More Lists!

Later today Joy will be posting about the pretty amazing A Song for Ella Gray, David Almond’s third (third! Does the man not sleep?) book out this year.

In the meantime, I wanted to say a few words about the awesome SLJ Best Books list.

Sometimes I forget to highlight it, because you’re here, and we’re lucky enough to be part of the SLJ blog network, which means you probably already know all the SLJ newsy goodness.

BUT.

It’s a fantastic list and I always like comparing editor lists to the books we’re looking at and seeing where the differences lie. And there are some differences…

First, the nonfiction. We’ve covered two of the four that seem to skew up into Printz territory (and Joy is reading Symphony right now); the fourth (Drowned City) is one we are hoping to squeeze in after the PW list brought it to our attention. So that’s a 75%-100% match, unless I am missing something that skews up.

The YA fiction list is pretty standout, with some of our current frontrunners highlighted (Challenger Deep, The Tightrope Walkers) and several more that we love and will rave about when we run those reviews. SLJ also has a few books we didn’t have on our list, which is the more interesting part to me — Ashley Hope Pérez’s Out of Darkness, which was shouted out in the comments here early on; Nicola Yoon’s Everything, Everything, which several people I trust described as an excellent read but not a likely contender; and two books that were completely off our radar, Moonshot (ordered it as soon as the list came out) and The Trouble in Me, which I would have assumed was middle grade and now we’ll need to take a look at it. Also recognized was Conviction, which was on our list initially but no one has talked about it so we dropped it.

What did you think? Are the books we weren’t going to cover Printz contenders or not? Comments are open, and lively debate is a Thanksgiving tradition, so fire away!

Filed under: Best Books