CCBC Choices 2017: The Final List!

So many great books.

We think that every year. It's why the question, "What's your favorite book this year?" is always a stumper. My personal answer, always, is "I don't have one." I'm not being coy, I'm being truthful. I don't have a single favorite. I have many books I appreciate for many different reasons.

Thinking that way informs how we create our annual best-of-the-year list, CCBC Choices. We aren't looking for a single, best book. We're looking to create a list that is broad and deep, reflective of the many dimensions of excellence to be found in literature for children and teens, many dimensions of identity in the lives of young people, and many dimensions of diversity in the world in which they--and we--live. Is it a lot of work? Yes. Is it worth it? Absolutely.

The books in CCBC Choices are titles we return to again and again in our work with preservice and practicing teachers and school and public librarians in Wisconsin.  They are books we are eager to share for many reasons: because they can engage, because they can inform, because they can entertain, because they can foster understanding and forge connections, and much more.

The Friends of the CCBC underwrite the significant cost of publishing the annual CCBC Choices booklet, which is fully annotated with age recommendations, and indexed.  The CCBC Choices 2017 booklet will be available after March 4.  If you aren't a Friends member, please consider  joining to support their work. You'll receive a copy of Choices by mail after it is published.

In the meantime, the list of titles we've chosen for inclusion in CCBC Choices 2017 is now final.

What's our favorite book this year? We don't have one. We have 246 of them. 

Looking Back/Looking Forward

The following is excerpted from the brief commentary on 2015 children's and young adult books that will appear in CCBC Choices 2016, our annual best-of-the-year list. The CCBC Choices 2016 booklet will be available after March 5. ( How to get a copy of CCBC Choices 2016).

Throughout the year as we read, we try to observe trends, themes, welcome surprises, and sometimes simple coincidences among the books published for children and teens. In 2015, one of the first things we couldn’t help but note as books came into the CCBC was the continued explosion in young adult fiction. Our shelves are still groaning under the weight of all that teen drama.

Among all those books were some themes and common threads. This included quite a few titles about teens with mental illness, ranging from anxiety to OCD to depression to schizophrenia, among them the National Book Award-winning Challenger Deep. This was also the year of the road trip in young adult literature. It was a device used with varying degrees of success, with The Porcupine of Truth among our favorites.

We also continue to see books that blur the lines between young adult and new adult. Taking Hold, which concludes Francisco Jiménez’s memoir cycle, follows him through graduate school at Columbia. The intriguing graphic novel Sculptor is about a fine artist in New York City. Sculptor is one of the several books we’ve included in Choices in recent years in which not only the audience but the publisher (in this case, First Second) is a crossover, with titles that are not always distinctly either young adult or adult.

 

There were a number of fine works of fiction for children, including one that broke new ground: the blithe and tender George, about a transgender child. It's among a few such titles, and has solid elementary-age appeal. Gender and sexuality were also given groundbreaking treatment for children in the outstanding informational book Sex Is a Funny Word.

The new baby/sibling theme in picture books seemed more abundant than usual in 2015, explored in a variety of freshly engaging ways in books such as DoubleTrouble for Anna Hibiscus, Rodeo Red, The Nesting Quilt, and The New Small Person.

The picture books we found most arresting were those tackling difficult topics with incredible honesty and sensitivity. The extraordinary Two White Rabbits speaks in the voice of a child describing things she sees on a journey with her father. Only the essential illustrations reveal they are refugees fleeing toward the U.S. / Mexico border. The moving Mama’s Nightingale is in the voice of a young girl whose mother is in prison awaiting a deportation hearing. And reassuring Yard Sale speaks in the voice of child whose family is having to sell many of their belongings.

In nonfiction, while we continued to see fewer works of literary nonfiction, especially those of substantial length, there were again singular standouts, from Symphony for the City of the Dead to Most Dangerous to Funny Bones, among others. 

Funny Bones, winner of the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award, leads us into what we consider the real story when it comes to children’s and young adult literature in 2015: increased focus on and discussion about multicultural literature. Some would say this began in 2014, with the launch of the We Need Diverse Books initiative, and that group’s work is welcome and critical. But many people of color and First/Native Nations have been drawing attention to issues of race and racism in children’s literature for years, as well as to the need for more books by authors and artists of color and First/Native Nations.

The 2015 ALA children’s and young adult literature awards, recognizing books published in 2014, were notable and invigorating regarding the diversity represented in choices across the awards (rather than seeing diversity only in awards whose purpose is to recognize books by authors and artist of color and First/Native Nations). That excitement continued with the recent announcement of the 2016 ALA awards, for books published in 2015, which reflect even greater racial and cultural diversity. The choice of Last Stop on Market Street, a picture book (picture book!), for the Newbery Award, written by a Latino author with an African American protagonist and illustrator (it also received a Caldecott Award honor citation for the art), was as deserving and welcome as the choice of Crossover last year. But the good news didn’t stop with the Newbery. Across the ALA awards, this year’s list of winners and honor books is one that reflects and speaks to multiple dimensions of the identity experience.

In the year between these two award announcements, a lot was happening in children’s and young adult literature and in our nation with regard to race and racism. It’s been a hard year in so many ways. Perhaps no book captures some of this agony as well as All American Boys, a groundbreaking look at racism, police violence, and white privilege.

Late in the year, a lot of attention in the children’s and young adult literature world focused on the depiction of enslavement in the picture book A Fine Dessert. There was also conversation about references to American Indians in the historical novel The Hired Girl. Those discussions were hard, painful, and honest in ways that weren’t always easy to read. They revealed not only how far we’ve come, but how far we have to go in our field in understanding racism and working to challenge it. Yes, what’s in a book matters. Of course it does.

The recent ALA awards make us hopeful. And so do many of the books we see from week to week and month to month, whether it’s a first book by a new author of color, such as Hoodoo or Blackbird Fly or See No Color; a new and essential perspective on historical events by a First/Native Nations author, like In the Footsteps of Crazy Horse or Hiawatha and the Peacemaker; or any of the other many other wonderful titles that we receive.

Increased diversity of representation within and across racial and cultural experiences in literature for youth, and indeed across the human experience, is not an option, it’s essential. So, too, is critical thinking in how such books are made. Children and teens deserve no less.

(Check back in the next week or so for our 2015 statistics of the number of bookspublished by and about people of color, which will also appear in the Choices 2016 publication.)

CCBC Choices 2016: Final List!

While we work madly to finishing annotating all the books in CCBC Choices 2016, the final Choices 2016 list is now available.  We are featuring 259 titles published in 2015.

The fully annotated Choices booklet, with author/title/illustrator and subject indexes and a brief commentary on the publishing year, will be available after March 5.

Overboard? Overthinking? Making Choices

Here at the CCBC we are constantly reading and evaluating the new books that arrive on a daily basis. We discuss some of the books face-to-face in a monthly discussion group open to anyone who wants to attend. But there are many, many more books that we discuss just among the four of us as we consider books that we will eventually select for our annual publication, CCBC Choices. 

Much as we all wish we could just sit at our desks and read all day, there's not enough time for that, so we do the bulk of our reading at home, in the evenings and on weekends. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, we are able to discuss these books as we read them via a running Google Doc, where we indicate our yes, no and maybe votes for inclusion in CCBC Choices. Unless we have four yes votes or four no votes, we also discuss all these books again face-to-face in order to make our final decisions. There are always some books, such as Under a Pig Tree by Margie Palatini, where we decide we need outside opinions, either from our monthly discussion group or from a content expert.

Although our Google Doc discussions are in-house and not intended for public consumption, we thought it would be helpful to get some opinions on this book from our blog readers, so we've decided to share it here. We all really liked the book a lot and admired the humor of the the running joke ("fig" is mistaken for "pig"), and the way it plays out in the artwork. But there were two illustrations that raised questions, one serious and one not. Here are the two pictures that prompted in-house discussion. The discussion itself has been cut and pasted from the Google Doc immediately below the two pictures.

Palatini, Margie. Under a Pig Tree: A History of the Noble Fruit. Ill by Chuck Groenik. Abrams

MS: Yes. Hysterical!

MVL:  Yes.   I must be missing the joke on the page that reads “Some pigs are very popular and quite famous, such as Blanche, Celeste, Len, and Tena. Of course, everyone knows Judy.”  Blanche, Celeste, and Tena all appear to be types of figs.  But Len and Judy?  I’m thinking there’s some wordplay there that’s zooming over my head.

KT: Maybe. I love this but was taken aback by the pig wearing a hijab, since pigs are forbidden in Islamic cultures.  Maybe I’m going overboard but I thought that was culturally insensitive on the part of the illustrator. In terms of the celebrity pigs I don’t get Len either, but the Judy is the Garland fig (and that was my favorite picture of all. It made me laugh out loud.)

MS: Thanks for pointing that out, KT. I did notice the priest pig, which I thought some would find offensive on principle, but the Muslim pig slipped by me.  And the point is different and I think important to think about. It’s a representation issue that violates a belief in Islam that pigs are haraam---they are truly considered filthy and so to represent a Muslim that way--yikes!  (It would be the same to see a Hasidic Jew represented as such). I do love the humor in this book, but I think that is an unintentional and unfortunate oversight.

Later:  Ok. I looked again.  I think that the hijab isn’t a hijab but is meant to represent Cleopatra (her hair) for “Egyptian fig.”  (That whole page spread gave me pause re. cultural representation on my initial read-- all of it is stereotypical/tongue in cheek.  But I took Cleo for Cleo and not a hijab which is why I didn’t remember a hijab. But the fact that KT and I disagree on this interpretation makes it still potentially problematic as I can clearly be taken as a hijab.)  Re. types of figs: Len and Judy are also types of figs. I’m not sure who each is supposed by be as represented beyond “Judy Garland” as KT noted. Is Blanche Blanche DuBois? Celeste looks like Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s--?. “Len” and “Tena”--?  (Way overthinking this page.)

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We'd love to know what you all think.  Cleopatra or hijab? And who is Len?