Bloggers’ Kid Lit Awards Unveil Top Picks
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Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 2/18/2008 2:00:00 PM
Are you one of those people who find the Newbery Awards a tad too elitist? That’s what two women who blog about children’s literature thought when they launched the Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards (Cybils) in 2006. Since then, they’ve amassed quite a loyal following.
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| Anne Boles Levy |
Anne Boles Levy, a freelance writer from Chicago, unveiled her blog BookBuds.net in 2004, and Kelly Herold, an associate professor of Russian literature at Grinnell College in Iowa, started her book review blog Big A little a almost two years ago.
Although the two had never met in person, Boles Levy approached Herold with the idea of starting a more “middle ground” children’s lit award with a different twist: all the judges had to blog about children’s and YA literature.
Now in its second year, the Cybils last week unveiled its awards for 2007. Surprisingly, the prize for the young adult category went to Barry Lyga's Boy Toy (Houghton, 2007), a wrenching story about a 12-year-old boy who was seduced by his young and beautiful history teacher. The book beat Sherman Alexie's heavily favored The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown, 2007), a National Book Award winner.
Cybils judges—who include the authors Sarah Miller and Mitali Perkins—said that Lyga's book “guides readers beyond sensationalism and straight into empathy, challenging expectations and assumptions on every page,” and that his prose is “unflinching, and the result is heartbreaking and unforgettable.”
The Cybils team hands out awards in eight genres of children's literature. Because both graphic novels and fantasy & science fiction are split by age group, there are a total of 10 awards. Ibtisam Barakat's Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood (Farrar), a haunting account of the Six Day War, won for middle grade/YA nonfiction; Adam Rex's The True Meaning of Smekday (Hyperion), a spoof of science fiction novels, won that category in the younger age group; and Janice N. Harrington's The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County (Farrar) took top honors in fiction picture books.
Close to 90 kidlit bloggers took part in two rounds of judging; the first group waded through 575 titles nominated by the public last fall. Their short lists were announced on January 1 at blog.cybils.com.
The Cybils are the only online literary awards, says Boles Levy, adding that the awards only have two criteria: literary merit and kid appeal. "We're not about dictating kids' tastes," she says. "But we're impatient with formulaic garbage, too."
