The National Book Awards were just announced, and the finalists for best ‘Young People’s Literature’ are:
Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith
Charles Darwin published “The Origin of Species,” his revolutionary tract on evolution and the fundamental ideas involved, in 1859. Nearly 150 years later, the theory of evolution continues to create tension between the scientific and religious communities. This same debate raged within Darwin himself, and played an important part in his marriage: his wife, Emma, was quite religious, and her faith gave Charles a lot to think about as he worked on a theory that continues to spark intense debates.Deborah Heiligman’s new biography of Charles Darwin is a thought-provoking account of the man behind evolutionary theory: how his personal life affected his work and vice versa.
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
On March 2, 1955, an impassioned teenager, fed up with the daily injustices of Jim Crow segregation, refused to give her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead of being celebrated as Rosa Parks would be just nine months later, fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin found herself shunned by her classmates and dismissed by community leaders. Undaunted, a year later she dared to challenge segregation again as a key plaintiff in “Browder v. Gayle,” the landmark case that struck down the segregation laws of Montgomery and swept away the legal underpinnings of the Jim Crow South.
One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. The fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had throat cancer and was expected to die. In Stitches, Small re-creates his real-life journey from a speechless victim to a young man willing to flee his home with nothing more than dreams of becoming an artist.
A girl who’s always been in the shadows finds herself pursued by the unbelievably attractive new boy at school. Another girl grows up mute because of a curse placed on her by a vindictive spirit. And a third girl discovers that the real reason for her transient life with her mother has to do with belonging to another world entirely. These are three distinct stories but all center on the deliciousness of wanting and waiting for that moment when lips touch.
Acclaimed author Rita Williams-Garcia intertwines the lives of three very different teens in this fast-paced, gritty narrative about choices and the impact that even the most seemingly insignificant ones can have. Weaving in and out of the girls’ perspectives, readers will find themselves engrossed in not one intimate portrayal but three.
For info on the National Book Foundation and other books that won this year’s awards, go here.
Madeline
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