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Cybils and The Hub

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If you haven’t already heard, today was the big announcements of the 2011 Cybils winners. You can see the list right here. If you’re interested at all in kidlit, these are the books (and apps!) you want to START with this year, if you haven’t already enjoyed them. They marry literary merit with reader appeal. Both Kim and I served this year in different capacities, but speaking for myself, I could NOT be happier with the YA Fiction winning title, Geoff Herbach’s Stupid Fast. It was one of my favorite reads last year. All of the finalists in my category were strong, but this one held a special little place in my heart.

Today I’m over at The Hub talking February debut novels, too. If you get a chance, hop over there and drop a comment or two.

The Cybils & The Post-Cybil Life

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Today’s the big day! For most people, it means a new year but for anyone who survived the first round of Cybils judging, it’s the big reveal day.

I say survived because not everyone does make it. We’re charged as a panel to read through 196 nominations and make a few cuts. This year, it was 189 cuts. Only 7 made it to see the new year and to see themselves on the final list.

I’ve talked about life on the panel already and offered a few book lists. What I didn’t get to talk about much was what happened after the mid-season trench report, which was that I read a few more books, and then participated in a marathon chat session with fellow panelists the day after Christmas. We’d whittled down our short lists to 5 each, then over the course of the week before Christmas, we knocked the overall shortlist down to 12 titles. The day of discussion, after a weekend of frantic reading (I reread 5 books in about 3 days) and email sending (I would venture to guess maybe 100 or more emails sent over a 24 hour period), we’d made our collective shortlist a total of 10 books.

Then we argued.

The thing about the Cybils or any book committee is that your tastes and your interpretations aren’t always the same as the rest of the group. Sometimes you end up arguing for a while over the subtle difference between “addiction” and “obsession” (ahem) but it’s okay. There’s something to be said about being able to argue small points like — and there’s something to be said the titles I was so intent on fighting for made the top ten list.

Being on a panel like involves a level of discussion unlike any book discussion you usually have. I’m a critical reader and I blog my reviews with a critical eye. So do the rest of the panelists. You’re arguing with smart, savvy readers and you see layers to texts you didn’t see before. And when the criteria for a Cybils book marry both literary merit and teen appeal, you get an interesting opportunity to talk about who the book is for and whether or not it’s believable to and for teenagers. But in the end, the list we came up with has something for everybody and meets both criteria.

Every single book nominated on the panel this year got read by at least one person, which blows my mind. 196 books in a not-quite-three-month-period is a huge number. In reading that many books, so many interesting commonalities emerged. I pointed out some of them before, but one of my favorite ways of looking at data is visually, and I tossed out the idea of creating a Cybils YA Fiction Bingo card. For anyone wondering what some of the unique and interesting things that popped up this year, well, here you go! If you’re feeling like challenging your 2011 YA Fiction expertise, print this out, along with the list of nominated titles we had in our category, and try to figure out what will score you a bingo or two.


This year, I managed to read 162 books of the nominated books and some 48,474 pages (not counting the rereads!). I don’t think I’ve ever read that much in a short amount of time. And I think maybe it made me a little crazy.

Now that I’ve talked about everything except the finalists, perhaps I should get to it. You should stop by the Cybils website to read our panel’s blurbs for each of the titles suggested and to see what made the cuts in the other categories. What I find interesting is that of the 7 titles we picked, 5 were debut novels (in the sense that the author had never before published a book). If you consider first YA novel as debut, then 6 of them were. Three had a sports theme within them. And the covers are pretty muted, too (which doesn’t detract from them being pretty good covers).

These are in no particular order.

Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

Frost by Marianna Baer

Leverage by Joshua Cohen

Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach

Bunheads by Sophie Flack

Everybody Sees the Ants by AS King

It’s a nice mix of books that spans so many different topics and themes. There’s definitely something here for every type of reader, even if it’s not something for every reader. That’s the beauty of the Cybils. Funny, too, looking through these books then back at the bingo card, I actually think these books only fit into a couple of those slots (boarding schools and sports).

I’m eager to see what the judging panel chooses as their winner from these 7 books, and, uh, I’m glad not to be in their shoes.

Cybils: A Mid-Season Report from the Trenches

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Last year, I wrote about my experience on the Cybils YA Fiction panel at the very end of reading season. This year, I thought I’d mix things up and talk about what things are shaking now, at the little-more-than-midway point for round one.

As a round one panelist, the job is pretty simple at first: read. Read a lot. Each book needs at least two readers, and we had 196 nominations in our category. That breaks down to about 60-odd books per person over the course of the two and a half month period. Of course, it’s not perfect math, but it’s roughly a book per day. So far, I’ve knocked out 150 titles. NOT in the last month and a half, mind you, but over the course of the last year. I know I still have a few I’m going to go back and revisit, simply because it has been a year or more since reading some of the titles.

We’re lucky as usual to have a 50-page rule. If a book isn’t working, we get the chance to stop and move on to the next thing. Last year, I felt wary about using this because I never knew whether it was me or the book at page 50 that wasn’t working; this year, though, I’ve made fine use of it. If a book isn’t working by page 50, the reasons are both on me and on the book, and that’s a valid reason to stop. Since the Cybils take literary merit AND appeal into account, that 50 pages are crucial; they can set the tone for both. Plus, because books are read by two panelists, someone else can budge in after their read and tell me why I was wrong. Along the way, books we find worth considering we mark onto personal short lists. The lists can be as long or short as we want through the initial reading process.

Jackie, panel organizer, then drops the bombs on us. Last year, she didn’t give a heads up on it, but this year, she was kind enough to give us dates. The bomb? We start getting short list limits. A couple weeks ago, we had to have no more and no fewer than 15 books each. And tomorrow, we have to have no more and no fewer than 10. But it only gets harder because not only do we have to whittle our lists to 10, we have to read every book on everyone else’s short list at this point all the way through. The 50 page rule is out for any book on a short list.

Knocking my short list to 10 hasn’t been as hard this year as it was last year, and not because I think the books this year are any different than last year in quality. Rather, it feels like in having read so many of them, the ones that are strong contenders for me are the ones I’m still remembering or thinking about this far in. Am I sad cutting some out I really liked? Absolutely. But I know when we have to plead a case for what should make final cuts, I’m only going to be able to rally behind a couple of them. So in thinking that way, it’s not as painful.

In reading all these books, I’ve found some really interesting trends in this year’s young adult nominees. There’s been a lot of cross over when it comes to topics, including a wealth of books about grief (and loss ranging from parents to siblings to friends and even whole families), a handful of books that incorporated some sort of scavenger hunt (or some set of instructions that leads the story forward), music (either performance by or listening to by the main character), characters who are photography whizzes or are surrounded by photography in some way, and more. In fact, some of the coincidences are so strange, I made a bingo card of them. I’ll share that later, though.

Because the Cybils takes nominations from anyone, I think the pool of books let me read a lot of books I’d otherwise never choose (and not to mention, I read a lot so far I hadn’t even heard of before I had to read them). In doing that, themes I otherwise didn’t think about as much emerged. I thought I’d share a few of them for anyone looking to expand their reading, build a display or book list, or fill in potential collection holes.

Africa

All of these books take place either partially or entirely in Africa. This was probably the most surprising trend I found. Two take place in Zimbabwe and feature war as a central force in the story.

American Experience
All three of these stories feature a Latina girl at the center of the story, as she works through what it means to have that heritage while pursuing the American dream. Bonus: all three take place in Texas.

LGBTQ Friendly
I’m really loving this trend. These books come in so many different flavors and explore the idea of sexuality through many lenses. Some are contemporary and some are historical, but what I think I’ve appreciated most is in this field, we’ve moved from the coming out stories — the ones where sexuality is THE THING of the story — and we’ve come to accept that it’s just a part of the story, instead of the whole story itself.

Sports
Maybe the biggest trend this year has been sports, and it’s a surprising trend because it doesn’t feel like I’ve read many sports books. But I have. Sports range from football to basketball to running, ballet, biking, and even drag racing. It’s an impressive range of talent. I know this list is going to leave some of the titles from our nominations out since there ARE so many.

1980-something
I’m filing this one under a trend that bothers me a little bit. Books set in the 1980s are tricky. They’re far enough in the past that the experiences of the characters don’t really resonate with today’s teens, and it feels inauthentic to label them historical fiction if they’re not centered around some historical event. It’s still recent history for adults but it’s not for teens. A couple of these books are actually historical fiction (the Moss and Wallace titles) but the others are only set in the 80s, and the setting can, at times, be very subtle.

This is just a sample of some of the interesting coincidences in the nominees so far. I’ve got a few other themes pop up in my reading, but I want to read through some more titles before building those lists, too. I’ll share them when the new year rolls around.

If you’re interested in reading panelist reviews of nominated titles, you’re in luck. If you go here to the list of nominees, reviews are linked beneath.

Last calls for Cybils nominations & more at The Hub

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This post will look familiar, but I promise it’s the last one on this topic for a long time. I’ve got together another list of books still unnominated for the Cybils in YA Fiction category, many of which haven’t made my previous iterations of the list. Anyone can nominated — you don’t need any accolades to do so — but you can only nominate one book in each category. All you have to do is go here, put in the required information and you’re done. You only have until Saturday to nominate your title in this category and in any of the other ones.

  • If I Tell by Janet Gurtler
  • Mercy Lily by Lisa Albert
  • David by Mary Hoffman
  • Every You, Every Me by David Levithan
  • Going Underground by Sarah Vaught
  • A Plague Year by Edward Bloor
  • You Have Seven Messages by Stewart Lewis
  • All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky by Joe Lansdale
  • Queen of Hearts by Martha Brooks
  • Chain Reaction by Simone Elkeles
  • Bestest Ramadan Ever by Medeia Sharif
  • Paradise by Jill Alexander
  • Popular by Alissa Grosso
  • Spinning Out by David Stahler
  • Unlocked by Ryan G Van Cleave
  • Where I Belong by Gwendolyn Heasley
  • Will Work for Prom Dress by Aimee Ferris
  • Choker by Elizabeth Woods
  • Love, Inc. by Yvonne Collins
  • Blank Confession by Pete Hautman


Here’s the part where this post gets even more eerie. I’m also over at Yalsa’s The Hub blog talking about authors with October debut novels. Head over there and leave a comment. I’d appreciate it!

Cybils Considerations

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There are only a few days left to submit your picks for Cybils consideration — nominations close October 15. Anyone can nominate a title for any of the categories by going right here, reading the rules, then submitting the form.

Looking for a title to submit for the ya fiction category? Here’s a list of titles that haven’t been nominated yet that should be:

  • The Babysitter Murders by Janet Ruth Young
  • Popular by Alissa Grosso
  • Lie by Caroline Bock
  • The Day Before by Lisa Schroeder
  • Her and Me and You by Laura Strasnik
  • Taking Off by Jenny Moss
  • All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky by Joe Lansdale
  • Threads and Flames by Esther Friesner
  • Badd by Tim Tharp
  • What Comes After by Steve Watkins
  • Compulsion by Heidi Ayarbe
  • Mercy Lily by Lisa Albert
  • Going Underground by Susan Vaught
  • Stay by Deb Caletti
  • Shut Out by Kody Keplinger

As someone who will be reading a few books as a first round panelist, I really hope to see all of these nominated. The more there is to read, the more opportunity there is to really find the best of the best.