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Alex Awards
The Winners: 2010
The Boy Who Harnessed
the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba
and Bryan Mealer
American readers will have their imaginations challenged by 14-year-old
Kamkwamba's description of life in Malawi, a famine-stricken, land-locked nation
in southern Africa: math is taught in school with the aid of bottle tops ("three
Coca-Cola plus ten Carlsberg equal thirteen"), people are slaughtered by enemy
warriors "disguised... as green grass" and a ferocious black rhino; and everyday
trading is "replaced by the business of survival" after famine hits the country.
After starving for five months on his family's small farm, the corn harvest
slowly brings Kamkwamba back to life. Witnessing his family's struggle,
Kamkwamba's supercharged curiosity leads him to pursue the improbable dream of
using "electric wind"(they have no word for windmills) to harness energy for the
farm. Kamkwamba's efforts were of course derided; salvaging a motley collection
of materials, from his father's broken bike to his mother's clothes line, he was
often greeted to the tune of "Ah, look, the madman has come with his garbage."
This exquisite tale strips life down to its barest essentials, and once there
finds reason for hopes and dreams, and is especially resonant for Americans
given the economy and increasingly heated debates over health care and energy
policy.
The Bride’s Farewell by
Meg Rosoff ROS
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! by
Ron Currie, Jr., CUR
In infancy, Junior Thibodeaux is encoded with a prophesy: a comet will
obliterate life on Earth in thirty-six 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-his anxious mother; his
brother, a cocaine addict turned pro-baseball phenomenon; his exalted father,
whose own mortality summons Junior's best and worst instincts; and Amy, the love
of Junior's life and a North Star to his journey through romance and heartbreak,
drug-addled despair, and superheroic feats that could save humanity. 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 by
David Finkel 956.704 FIN
A success story in the headlines, the surge in Iraq was an ordeal of hard
fighting and anguished trauma for the American soldiers on the ground, according
to this riveting war report. Washington Post correspondent Finkel chronicles the
15-month deployment of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion in Baghdad during 2007 and
2008, when the chaos in Iraq subsided to a manageable uproar. For the 2-16,
waning violence still meant wild firefights, nerve-wracking patrols through
hostile neighborhoods where every trash pile could hide an IED, and dozens of
comrades killed and maimed. At the fraught center of the story is Col. Ralph
Kauzlarich, whose dogged can-do optimism—his motto is “It’s all good”—pits
itself against declining morale and whispers of mutiny. While vivid and moving,
Finkel’s grunt’s-eye view is limited; the soldiers’ perspective is one of
constant improvisatory reaction to attacks and crises, and we get little sense
of exactly how and why the new American counterinsurgency methods calmed the
Iraqi maelstrom. Still, Finkel’s keen firsthand reportage, its grit and impact
only heightened by the literary polish of his prose, gives us one of the best
accounts yet of the American experience in Iraq.
The Kids Are All Right:
A Memoir by Diana Welch and Liz Welch with Amanda Welch and Dan Welch
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 nineteen-year-old Amanda
was legally on her own, the three younger siblings–Liz, sixteen; Dan, fourteen;
and Diana, eight–were each dispatched to a different set of family friends.
Quick-witted and sharp-tongued, Amanda headed for college in New York City and
immersed herself in an ’80s world of alternative music and drugs. Liz, living
with the couple for whom she babysat, followed in Amanda’s footsteps until high
school graduation when she took a job in Norway as a nanny. Mischievous,
rebellious Dan, bounced from guardian to boarding school and back again, getting
deeper into trouble and drugs. And Diana, the red-haired baby of the family, was
given a new life and identity and told to forget her past. But Diana’s siblings
refused to forget her–or let her go.
The Magicians by Lev
Grossman GRO
Quentin Coldwater is a geeky high-school senior in Brooklyn who is convinced
that happiness and “the life he should be living” are elsewhere—for example, in
the series of nineteen-thirties British adventure novels that he was obsessed
with as a child. When Quentin stumbles on a portal that takes him to a college
for magicians in upstate New York, he learns that the world depicted in these
novels, known as Fillory, is real, and he is forced to square his youthful ideas
with the realities that exist there, too—boredom, regret, shame, and despair.
Quentin’s journey becomes an unexpectedly moving coming-of-age story in which he
learns that magical worlds are much like the real one, in that they are places
“where bad, bitter things happened for no reason, and people paid for things
that weren’t their fault.”
My Abandonment
by Peter Rock ROC
BA thirteen-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.
Inspired by a true story and told through the startlingly sincere voice of a
young narrator, Caroline, Peter Rock's My Abandonment is a riveting journey into
life at the margins, and a mesmerizing tale of survival and hope.
Soulless: An Alexia Tarabotti Novel, by Gail Carriger
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? Will her soulless ability to negate
supernatural powers prove useful or just plain embarrassing? Finally, who is the
real enemy, and do they have treacle tart?
Soulless is a comedy of manners set in Victorian London: full of
werewolves, vampires, dirigibles, and tea-drinking.
Stitches: A Memoir, by
David Small 741.5 SMA
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 fourteen-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.
Believing that they were trying to do their best, David’s parents did just the
reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting
a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son’s respiratory
problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David’s cancer.
Elizabeth, David’s mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the
Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were
hidden.
Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn
nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to
cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home
at sixteen—with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist—will resonate
as the ultimate survival statement.
Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, by Kevin Wilson
In a wholly original collection of stories, 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.
The Winners: 2009
City of Thieves, by David
Benioff BEN
Author and screenwriter Benioff follows up The 25th Hour with this
hard-to-put-down novel based on his grandfather's stories about surviving WWII
in Russia. Having elected to stay in Leningrad during the siege, 17-year-old Lev
Beniov is caught looting a German paratrooper's corpse. The penalty for this
infraction (and many others) is execution. But when Colonel Grechko confronts
Lev and Kolya, a Russian army deserter also facing execution, he spares them on
the condition that they acquire a dozen eggs for the colonel's daughter's
wedding cake. Their mission exposes them to the most ghoulish acts of the
starved populace and takes them behind enemy lines to the Russian countryside.
There, Lev and Kolya take on an even more daring objective: to kill the
commander of the local occupying German forces. A wry and sympathetic observer
of the devastation around him, Lev is an engaging and self-deprecating narrator
who finds unexpected reserves of courage at the crucial moment and forms an
unlikely friendship with Kolya, a flamboyant ladies' man who is coolly reckless
in the face of danger. Benioff blends tense adventure, a bittersweet
coming-of-age and an oddly touching buddy narrative to craft a smart
crowd-pleaser.
The Dragons of Babel by
Michael Swanwick SCI FIC SWA
A war-dragon of Babel crashes in the idyllic fields of a post-industrialized
Faerie and, dragging himself into the nearest village, declares himself king and
makes young Will his lieutenant. Nightly, he crawls inside the young fey's brain
to get a measure of what his subjects think. Forced out of his village, Will
travels with female centaur soldiers, witnesses the violent clash of giants, and
acquires a surrogate daughter, Esme, who has no knowledge of the past and may be
immortal. Evacuated to the Tower of Babel -- infinitely high, infinitely vulgar,
very much like New York City -- Will meets the confidence trickster Nat Whilk.
Inside the Dread Tower, Will becomes a hero to the homeless living in the
tunnels under the city, rises as an underling to a politician, and meets his one
true love-a high-elven woman he dare not aspire to.
Finding Nouf, by Zoë Ferraris -
Zoë Ferraris's electrifying debut of taut psychological suspense offers an
unprecedented window into Saudi Arabia and the lives of men and women there.
When sixteen-year-old Nouf goes missing, along with a truck and her favorite
camel, her prominent family calls on Nayir al-Sharqi, a desert guide, to lead a
search party. Ten days later, just as Nayir is about to give up in frustration,
her body is discovered by anonymous desert travelers. But when the coroner's
office determines that Nouf died not of dehydration but from drowning, and her
family seems suspiciously uninterested in getting at the truth, Nayir takes it
upon himself to find out what really happened to her. This mission will push
gentle, hulking, pious Nayir, a Palestinian orphan raised by his bachelor uncle,
to delve into the secret life of a rich, protected teenage girl -- in one of the
most rigidly gender-segregated of Middle Eastern societies. Initially horrified
at the idea of a woman bold enough to bare her face and to work in public, Nayir
soon realizes that if he wants to gain access to the hidden world of women, he
will have to join forces with Katya Hijazi, a lab worker at the coroner's
office. Their partnership challenges Nayir, bringing him face to face with his
desire for female companionship and the limitations imposed by his beliefs. It
also ultimately leads them both to surprising revelations. Fast-paced and
utterly transporting, Finding Nouf offers an intimate glimpse inside a closed
society and a riveting literary mystery.
The Good Thief, by
Hannah Tinti TIN
Twelve year-old Ren is missing his left hand. How it was lost is a mystery that
Ren has been trying to solve for his entire life, as well as who his parents
are, and why he was abandoned as an infant at Saint Anthony’s Orphanage for
boys. He longs for a family to call his own and is terrified of the day he will
be sent alone into the world. But then a young man named Benjamin Nab appears,
claiming to be Ren’s long-lost brother, and his convincing tale of how Ren lost
his hand and his parents persuades the monks at the orphanage to release the boy
and to give Ren some hope. But is Benjamin really who he says he is? Journeying
through a New England of whaling towns and meadowed farmlands, Ren is introduced
to a vibrant world of hardscrabble adventure filled with outrageous scam
artists, grave robbers, and petty thieves. If he stays, Ren becomes one of them.
If he goes, he’s lost once again. As Ren begins to find clues to his hidden
parentage he comes to suspect that Benjamin not only holds the key to his
future, but to his past as well.
Just After Sunset: Stories,
by Stephen King KIN
The stories in this collection have appeared in The New Yorker, Playboy,
McSweeney’s, The Paris Review, Esquire, and other publications. Who but Stephen
King would turn a Port-O-San into a slimy birth canal, or a roadside honky-tonk
into a place for endless love? A book salesman with a grievance might pick up a
mute hitchhiker, not knowing the silent man in the passenger seat listens
altogether too well. Or an exercise routine on a stationary bicycle, begun to
reduce bad cholesterol, might take its rider on a captivating—and then
terrifying—journey. Set on a remote key in Florida, “The Gingerbread Girl” is a
riveting tale featuring a young woman as vulnerable—and resourceful—as Audrey
Hepburn’s character in Wait Until Dark. In “Ayana,” a blind girl works a miracle
with a kiss and the touch of her hand. For King, the line between the living and
the dead is often blurry, and the seams that hold our reality intact might tear
apart at any moment.
Mudbound, by Hillary
Jordan JOR
In Jordan's prize-winning debut, prejudice takes many forms, both subtle and
brutal. It is 1946, and city-bred Laura McAllan is trying to raise her children
on her husband's Mississippi Delta farm-a place she finds foreign and
frightening. In the midst of the family's struggles, two young men return from
the war to work the land. Jamie McAllan, Laura's brother-in-law, is everything
her husband is not-charming, handsome, and haunted by his memories of combat.
Ronsel Jackson, eldest son of the black sharecroppers who live on the McAllan
farm, has come home with the shine of a war hero. But no matter his bravery in
defense of his country, he is still considered less than a man in the Jim Crow
South. It is the unlikely friendship of these brothers-in-arms that drives this
powerful novel to its inexorable conclusion. The men and women of each family
relate their versions of events and we are drawn into their lives as they become
players in a tragedy on the grandest scale.
Over and Under, by Todd Tucker –
In the summer of 1979, Andy and Tom are two fourteen-year-old boys---best
friends, expert cave explorers, and crack shots with their Springfield M-6 Scout
rifles. In rural southern Indiana they are blissfully unaware of the local labor
strife surrounding the Borden Casket Company. The fact that Andy’s dad is a
manager and Tom’s dad is a union laborer has no bearing on their fun and
adventure. But in the building summer heat, violence quickly erupts---including
an explosion, a murder, and the escape of two fugitives---and the young boys can
no longer ignore that the world around them has forever changed. Through their
secret observations of labor meetings, both boys feel the effect of the
dissolution, and it tests their loyalty and friendship, as well as the town's
spirit. What began as a season of independence becomes a summer of growth and
change, of adventure and misbehavior. Reminiscent ofStand by MeandTo Kill a
Mockingbird, Over and Underis the quintessential story of ruddy-faced, scheming,
precocious boys who must navigate that hazy boundary between growing up and
making the most of their last summer of innocence and freedom as they explore
the wilds of rural Indiana, see the most amazing gunshot of their lives, and
discover what it means to be friends.
The Oxford Project, by
Stephen G. Bloom YA SHA
The Oxford School Shakespeare is a well-established series that helps students
to understand and enjoy Shakespeare's plays. As well as the complete and
unabridged text, each play in this series has an extensive range of students'
notes. These include detailed and clear explanations of difficult words and
passages, a synopsis of the plot, summaries of individual scenes, and notes on
the main characters. Also included is a wide range of questions and activities
for work in class, together with the historical background to Shakespeare's
England, a brief biography of Shakespeare, and a complete list of his plays. For
this new edition, the notes have been revised so as to make them clearer anymore
accessible. In addition, the entire text of the book has been redesigned and
reset to make it easier to read.
Sharp Teeth, by Toby
Barlow BAR
An ancient race of lycanthropes has survived to the present day, and its numbers
are growing as the initiated convince L.A.'s down and out to join their pack.
Paying no heed to moons, full or otherwise, they change from human to canine at
will-and they're bent on domination at any cost. Caught in the middle are
Anthony, a kind-hearted, besotted dogcatcher, and the girl he loves, a female
werewolf who has abandoned her pack. Anthony has no idea that she's more than
she seems, and she wants to keep it that way. But her efforts to protect her
secret lead to murderous results. Blending dark humor and epic themes with
card-playing dogs, crystal meth labs, surfing, and carne asada tacos, Sharp
Teeth captures the pace and feel of a graphic novel while remaining "as
ambitious as any literary novel, because underneath all that fur, it's about
identity, community, love, death, and all the things we want our books to be
about" [Nick Hornby, The Believer].
Three Girls and Their Brother,
by Theresa Rebeck REB
Now that it’s all over, everybody is saying it was the picture–that stupid
picture was behind every disaster. . . . They may be the granddaughters of a
famous literary critic, but what really starts it all is Daria, Polly, and
Amelia Heller’s stunning red hair. Out of the blue one day, The New Yorker calls
and says that they want to feature the girls in a glamorous spread shot by a
world-famous photographer, and before long these three beautiful nobodies from
Brooklyn have been proclaimed the new “It” girls. But with no parental
guidance–Mom’s a former beauty queen living vicariously through her daughters,
and Dad is nowhere to be found–the three girls find themselves easy prey for the
sharks and piranhas of show business. Posing in every hot fashion magazine,
tangling with snarling fashonistas and soulless agents, skipping school and
hitting A-list parties, the sisters are caught up in a whirlwind rise to fame
that quickly spirals out of control. When Amelia, the youngest of the three–who
never really wanted to be a model in the first place–appears in an Off-Broadway
play, the balance of power shifts, all the pent-up resentment and pressure comes
to a head, and the girls’ quiet, neglected brother reaches a critical point of
virtual breakdown. And against the odds, even as the struggle for fame threatens
to tear the family apart, the Hellers begin to see that despite the jealousy,
greed, and uncertainty that have come to define their relationships, in the
celebrity world of viciousness and betrayal, all they really have is one
another. Narrated in four parts, from the perspective of each sibling, Three
Girls and Their Brother is a sharp, perceptive, and brilliantly written debut
novel from an acclaimed playwright.
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