ALA Youth Media Awards

Tomorrow is the big day when the Youth Media Awards are announced. I hope to watch them live, but that means I will have to get to school extra extra early. Or take the morning off. You can watch them live here.

There are many books I hope to see honored at the ALA YMA and I think today is a good day to share a few of  them with you, in no particular order.

 The Story of Owen by E. K. Johnston

 Poisoned Apples  by Christine Heppernan

 The Right Word: Roget and his Thesaurus by Jen Bryant

 The Misadventures of the Family Fletcher by Dana Alison Levy

 El Deafo by Cece Bell

 Gaston  written by Kelly DiPucchio, illustrated by Christine Robinson

 I Kill the Mockingbird by Paul Acampora

 Grasshopper Jungle by Andrew Smith

 Going Over  by Beth Kephart

 The Farmer and the Clown by Marla Frazee

 Nuts to You  by Lynne Rae Perkins

 Audrey (Cow)  by Dan Bar-El (this can;t win a Newbery because Bar-El is Canadian)

 Gabi A Girl in Pieces  by Isabel Quintero

 Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Move over Eleanor and Park

My sister likes to walk into bookstores and ask the clerk in the children’s/YA section for the titles of the best books he or she has read lately. A title recommended to her recently was Going Over by Beth Kephart.

It is a story told in two voices. Ada lives in squatters’ slum in West Berlin. Her story is narrated in the first person. Stefan lives in Communist East Berlin. His story is told in the second person. An unusual choice, and yet, it works.  really though, the whole books works because Beth Kephart is such fantastic writer.

“There is a line between us, a wall. It is wide as a river; it has teeth. It is barbed and trenched and lit and piped and mesed and bricked–155 kilometers of wrong. There are dogs, there are watchtowers, there are men, there are guns, there are blares, but this is West Berlin, the Kreuzberg Kiez, Post Office Sudost 3, and we’re free.”

The book is set in 1980’s Berlin, before the wall came down in 1989. Ada Is a graffiti artist who sends messages of hope and escape to Stefan, with whom she is in love. I remember when the wall cam down, but had forgotten about the graffiti.

Stefan dreams of going over to West Berlin. Their grandmothers are best friends and so they meet as children. Eventually, they fall in love and the  dream of Stefan’s escape to the West begins.

I highly recommend this book. This is one you really should read.