Opening Doors for Younger Readers

At Chasing Ray, Colleen Mondor is doing what she does so very well—forcing us to think hard about the big things. Her post is titled "How to recommend a book written by and/or about a person of color (POC)" and, with her typical intelligence, she parses the issues, concluding, "If we want to fully integrate publishing—if we want to make bookstores places that only have an African American section in the context of history...then we need to depart from the impression that minority books can ever be lumped together. They are as diverse and unusual and unique as the genres they are written for."

I could not agree more, and I could not be prouder to call Colleen a friend. I've not posted about the Liar book cover controversy because everyone else has done that so well and because I've had my own cover challenges—once in my memoir about marriage to a Salvadoran man, Still Love in Strange Places, and once during the design work for The Heart is Not a Size, my forthcoming Juarez novel.

But all of the talk has caused me to think back on 2001, when I chaired the National Book Awards Young People's Literature jury. We were five people asked to read upwards of 160 books. We set down criteria for excellence at the outset, established guidelines that would allow us to put YA novels on equal footing with picture books, history books, poetry books, biographies. Then we focused on the task at hand. We'd never met one another, our team of five. We had no politics to argue against or for, no statement we were trying to make. We were simply looking for the five best books of the year—the five books we wished to recommend to young readers, teachers, librarians, parents. The books we wanted carried forward.

Excellence prevailed. Excellence resulted in our selection of the following five exquisite, timeless, please-recommend-them books. How can we influence what others read? We can, when we are given a voice about books, make sure we use that well.

With the fierce originality that inheres in the very best of books, Virginia Euwer Wolff takes on life's hardest questions in TRUE BELIEVER and then dares to answer them. Love and religion, hope and sacrifice, community and class are spoken to and through Euwer's audacious narrator, fifteen-year-old LaVaughn. In a voice that manages both authenticity and lyricism, and with a fractured prose-poem style that perfectly captures the particulars of LaVaughn's sometimes bewildering circumstance, Wolff has written a masterful, fearless, and most essential novel.

In CARVER: A LIFE IN POEMS, Marilyn Nelson takes the familiar sketched outline of the life of former slave and renowned scientist George Washington Carver and fashions a revealing, richly textured portrait of an extraordinary and unforgettable man. Like Carver himself, the poems included here are elegant, careful, and rich with detail; they hold a quiet but unyielding power.

In Kate DiCamillo’s novel, THE TIGER RISING, two bereft children, walloped by death and abandonment, find a caged tiger in the woods. They learn from their fascination with the creature that they and the life burning in them, the power of their emotions, and the solace in their relationship match the tiger in brightness, despite the darkness of their loss. The story is small but deep, populated with characters of mythic presence and written in a lyrical style that transforms the Florida backwoods into poetic territory.

History books are so often filled with the contributions of adults. However, in WE WERE THERE, TOO, Phillip Hoose has chosen to highlight the fascinating role that young people have played in the making of America. Using diaries, journals, and interviews, Hoose brings us unforgettable new insights into the courageous young people who dared to make a difference. These compelling pages yield a new, refreshing look at another kind of national hero.

In A STEP FROM HEAVEN, first-time novelist An Na creates an authentic portrait of an immigrant child and her family. A little girl when the story opens, bound for college by the time it ends, Young Ju tells of her journey in a brilliantly maturing voice as confusion gives way to articulate comprehension. The cumulative power of the book’s precisely imagined moments and its unwavering point of view carry the reader with Young Ju toward understanding—not just of where she is going, but where she has come from. To read A STEP FROM HEAVEN is to experience, or re-experience, what it is to grow up.