The editors of School Library Journal, the go-to professional journal for librarians that work with children and teens, selected 62 titles for their Best Books of 2010. Categories include Picture Books, Fiction and Nonfiction, and while I won’t list all of them (the full list is here), I will highlight a few that just happen to be in the Academy Library collection:
KING OF ITHAKA by Tracy Barrett — When sixteen-year-old Telemachos and his two best friends, one a centaur, leave their life of privilege to undertake a quest to find Telemachos’s father Odysseus, they learn much along the way about what it means to be a man and a king.
ANNEXED by Sharon Dogar — Retells the story of Anne Frank from the perspective of Peter, who overcomes an initial loathing for the precocious young diarist before falling in love with her and questioning his faith in light of frightening persecutions.
REVOLUTION by Jennifer Donnelly — An angry, grieving seventeen-year-old musician facing expulsion from her prestigious Brooklyn private school travels to Paris to complete a school assignment and uncovers a diary written during the French revolution by a young actress attempting to help a tortured, imprisoned little boy–Louis Charles, the lost king of France.
INCARCERON by Catherine Fisher — To free herself from an upcoming arranged marriage, Claudia, the daughter of the Warden of Incarceron, a futuristic prison with a mind of its own, decides to help a young prisoner escape.
BLACK HOLE SUN by David Macinnis Gill — On the planet Mars, sixteen-year-old Durango and his crew of mercenaries are hired by the settlers of a mining community to protect their most valuable resource from a feral band of marauders.
WICKED GIRLS: A NOVEL OF THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS by Stephanie Hemphill — A fictionalized account, told in verse, of the Salem witch trials, told from the perspective of three young women living in Salem in 1692–Mercy Lewis, Margaret Walcott, and Ann Putnam, Jr.
THE THINGS A BROTHER KNOWS by Dana Reinhardt — Although they have never gotten along well, seventeen-year-old Levi follows his older brother Boaz, an ex-Marine, on a walking trip from Boston to Washington, D.C. in hopes of learning why Boaz is completely withdrawn.
THE GRIMM LEGACY by Polly Shulman — New York high school student Elizabeth gets an after-school job as a page at the “New-York Circulating Material Repository,” and when she gains coveted access to its Grimm Collection of magical objects, she and the other pages are drawn into a series of frightening adventures involving mythical creatures and stolen goods.
CONFESSIONS OF THE SULLIVAN SISTERS by Natalie Standiford — Upon learning on Christmas Day that their rich and imperious grandmother may soon die and disown the family unless the one who offended her deeply will confess, each of the three Sullivan sisters sets down her offenses on paper.
NUMBERS by Rachel Ward — Fifteen-year-old Jem knows when she looks at someone the exact date they will die, so she avoids relationships and tries to keep out of the way, but when she meets a boy named Spider and they plan a day out together, they become more involved than either of them had planned.
Wow, that’s quite a list — and that’s only the fiction titles. I’ll highlight some of School Library Journal‘s Best Books of 2010 in the nonfiction category in tomorrow’s post.