2011 William C. Morris Award Winner! Congratulations Blythe Woolston!The Freak Observer has won YALSA's William C. Morris Award, honoring a YA book written by a debut author.
I should have died quick. But I didn't. I'm a miracle of modern medicine, only the medicine doesn't get much credit, I notice. People say I'm lucky, or I'm blessed, and then they turn away.
I'm not the only miracle. There's Odd too.
Polly Furnas had The Plan for the future. Get married to Bridger Morgan, for one. College, career, babies. Etc. All the important choices were made.
It was all happily-ever-after as a diamond-ring commercial.
But The Plan did not include a lethal drug-resistant infection. It did not include "some more reconstruction and scar revision in the future." And it certainly did not include Odd Estes, a trip to Portland in an ancient Cadillac to "tear Bridger a new one," fly fishing, marshmallows, Crisco, or a loaded gun.
But plans change. Stories get revised and new choices must be made.
Polly and Odd have choices: Survival or not. Catch or release.
About Blythe Woolston
Blythe Woolston works as professional book indexer for academic presses. She is the author of The Freak Observer, which won the ABC New Voices Pick award, the Moonbeam Children's Book Award, and the 2010 William C. Morris YA Debut Award. She lives in Montana with her family.
Blythe Woolston's Web Links
Book Details
Hardcover: 978-0-7613-7755-9
List Price: $17.95 • S&L: $13.46
eBook: 978-0-7613-8725-1
List Price: $12.95 • S&L: $9.71
There are stories where the girl gets her prince, and they live happily ever after. (This is not one of those stories.)
Jenna Lord's first sixteen years were not exactly a fairy tale. Her father is a controlling psycho and her mother is a drunk. She used to count on her older brother—until he shipped off to Iraq. And then, of course, there was the time she almost died in a fire.
There are stories where the monster gets the girl, and everyone cries for his innocent victim. (This is not one of those stories either.)
Mitch Anderson is many things: A dedicated teacher and coach. A caring husband. A man with a certain...magnetism.
And there are stories where it's hard to be sure who's a prince and who's a monster, who is a victim and who should live happily ever after. (These are the most interesting stories of all.)
Drowning Instinct is a novel of pain, deception, desperation, and love against the odds—and the rules.
About Ilsa J. Bick
Ilsa J. Bick is a child psychiatrist, as well as a film scholar, surgeon wannabe, former Air Force major, and award-winning author of dozens of short stories and novels, including the critically acclaimed Draw the Dark and Ashes. Ilsa lives with her family and other furry creatures near a Hebrew cemetery in rural Wisconsin. One thing she loves about the neighbors: They are very quiet and only come around for sugar once in a blue moon.
Praise for Draw the Dark: "The novel brilliantly strikes a compelling balance between fantasy and contemporary fiction. Readers will be on the edge of their seats waiting to find out what happens next."— starred, SLJ
by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson Illustrated by R. Gregory Christie
A documentary novel of the life and work of Lewis Michaux, Harlem bookseller
"You can't walk straight on a crooked line. You do you'll break your leg. How can you walk straight in a crooked system?"
Lewis Michaux was born to do things his own way. When a white banker told him to sell fried chicken, not books, because "Negroes don't read," Lewis took five books and one-hundred dollars and built a bookstore. It soon became the intellectual center of Harlem, a refuge for everyone from Muhammad Ali to Malcolm X.
In No Crystal Stair, Coretta Scott King Award-winning author Vaunda Micheaux Nelson combines meticulous research with a storyteller's flair to document the life and times of her great uncle Lewis Michaux, an extraordinary literacy pioneer of the Civil Rights era.
"My life was no crystal stair, far from it. But I'm taking my leave with some pride. It tickles me to know that those folks who said I could never sell books to black people are eating crow. I'd say my seeds grew pretty damn well. And not just the book business. It's the more important business of moving our people forward that has real meaning."
About Vaunda Micheaux Nelson
Vaunda Micheaux Nelson is the author of many books for young readers, including Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal, which won the Coretta Scott King Award in 2010, and Almost to Freedom, which won a Coretta Scott King Honor for Colin Bootman's illustrations in 2007. Vaunda is a youth services librarian at the public library in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, where she lives with her husband.
To write No Crystal Stair, Vaunda spent years researching Lewis Michaux's life. She conducted interviews, sifted through library collections, examined family archives, and interviewed those who knew Michaux. In the end though, the man's full story (and even his date of birth) remained elusive. Only the tools of fiction could make a complete portrait.
About R. Gregory Christie
R. Gregory Christie's illustrations have earned him three Coretta Scott King Honors and two spots on the New York Times' annual Best Illustrated Children's Books lists. Greg has also illustrated numerous jazz album covers and is a regular contributor to the New Yorker magazine.
"Like Ashley Hope Pérez, I have been a teacher in inner-city Houston and a writer of young adult fiction. I am in a perfect position to watch in awe as she completely nails our students' experiences in her harrowing, heart-rending, and ultimately hopeful The Knife and the Butterfly. This is the book I wish I'd had the guts to write!"
—Jordan Sonnenblick, author of After Ever After and Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie
Remember.
Azael Arevalo wishes he could remember how the brawl ended. He knows his MS13 boys faced off with some punks from Crazy Crew. He can picture the bats, the bricks, the chains. A knife. But he can't remember anything between that moment and when he woke behind bars.
Azael knows prison, and something isn't right about this lockup. No phone call. No lawyer. No news about his brother or his homies. The only thing they make him do is watch some white girl in some cell. Watch her and try to remember.
Remember.
Lexi Allen would love to forget the brawl, would love for it to disappear back into the Xanax fog it came from. And her mother and her lawyer hope she chooses not to remember too much about the brawl—at least when it's time to testify.
Lexi knows that there's more at stake in her trial than her life alone, though. She's connected to him, and he needs the truth. The knife cut, but somehow it also connected.
About Ashley Hope Pérez
Ashley Hope Pérez grew up in Texas and served in the Teach for America Corps in Houston. She has worked as a translator and is completing a PhD in comparative literature. She spends most of her time reading, writing, and teaching college classes on vampire literature and Latin-American women writers. Kirkus called her first novel, What Can't Wait, "Un magnífico debut." Ashley lives in Indiana with her husband, Arnulfo, and their son, Liam Miguel.
Carolrhoda Lab is dedicated to distinctive, provocative, boundary-pushing fiction for teens and their sympathizers. Carolrhoda Lab probes and examines the young-adult condition one novel at a time, affording YA authors and readers an opportunity to explore and experiment with thoughts, ideas, and paradigms in the human condition. Adolescence is an experience we share and a condition from which some of us never quite recover. All of us at Carolrhoda Lab are proud to proclaim our lifelong adolescence and our commitment to publishing exceptional fiction about the teenage experience.
