Award season I

So, the American Library Association announced the Newbery and Caldecott Medals and the Printz Award yesterday, and in a somewhat surprising turn of events, I'd already read two of the three.

The Caldecott was awarded to the wonderfully strange Flotsam by David Weisner. It doesn't really have a plot to speak of, but it involves a young man who finds a camera on the beach and discovers in it a roll of film containing a number of bizarre and unbelievable images. It's a utterly charming book, and well deserving of the honor. This is Weisner's third Caldecott Medal, which I believe may be a record. I'll have to look it up later.

The Printz Award, given for "excellence in literature written for young adults," went to Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese. It's an original graphic novel - the first graphic novel to win an ALA prize - about the efforts of a Chinese-American boy to come to terms with his ethnic identity. It's cleverly written, and I thought the cartoony drawing style was well-suited to the story. The Printz Award is pretty new, but I've been impressed with their selections thus far, and this one is no exception

The Newbery went to a book I've never heard of, The Higher Power of Lucky, by an author I've never heard of, Susan Patron. I'll be surprised if I like it as much as I liked last year's winner, Criss Cross, but I hope at least it will be better than 2005 winner, Kira-Kira, which I did not like. I'll have to wait a week or so to find out, unfortunately; we don't have any copies here in the store.

As for those other awards, I'll have a long post about them after work. I will take a moment to say that it's interesting to be able say that I've seen as many of the Best Documentary Feature nominees as Best Picture nominees. That's a first for me, I think.