Mocking the Night Away

A little bit of Mock related housekeeping to start off the week…

We’re just shy of a month out from the Youth Media Awards, so the clock is ticking. We’re also still reading frantically, trying to get to everything anyone says we should have read (we’ll fail, at least a little, but we’re trying! And still growing the list. So comments, yadda yadda, add your ideas, etc.)

This past weekend, we hosted our fourth in-person mock event, except we changed it up a little and looked at YA and children’s lit together in what has been dubbed the Printzbery (see also our series of posts about crossover books), a new tradition that I think we’ll keep.

And it’s well past time to launch the Pyrite, in a slightly abbreviated version.

Read on for more info and to find our how we’re Pyriting this year.

As far as the Printzbery goes, one of our attendees is writing it up for SLJ, so I don’t want to spoil anything. I will tell you that we had a blast and putting the Newbery and Printz mock slates together definitely makes for some really interesting conversational shifts; we talked merit for each award, as per standard Mock practice, but we also looked at a few books from both lenses (nominators had to say whether they were presenting each book as a Newbery or Printz). We had four true YA titles (Symphony for the City of the Dead, The Walls Around Us, Bone Gap, and Challenger Deep), four crossover titles (The Hired Girl, My Seneca Village, Orbiting Jupiter, and Goodbye, Stranger) and four books that our early polling process had placed as Newbery only (The Marvels, George, Rollergirl, and The Thing About Jellyfish). We voted in the end for a Printz, a Newbery, and a Printzbery winner and recognized a different book for each of the three awards.

Printzbery Stray Thoughts:

• Bone Gap dropped a bit in my estimation through the discussion, something I’ll explore more when I review it (probably with The Accident Season) for next week.
• My Seneca Village appears to be the most difficult book to get a hold of this year and one stalwart attendee, who had driven from Connecticut to Queens to get his hands on a copy, rather succinctly said “it wasn’t worth it.”
• Everyone wants a third book in the Russian History series that currently consists of The Family Romanov and Symphony for the City of the Dead (and so what if Anderson and Fleming didn’t know they were writing a series?).
• Strawberries look good in crowns.

Now on to the more exciting piece of housekeeping, the 2016 Pyrite!

Time is short. Here’s how it’s going to work:

On Wednesday, the Pyrite will officially begin. We’ll put up a brief procedural post, and everyone can vote for three books, weighted, then and there (we’re skipping the nomination process entirely. Blame ALA and the early Midwinter date).

Everything we’ve covered and everything we haven’t covered is fair game, so now is the time to either comment on this post for a book we haven’t talked about OR go and rally the troops (or try to drive them away) in the comments on something we’ve already covered (hyperlinked table of contents below).

We’ll leave the voting open though the weekend, and post results on 12/23. If there’s a tie, we’ll go from there; if not, we’ll declare a winner and move on to honor voting.

After all that, we’d love to dissect the results with you all, and we’ll keep on keeping on with reviews throughout and beyond the Pyrite (we’ve currently got books scheduled out until January 6th).

Table of Contents for all our 2015 posts thus far*:
The Alex Crow, Andrew Smith
All American Boys, Brendan Kiely and Jason Reynolds
All the Bright Places, Jennifer Niven
All the Rage, Courtney Summers
Archivist Wasp, Nicole Kornher-Stace
Audacity, Melanie Crowder
Black Dove, White Raven, Elizabeth Wein
The Boy in the Black Suit, Jason Reynolds
Boys Don’t Knit, T.S. Easton
The Boys Who Challenged Hitler, Philip Hoose
The Bunker Diary, Kevin Brooks
Challenger Deep, Neal Schusterman
The Cuckoo Song, Frances Hardinge
The Dead I Know, Scott Gardner
Dime, E.R. Frank
Dumplin‘, Julie Murphy
The Emperor of Any Place, Tim Wynne-Jones
A Game of Love and Death, Martha Brockenbrough
Goodbye, Stranger, Rebecca Stead
The Hired Girl, Laura Ann Schlitz
Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go, Laura Rose Wagner
I Am Princess X, Cherie Priest
I Was Here, Gayle Forman
The Infinite In-Between, Carolyn Mackler
Illuminae, Amy Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
Juba!, Walter Dean Myers
Lair of Dreams, Libba Bray
The Last Leaves Falling, Sarah Benwell
A List of Things that Didn’t Kill Me, Jason Schmidt
The Marvels, Brian Selznick
More Happy than Not, Adam Silvera
Mosquitoland, David Arnold
Nimona, Noelle Stevenson
Orbiting Jupiter, Gary D. Schmidt
Paper Hearts, Meg Wiviott
Razorhurst, Justine Larbalestier
Rollergirl, Victoria Jamieson
Saint Anything, Sarah Dessen
Scorpion Rules, Erin Bow
Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda, Becky Albertalli
Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older
Show and Prove, Sofia Quintero
A Song for Ella Gray, David Almond
Symphony for the City of the Dead, M.T. Anderson
Stonewall, Ann Bausam
A Thousand Nights, E.K. Johnston
The Tightrope Walkers, David Almond
The Truth Commission, Susan Juby
The Walls Around Us, Nova Ren Suma
We Should Hang Out Some Time, Josh Sundquist
X, Ilyash Shabazz and Kekla Magoon
Zeroes, Scott Westerfeld, Margo Lanagan, and Deborah Biancotti

*I’ll try to keep this updated as we review more more more books.

Filed under: Books to look for, Housekeeping, Pyrite