whatsoever). Note that we weren’t able to revisit each of these, due to time, but there is no formal moment when a book is taken permanently off the table, so even though some of these received fewer nominations/less support and might have effectively fallen off, the fact that they were Pyrite Nominations at all means you can still vote for them. Keep in mind that a vote for a book only you support is a lost opportunity to support another book which might have a shot, so think carefully and strategically about how you will use your votes — sometimes a wasted vote means a book you don’t support doesn’t get points, so there’s that too.
The nominees, in no particular order, linked to their coverage here where applicable:
How I Discovered Poetry, Marilyn Nelson (recap)
Gabi: A Girl in Pieces, Isabel Quintero (recap)
Egg & Spoon, Gregory Maguire (recap)
We Were Liars, E. Lockhart (recap)
This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (recap)
Grasshopper Jungle, Andrew Smith (recap)
Love is the Drug, Alaya Dawn Johnson (recap)
Beyond Magenta, ed. Susan Kuklin
I’ll Give You the Sun, Jandy Nelson (recap)
A Volcano Beneath the Snow, Albert Marrin
West of the Moon, Margi Preus
The Family Romanov, Candace Fleming (recap)
The Crossover, Kwame Alexander (Heavy Medal discussion)
The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, Adele Griffin
The Shadow Hero, Gene Luen Yang
100 Sideways Miles, Andrew Smith (recap)
And We Stay, Jenny Hubbard
The Vanishing Season, Jodi Lynn Anderson
Everything Leads to You, Nina LaCour
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, Leslye Walton
A Time to Dance, Padma Venkatraman
Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, A.S. King (recap)
Scar Boys, Len Vlahos
How It Went Down, Kekla Magoon
Vigilante Poets of Selwyn Academy, Kate Hattemeyer
Vango: Between Sky and Earth, Timothèe Fombelle
The Story of Owen: Dragon Slayer of Trondheim, E.K. Johnston
Afterworlds, Scott Westerfeld
The Summer Invitation, Charlotte Silver
The Lies We Tell Ourselves, Robin Talley
Liv, Forever, Amy Talkington
Noggin, John Corey Whaley
The Pyrite Printz, or Pyrite, is the Someday My Printz Will Come mock Printz deliberation, and should not in any way be confused with YALSA’s Michael L. Printz Award, often referred to here as the RealPrintz or Printz. Our predictions, conversations, and speculation about potential RealPrintz contenders and winners reflect only our own best guesses and are not affiliated with YALSA or the RealPrintz committee.
Filed under: Housekeeping, Process, Pyrite
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