More Awards

From The Book Standard here are the Edgar Award nominees and winners for Young Adult and Children's Books:

Best Young Adult

Story Time by Edward Bloor (Harcourt Children's Books)
In Darkness, Death by Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler (Philomel Books)
Jude by Kate Morgenroth (Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing)
The Book of Dead Days by Marcus Sedgwick (Wendy Lamb Books)
Missing Abby by Lee Weatherly (David Fickling Books)


Best Juvenile

Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett (Scholastic Press)
Assassin: The Lady Grace Mysteries by Patricia Finney (Delacorte Books for Young Readers)
Abduction! by Peg Kehret (Dutton Children's Books)
Looking for Bobowicz by Daniel Pinkwater (HarperCollins Children's Books)
The Unseen by Zilpha Keatley Snyder (Delacorte Books for Young Readers)

The only one of these books that I've read is Story Time, which definitely was not award material as far as I'm concerned. (Thanks to Blog of a B.S. for the Book Standard link.)

Welcome to Welcome to Lizard Motel

I've finally started reading Welcome to Lizard Motel by Barbara Feinberg. Feinberg took a beating in the press regarding her take on YA books. In a Salon article, Michael Cart, a professor of Y.A. literature at UCLA's school of education, was quoted as saying of Feinberg's book, "It was the same old thing -- like, here they come again, attacking one small aspect of a field that they don't understand and don't know very much about." Hmmmm. And more recently in an article in AlterNet called New Adventures in Censorship Feinberg was accused of wanting two books "struck from as many reading lists as possible"--a charge Feinberg wrote to deny.

I'm only on page 41. I'm finding the writing style a little on the pretentiously literary side. Is it really necessary for me to know about the weather and what the slats on her chair felt like while she was reading out in the yard? And though her own children inspired this book, so far I think she's running the risk of involving them too much in her argument. If the book becomes too personal, it won't have enough to say about the general population.

All that aside, though, I think Feinberg brings up questions that I feel the kidlit community has totally blown off and been unwilling to discuss. So, while I continue to read the book, I'm going to use my blog as a reader's journal and I'll discuss them.

My tens of readers are looking forward to that, I'm sure.