The 2021 ALA Youth Media Awards–How Did We Do?

After an hour of listening and scribbling madly as announcements were read, I can now pass on what we learned from this year’s ALA Youth Media Awards (including Newbery & Caldecott). The reason we pay so much attention to this is not that we’re simpatico with the American Library Association. But the ALA exerts tremendous influence on children’s literature. If we factor out huge bestsellers like The Wimpy Kid, librarians are the chief gatekeeper of what appears in the children’s section of bookstores and libraries. Award-winning books with shiny stickers will appear in displays and on recommended titles and purchase lists. Newbery and Caldecott winners stay in print forever.

I’ll end the suspense right away: The Newbery winner this year is When You Trap a Tiger, by Tae Keller. I predicted it would be on the list somewhere, as well as Fighting Words, one of this year’s five honor books. The other honor books were All Thirteen, Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom, We Dream of Space, and A Wish in the Dark.

Fun fact: Christina Soontornvat is the author of All Thirteen and A Wish in the Dark–the first time I know of that a single author has two books on the Newbery list in the same year! (A Wish in the Dark is fiction, All Thirteen is nonfiction.)

We didn’t do any Caldecott predictions, but flamed out anyway. We’ve reviewed none of the honor books: A Place Inside Me, The Cat Man of Aleppo, Me & Mama, Outside In. Much less the winner, We Are Water Protectors.

The Michael Prinz Award is for outstanding Young-Adult books. Usually, most of those are a bit problematic (or a lot). But we’re very happy that the top winner this year is Everything Sad Is Untrue. We were hoping this one would pick up a Newbery, but a Prinz might be even better. Everything Sad straddles the lines between YA and MG, fiction and nonfiction: a memoir told with fiction elements and a strong Christian influence.

Those are the big ones. Here are some other winners that we’ve reviewed:

• Prairie Lotus scored an honor for the Asian Pacific American Award.
• The Blackbird Girls appeared on the honor list for the Sidney Taylor Award (reflecting the Jewish experience).
• For the Schneider Award for promoting understanding of disability, I Talk Like a River took top honors for picture book and Show Me a Sign for MG fiction; *When Stars Are Scattered was an honor title for middle grade. (Fun fact: When Stars Are Scattered also won Odyssey honors for the audio version, which leaves me scratching my head: how do you do an effective audio version of a graphic novel?)
• Before the Ever After won the Coretta Scott King Award (reflecting the black experience) for text. Two of the honor books in that category were King and the Dragonflies and All the Days Past; All the Days to Come. (Mildred Taylor, author of All the Days Past, also won a Children’s Literature Legacy Award for her work, including the Logan Family series.)
• The YALSA Award for Excellence in YA Nonfiction went to *The Rise and Fall of Charles Lindberg.
• The Silbert Award for children’s nonfiction went to *Honeybee: the Busy Life of Apius Mellifera. Fun fact: both of these were written by Candace Fleming. We gave them both a starred review.
• The top choice for the Pura Belpre award, reflecting the Hispanic experience, is Efren Divided.

So . . . even though we didn’t do such a great job predicting this year, we’ve called your attention to a number of award winners! We’ll try to round up the Caldecotts and the Theodore S. Geisels (for early readers) early next month.