Andre Norton Nominees, 2014

Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, Holly Black (Little, Brown; Indigo)
When We Wake, Karen Healey (Allen & Unwin; Little, Brown)
Sister Mine, Nalo Hopkinson (Grand Central)
The Summer Prince, Alaya Dawn Johnson (Levine)
Hero, Alethea Kontis (Harcourt)
September Girls, Bennett Madison (Harper Teen)
A Corner of White, Jaclyn Moriarty (Levine)

And of these, I have read exactly none. Well, I know what my next civic duty is - tracking them down and reading them. Voting closes March 30, so there's time pressure.

Oh, and the other Nebula nominees were announced, too; but this is the only category I care about.

The Andre Norton Award Nominees Announced

Blatantly copy-pasting from the SFWA website:
Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

Iron Hearted Violet, Kelly Barnhill (Little, Brown)
Black Heart, Holly Black (S&S/McElderry; Gollancz)
Above, Leah Bobet (Levine)
The Diviners, Libba Bray (Little, Brown; Atom)
Vessel, Sarah Beth Durst (S&S/McElderry)
Seraphina, Rachel Hartman (Random House; Doubleday UK)
Enchanted, Alethea Kontis (Harcourt)
Every Day, David Levithan (Alice A. Knopf Books for Young Readers)
Summer of the Mariposas, Guadalupe Garcia McCall (Tu Books)
Railsea, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan)
Fair Coin, E.C. Myers (Pyr)
Above World, Jenn Reese (Candlewick)

Holey cheese, I've even read two of these already! (In italics.)

Running my eyes over the list, my bet is on the China Mieville because he's a name that will be familiar to the adult readership. But I also expect that to be the book I like least. David Levithan's will be the funniest. Beyond that, I'll have to read them, won't I? Oh, good, a project.

News, and Contingency

Yesterday was Award Day at the American Library Association Convention, and guess what? I haven't read any of the awards or honors.

Yet.

I'm particularly anxious to read Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which took both a Belpre and a Stonewall.

And it should surprise no one that Katherine Paterson landed the Wilder Award. It was never a question of "whether," with her, but of "when."

I no longer kick myself about not having read the award books before the awards are announced. It takes an on-the-ball reader to keep up with the industry as it comes out, and I'm not that person. Wasn't even in my young vigorous days. I'm a serendipitous reader who reads what she finds and finds what she reads - it's all contingency with me. Readers like me are why awards exist to begin with - they increase the contingency of books. Not just the award winners, either. Buzz beforehand increases contingency; the public guessing games of the on-the-ball. Sharing your favorite reads of the year is just so much more urgent in the lead-up to award season.

Another thing came to my mailbox yesterday: an e-mail prodding participants in the Paleoamerican Odyssey Conference in October to get their poster presentations in. I, of course, have no poster and will be going as an interested layman. But I'll be a very interested layman indeed, listening in on the conversations of people whose names became familiar to me in the books and articles I read while researching 11,000 Years Lost. I haven't been able to do avocational archeology since the Health Crap really kicked in, but by golly, I can sit in an air-conditioned lecture room with the best of them! Just thought I'd mention it here to increase the contingency factor. I'm sure many more people would like to go to this, than would find out about it in the normal courses of their daily lives.

And though ALA is all about books, it is an interesting fact that the floors of scholarly conferences are littered with more story ideas to trip over than those of literary ones. Because what you're coming across in the floor of a convention that's about books is ideas that other people have already turned into books of the sort you want to write. Scholarly conferences are all about the ideas no one has thought to put into your medium yet.

In other words, they're vast smorgasbords of yummy, yummy inspiration.

Andre Norton Awards: How Shall I Vote?

Today is the deadline for voting on the Andre Norton Awards. It's a particularly tough field this year, and they've changed the rules so we're no longer ranking books, but must vote only on one; so I'm going to muse aloud about it till I reach a decision.

Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi (Little, Brown)
Man, this is good. Technically post-apocalyptic fiction, it reads like realism, not SF. No zombie hordes, no Sufficiently Advanced Technology, and an underclass POV that is neither romanticized nor polemicized.

White Cat, Holly Black (McElderry)
Woman, this is good! Biggest kick-in-the-head ending of the decade, and Portrait of the Wizard as a Young Con Artist. Not what you expect from a title referencing the literary fairy tales of the Cabinet de Fees.

Mockingjay, Suzanne Collins (Scholastic Press; Scholastic UK)
Having jumped out of the airplane in Hunger Games and free-fallen through Catching Fire, we now land splat. Braced for a happy ending, we instead get a realistic one. That is praise, not blame! Alas, Katniss is unconscious at too many important points, rendering this book weaker than either of the preceding ones. Nice to have one strong contender out of the running. (But it stands a good chance of winning because a lot of SFWA members who don't normally read YA will have read it.)

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, Barry Deutsch (Amulet)
A graphic novel set in an Orthodox Jewish enclave. Floating witch, talking pig, knitting troll, and spot-on character dialog and dynamics, particularly between Mirka and her siblings. Strong contender, but this is only part of a story. Mirka needs to use that sword and have repercussions from some of her choices in the next book - of which there is no sign on the web page. I've bookmarked the page and will be on the lookout. I hate to knock this out for being Vol. 1, but the impression is strong enough I'm gonna have to. Rats. No, wait, eliminating books from the running is a good thing.

The Boy from Ilysies, Pearl North (Tor Teen)
Was not in the library and I wasn't on the ball enough to get it ordered from my local indy in time. I hate making choices through inaction, but I've done it this time.

I Shall Wear Midnight, Terry Pratchett (Gollancz; Harper)
Workmanlike Pratchett, not his best work but that's a pretty faint damn. Still, it's enough to deny it my vote.


A Conspiracy of Kings, Megan Whalen Turner (Greenwillow)
I pounced on this as soon as it came out, and unlike some people I'm not worried about Gen. We've been shoved completely out of his POV in this and King of Attolia specifically so we'd be worried about him, but I don't believe for a moment that he's getting off on being king. Turner did an excellent job of pulling our attention right away from Gen and still keeping him the central figure in the series. But is this more impressive than what Black did in White Cat and Bacigalupi did in Ship Breaker? These three are seriously neck-and-neck.


Behemoth, Scott Westerfield (Simon Pulse; Simon & Schuster UK)
Sequel; and points for surprising me on what hatched out of the eggs. (I was certain they were dragons.) Lots of steampunky goodness + extrapolating from real political history rather than mythic political history = win. But something weighs less than the three others still in the running in the scales of my head. I can't define it, but I need an excuse to eliminate something. Okay, that's a relief.
No Award - nonsense! Anybody who votes for "No Award" in a year like this one is a sorehead.

Hmm...I'm not sure how much having rankings would have helped to whittle down the field. These three are just too darn good! But I continue the mental weighing, and find that I'll have to vote for Gen because I love him; and because the entire audience loves him enough to be terrified at the possibility that he might become corrupted and stop deserving our love. My emotional investment in the protagonists of the other two books ended shortly after closing the book. I'll read the next Curse Workers story and be interested to see how the closing dilemma is resolved, but I'm not on tenterhooks for it.

Also - apologies to those of you who cannot see Bruce in the header. This appears to be an Internet Explorer problem and Damon and I (by which I mostly mean Damon) haven't been able to figure out how to fix it. The blogger templates are handy, but the code is full of redundancies and hard to troubleshoot. If anybody who isn't using Explorer also has a black header instead of Bruce, please let us know.

Thoughts on Award Week

Alas, I am once again behind the curve, as I haven't read any of the major award winners! Newbery, Caldecott, Prinz, King, Belpre - nothing makes me feel how completely out of the loop I am in my own profession like award announcements! It's also a little embarrassing because I know some of the authors. Not till you get down to the awards for audios do I start knowing the books involved, and that's because the audio version is done a year or more after publication. Oh, and I have read one of the Stonewall honor books. I reckon that's something.

I've read a lot of books I enjoyed, all the same; though 2010 was the first year in a long time I didn't crack 200 read. My final total was 179. I blame the combination of driving and computer games. I've done a lot of reading on buses over the years, and if I'm at a computer I'm not reading a book. Even a lot of my reading time doesn't count toward the total, as I only count books I read all the way through. If I mine two or three chapters of seven or eight books for research, that's a fair number of books that I read intently but can't put on my tally. Magazines and comics don't count unless they're bound collections. And no online reading counts.

The trouble is - there's always more good books published in a year than anybody, even someone on an awards committee, can read. Probably when I do read this year's award winners - and I will read a lot of them eventually - I'll think that this or that other book that never got any buzz probably deserved an award more than this or that winner, whether by some objective standard or by dint of my taste diverging from the judges. I might even think that its failure to win proves the judges hadn't read it. And I might be right, or I might be wrong.

The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Even with recent proliferation of awards, there's more good books than there are awards to give to them. Society has worse troubles than that!

Andre Norton Breakdown, Pt. 2

So, research done, proceeding to evaluation. First, a quick review of what I'm reading for. A book could be the best book published last year and not fit award criteria. So, how is the Andre Norton Award defined?

Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc., (SFWA®) has created this new literary award to recognize outstanding science fiction and fantasy novels that are written for the young adult market. ... Any English-language book published as a young adult science fiction/fantasy novel is eligible, including graphic novels with no limit on word length or country of origin. Votes are cast by SFWA members in conjuction with the Nebula Awards.

Taking them in order read, how does each book match up?

Ash, by Malinda Lo. I read this months ago. It wasn't "just" a lesbian Cinderella, but what I chiefly remember is a dreamy familiarity. No crying, no laughing, no vivid images rising in my mind's eye. Shouldn't "outstanding" stick out in my head more?

Zoe's Tale, by John Scalzi - okay, it's science fiction, and it's not bad, for half a book. I kept thinking as I read it that I was missing chunks of story, and I was right. The other half is contained in The Last Colony, which was published in 2006. And you know what else? It doesn't qualify. It was not "written for the young adult market." It's part of a series written and marketed for adults; the author admits in the end matter that he wrote this book in response to disatisfaction with what had been the last book in that series; and though he does a good job of the YA narrator and should consider the market, that doesn't make it a YA book. No vote.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead won a Newbery and was checked out with holds on it all over my library system, which is a good sign. And it is science fiction/fantasy - eventually. Most of the time it reads like a domestic novel, but it does deal with time travel from the point of view of someone in the past affected by a future time visitor, which gets her out of any need to explain the mechanism. It's full of clues and hints for the alert reader to pick up on, and I like that. It doesn't really tie my brain into a knot the way time travel stories should, though. And - you're going to think I'm a horrible nitpicker, but - I'm not sure it's YA. The age of the protagonists, the themes, and the style all say "MG" to me, as they did to the librarians who placed it in "juvenile." But as we all know, the boundaries between those two sections are fluid.

Leviathan, by Scott Westerfield. Cracking story, definitely SF/F (depending on exactly where you put his Weird Science steampunky tech), YA without question. Loses a point for not telling a full story, but since it's the first of a series that's not a big deal. I never felt that I was being shortchanged during the book.

Eyes Like Stars, by Lisa Mantchev. Fantasy, YA, another first in series, fun to read. I had problems with the worldbuilding that I could ignore while reading but that leaped out at me every time I put the book down. Where are the Players when not on call? Every play? Does that include the one-act plays we do in grade school, or the unproduced plays like Tolkien's "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm's Son?" Could you define the term more? Why does anybody come to this theater if you never do new productions? If the Players only play one role why aren't they identical to that role? These things bother me. No vote.

Hotel Under the Sand - Kage Baker. I love this book. I would have loved this book when I was nine, though I wouldn't have understood it as well. It's got themes you can grow into and it's funny and it's dramatic and you can read it more than one way and this is what it's all about, people. I'm tempted to vote for it just for the line "No bully is a match for a dreadful ghost, or for two determined ladies with a cannon." But. Criterion. No way in heck is this YA. This is a children's book. The protagonist is 9. The themes and the way they're presented are ideal to encounter in elemetary school and revisit throughout the rest of your life. It's the best of the lot and I wish it had gotten more notice (any notice) in the industry but the fluidity of the juvenile/YA boundary is not fluid enough to let me vote for it for a YA award. Dagnab it.

Ice, by Sarah Beth Durst. This, on the other hand, is as YA as they come. It's pretty hard to do the Psyche story (technically, "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," but at the motif level it's all the same) without being YA. And it's good. The fact that I find the heroine annoying for most of the book doesn't change that. The only time I like her at all is when she's insisting on having her own work and figuring out how to make that fit her new lifestyle, which is sympathetic. But everything else about her grates so hard on my nerves I'm having trouble deciding whether the book itself is outstanding or merely good.

This left me with The Girl who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of her Own Making. As I mentioned, hate the title - it sounds, oh, what's the word? Cutesy? Phony? But I'm prejudiced by its only being available online - inconvenient to read and self-published! - so I shrug that off and dive in. Unfortunately, yesterday was a bad balance day. I felt crappy, my defenses were low, and by the third chapter I was hiding under the desk crying; "The adverbs! The adverbs! Oh, the horror!" I understand this has been picked up by Feivel and Friends, so maybe when it comes out as a book, having undergone an editing process and been purged of words like "rather" and "quite," it'll be readable, but right now it's like a rough draft of what a children's book is supposed to be, built on an inperceptive reading of late 19th-early 20th century British fantasy and played to the gallery. And, by the way, the author addresses her audience once, as adults, so I'm allowed to stop there and say she's disqualified herself for this award. Whew.

Used to, we were asked to rank each nominee, with points awarded for all the different rankings a book received and the winner having most points. This year, we're supposed to vote for only one, and it appears that the only book that qualifies about which I have no reservations is Leviathan. So that's that.

I'd have voted for Hotel Under the Sand if I could.

Andre Norton Breakdown

It's that time of year again and I'm within spitting distance of finishing my research on my vote for the Nebula Award, given every year by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Actually, I don't give two hoots about the Nebula itself most years; the Andre Norton Award for YA SF is almost always the only vote I cast. And that's plenty of work all on its own, because between my inability to keep up with my own field and the bizarro nature of the typical roster of nominees it's rare for me to have read any of them before the final ballot appears. I'm resolved to pay more attention this year, but I resolved that last year, too, and here we are.

The thing about the Andre Norton Award nominees is that, due probably to the way the nominations are made - with SFWA members who happen to think about it during the year nominating books that happen to impress them, and the ones that get the most nominations during that period making the final cut - and the nature of the SFWA membership, which is mostly authors of adult science fiction and fantasy, there isn't much overlap with the books that are buzzed, listed, and awarded in the YA industry. Most of the authors don't read YA on purpose, don't understand how it differs from juvenile or adult literature, and don't take it seriously. Many of them are trying to live down the dictum that "the Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve," rather than embracing it as they should. On the other hand, the YA they read and like isn't influenced by the librarians, school review sources, and social networks that drive the awards within the industry. So the fact that the list often seems like it came from a different universe isn't necessarily a bad thing. At least there's almost always something wonderful I might not have run across without it.

On the other hand, it's a fair amount of work. This year, of the nominees, I had read Malinda Lo's Ash at the time the nominees were announced in February. John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale was at the Enchilada, but hidden away in the adult SF section where the odds of my running across it were approximately nil. Others were also in the library system, but either checked out, in process, or on hold at the central location I can bus to, so I planned the most efficient route and drove to branches. I got lucky and found both of the most "mainstream" nominees, Scott Westerfield's Leviathan and Rebecca Stead's Newbery-winning When You Reach Me at the same library on the near southeast side. However, to get Lisa Mantchev's Eyes Like Stars I had to drive several miles north of beyond and get on the Death Loop among all the evil subdivisions.

Sarah Beth Durst's Ice and Kage Baker's Hotel Under the Sand weren't in the San Antonio Library System at all, but I have an indy bookstore and I'm not afraid to use it. My special order on those two came in last Saturday and I've read Hotel and am about halfway through Ice.

The last book isn't even a book. The Girl Who Navigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente is available online for "donations" and won't be a real book I can read on the balcony or in the bathroom until next year. Although I could have read it at any time during the past month, I resent this a lot and have put it off till last. Also, I hate the title. But I'm an honest voter and will get it done.

The deadline to vote is March 30. I'm probably the only one going to all this trouble for this particular award. The fact that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows beat out The True Meaning of Smek Day in 2007 is proof enough of that. (I promise you, if everybody who voted for Potter had read Smek Day, it would have been a landslide for the funny SF!) But I'm not responsible for them; I'm responsible for me.

So go read them all and on Thursday I'll come back and discuss each title. I'll be finishing Ice at lunch, probably, and that leaves plenty of time to read that online thing. If I can sit at the computer that long.

Headlines! ALA Awards!

The American Library Association Youth Media Awards are posted at ALA's site, and I get more reflected glory. Diego: Bigger Than Life, illustrated by David Diaz, written by Carmen T. Bernier-Grand, and published by Marshall was honored with both the author and the illustrator Pura Belpre award, and I've known Carmen T. on the internet for years. I even had her vet my book The Music Thief for gringo stupidity. So I'm very proud of her.

Tanya Lee Stone hasn't been on the listserve as long and I can't claim any close acquaintance with her, but her Almost Astronauts: 13 Women Who Dared to Dream, won the Robert F. Sibert Medal for most distinguished informational book for children, and I'm going to take the liberty of being proud of her, too.

Now for the embarrassing admission - of all the Newbery books, award and honors, I have only read The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg by Rodman Philbrick. This is because I can't make myself keep up with all the new books coming out and choose my books haphazardly, based on what I happen to run across, rather than actively reserving books or ordering them. So I'm always behind the curve on Newbery day, and am not much good at improving the dismal record of the SFWA for haphazard and sometimes inexplicable nominations for the Andre Norton Awards, which has always acted as the neglected stepchild of the Nebula. But I'll get 'em read.

Headlines! More reflected glory!

So I opened School Library Journal this morning, and I saw that San Antonian Carmen Tafolla has won the Charlotte Zolotow Award for outstanding writing in a picture book with What Can You Do with a Paleta? ( Tricycle Press)

I can't claim any particular closeness to Ms. Tafolla, and I don't guarantee you that if you mentioned me to her she'd know who I was, but she's local and I've been in the same room with her, so I can be proud of her if I want to. And I want to!

A paleta, for those of you who don't know, is like a Popsicle but way better. They're basically frozen juice on a stick, but without that wateriness I get when I try to freeze my own. When you're about to collapse of heat exhaustion a tamarind paleta is the wisest thing you can buy. El Paraiso, the joint closest to me, sells watermelon ones with the seeds still in; and if you're into cold dill pickles you should try their dill pickle flavored ones.

I see I had a brain burp on Tuesday and got the Sydney Taylor Book Award mixed up with Susan Taylor Brown. What can I say, it was kind of a crappy day and I just wanted to go lie down before my head fell off. I could go back and edit and pretend it never happened, but I'm more honest than that. Or lazy, pick one.

Award Time!

My online writing community includes all sorts of wonderful people in whose reflected glory I can bask. Case in point: April Halprin Wayland has won the Sydney Taylor Brown Award for New Year at the Pier. I remember when she was talking about the book on our listserve and getting input on the title and so on. I don't think I had anything useful to say, but I was at least there for the conversation.

So go on over to her website and congratulate her already!
April Halprin Wayland