Newbery Medal 2015

The 2015 Newbery Award was announced last night in America. One winner and two honour books. Three interesting books. Two verse novels and a graphic novel. No traditional prose fiction! The world is certainly changing. Perhaps verse novels are really becoming cool?

Kwame Alexander's Crossover was named the Newbery Award winner 2015 at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting and Exhibition in Chicago. The full list of awards and winners are here.

Crossover is a verse novel about 12 year old basketball playing twins. Really.
May 2017 I've read it now (review coming soonish)

Honour books.

El Deafo is a graphic novel about a deaf girl written by a deaf author, Cece Bell. (see my review)

I still love this cover.
Beautiful. 

I loved Jacqueline Woodson's brown girl dreaming, an amazing verse memoir. See my review here. It also won the National Book Award

I'm moderately certain that the Newbery Committee didn't set out to make all three books to be diverse books, but they certainly achieved it with diversity in authorship and diversity in format. Awards like these are so important. I certainly wouldn't have heard of any of these books if they hadn't won significant awards like these. I look forward to reading them all.

http://weneeddiversebooks.org