Alex Awards 2010
Awards
Alex Awards 2010
The Alex Awards are given to 10 books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18. The winning titles are selected from the previous year’s publishing. The award is sponsored by the Margaret Alexander Edwards Trust and Booklist. Edwards was a young adult specialist for many years at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore. Her work is described in her book FAIR GARDEN AND THE SWARM OF BEASTS, and over the years she has served as an inspiration to librarians who serve young adults. The Alex Awards are named after Edwards, who was called “Alex” by her friends.
2010
THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope
William Morrow
ISBN: 9780061730320
288 pages
September 2009
William Kamkwamba was born in Malawi, a country where magic ruled and modern science was mystery. It was also a land withered by drought and hunger, and a place where hope and opportunity were hard to find. But William had read about windmills in a book called USING ENERGY, and he dreamed of building one that would bring electricity and water to his village and change his life and the lives of those around him. His neighbors may have mocked him and called him misala --- crazy --- but William was determined to show them what a little grit and ingenuity could do.
THE BRIDE’S FAREWELL
Viking Adult
ISBN: 9780670020997
224 pages
August 2009
In Meg Rosoff’s fourth novel, a young woman in 1850s rural England runs away from home on horseback the day she’s to marry her childhood sweetheart. Pell is from a poor preacher’s family and she’s watched her mother suffer for years under the burden of caring for an ever-increasing number of children. Pell yearns to escape the inevitable repetition of such a life.
She understands horses better than people and sets off for Salisbury Fair, where horse trading takes place, in the hope of finding work and buying herself some time. But as she rides farther away from home, Pell’s feelings for her parents, her siblings and her fiancé surprise her with their strength and alter the course of her travels. And her journey leads her to find love where she least expects it.
EVERYTHING MATTERS!
Viking Adult
ISBN: 9780670020928
320 pages
June 2009
In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophesy: a comet will obliterate life on Earth in 36 years. Alone in this knowledge, he comes of age in rural Maine grappling with the question: Does anything I do matter? While the voice that has accompanied him since conception appraises his choices, Junior’s loved ones emerge with parallel stories. While our recognizable world is transformed into a bizarre nation at endgame, where government agents conspire in subterranean bunkers, preparing citizens for emigration from a doomed planet, Junior’s final triumph confounds all expectation, building to an astonishing and deeply moving resolution.
THE GOOD SOLDIERS
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374165734
304 pages
September 2009
It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it the surge. “Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences,” he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them.
Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed. Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter David Finkel was with them in Baghdad, and almost every grueling step of the way.
What was the true story of the surge? And was it really a success? Those are the questions he grapples with in his remarkable report from the front lines.
THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT: A Memoir
Harmony Books
ISBN: 9780307396044
352 pages
September 2009
“Perfect is boring.”
Well, 1983 certainly wasn’t boring for the Welch family. Somehow, between their handsome father’s mysterious death, their glamorous soap-opera-star mother’s cancer diagnosis, and a phalanx of lawyers intent on bankruptcy proceedings, the four Welch siblings managed to handle each new heartbreaking misfortune in the same way they dealt with the unexpected arrival of the forgotten-about Chilean exchange student --- together.
All that changed with the death of their mother. While 19-year-old Amanda was legally on her own, the three younger siblings --- Liz, 16; Dan, 14; and Diana, eight --- were each dispatched to a different set of family friends. But they refused to forget her --- or let her go.
THE MAGICIANS
Viking Adult
ISBN: 9780670020553
416 pages
August 2009
At once psychologically piercing and magnificently absorbing, THE MAGICIANS boldly moves into uncharted literary territory, imagining magic as practiced by real people, with their capricious desires and volatile emotions. Lev Grossman creates an utterly original world in which good and evil aren’t black and white, love and sex aren’t simple or innocent, and power comes at a terrible price.
MY ABANDONMENT
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780151014149
240 pages
March 2009
A 13-year-old girl and her father live in Forest Park, the enormous nature preserve in Portland, Oregon. There they inhabit an elaborate cave shelter, bathe in a nearby creek, store perishables at the water’s edge, use a makeshift septic system, tend a garden, even keep a library of sorts. Once a week, they go to the city to buy groceries and otherwise merge with the civilized world. But one small mistake allows a backcountry jogger to discover them, which derails their entire existence, ultimately provoking a deeper flight.
SOULLESS: An Alexia Tarabotti Novel
Orbit
ISBN: 9780316056632
384 pages
October 2009
Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she’s a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette.
Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire --- and then the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate. With unexpected vampires appearing and expected vampires disappearing, everyone seems to believe Alexia responsible. Can she figure out what is actually happening to London’s high society?
STITCHES: A Memoir
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393068573
336 pages
September 2009
One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the 14-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.
In STITCHES, Small, the award-winning children’s illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David --- a highly anxious yet supremely talented child --- all too often became the unwitting object of his parents’ buried frustration and rage.
TUNNELING TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH: Stories
Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9780061579028
March 2009
Kevin Wilson’s characters inhabit a world that moves seamlessly between the real and the imagined, the mundane and the fantastic. "Grand Stand-In" is narrated by an employee of a Nuclear Family Supplemental Provider --- a company that supplies "stand-ins" for families with deceased, ill, or just plain mean grandparents. And in "Blowing Up On the Spot," a young woman works sorting tiles at a Scrabble factory after her parents have spontaneously combusted. Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways we try to cope with both.
