This month youth services is revamping our Mock Newbery Club! Our first meeting will be Monday, June 27 at 4:00. We will discuss books just like the real Newbery Committee and try to figure out which book will be the next Newbery Award winner in January 2023. Youth Services staff have come up with our first 10 nominees to get you started with your Newbery reading adventure! At our July meeting, we would love for you to add to the nominations with your own.

Here’s a little synopsis of our first 10 Mock Newbery Nominees….

1) Loyalty by Avi

  • Avi explores the American Revolution from a fresh perspective in the story of a young Loyalist turned British spy navigating patriotism and personal responsibility during the lead-up to the War of Independence.

2) The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Regan Barnhill

  • When a child goes missing from the Orphan House in the town of Stone-in-the-Glen, the mayor suggests the kindly Ogress is responsible, but the orphans do not believe that and try to make their deluded neighbors see the real villain among them.

3) Anybody Here Seen Frenchie? by Leslie Connor

  • Eleven-year-old Aurora Petrequin’s best friend has never spoken a word to her. In fact, Frenchie Livernois doesn’t talk. Aurora is bouncy, loud, and impulsive. Making friends has never come easily. When Frenchie, who is autistic, silently chose Aurora as his person back in third grade, she chose him back. They make a good team, sharing their love of the natural world in coastal Maine. In the woods, Aurora and Frenchie encounter a piebald deer, a rare creature with a coat like a patchwork quilt. Whenever it appears, Aurora feels compelled to follow. At school, Aurora looks out for Frenchie, who has been her classmate until this year. One morning, Frenchie doesn’t make it to his classroom. Aurora feels she’s to blame. The entire town begins to search, and everyone wonders: how is it possible that nobody has seen Frenchie?

4) Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis by Susan Hood

  • An inspirational nonfiction novel-in-verse about Zhanna Arshanskaya, a young Ukrainian Jewish girl using the alias Anna, whose phenomenal piano-playing skills saved her life and the life of her sister, Frina, during the Holocaust-from award-winning author Susan Hood, with Zhanna’s son, Greg Dawson.

5) Those Kids from Fawn Creek by Erin Entrada Kelly

  • The twelve kids in the seventh grade at Fawn Creek K-12 have been together all their lives so when graceful Orchid Mason arrives, with exotic clothes and glorious hair, the other seventh graders don’t know what to think.

6) Different Kinds of Fruit by Kyle Lukoff

  • When Annabelle learns that her father shares something big–and surprising–in common with her new nonbinary friend, she begins to see herself, and her family, in a whole new light.

7)Cress Watercress by Gregory Maguire

  • An animal adventure about growing up, moving on, and finding community. When Papa doesn’t return from a nocturnal honey-gathering expedition, Cress holds out hope, but her mother assumes the worst. It’s a dangerous world for rabbits, after all. Mama moves what’s left of the Watercress family to the basement unit of the Broken Arms, a run-down apartment oak with a suspect owl landlord, a nosy mouse super, a rowdy family of squirrels, and a pair of songbirds who broadcast everyone’s business. Can a dead tree full of annoying neighbors, and no Papa, ever be home?

8) Ain’t Burned All the Bright by Jason Reynolds

  • A smash up of art and text that viscerally captures what it means to not be able to breathe, and how the people and things you love most are actually the oxygen you most need.

9)Solimar: The Sword of Monarchs by Pam Munoz Ryan

  • On the eve of her Quinceaǹƒera, Princess Solimar discovers that it will take more than magic to save her kingdom and prevent the destruction of the Monarch butterfly.

10) Comb of Wishes by Lisa Stringfellow

  • Twelve-year-old Kela is still mourning her mother when she finds a mermaid’s comb while she and her friend are looking for sea glass on her Caribbean island; such combs have magic in them, and touching it opens a connection to the mermaid Ophidia who can grant her wish, to bring her mother back to life–but all wishes have consequences, and magic demands a price which may prove to be more painful than the loss of her mother.

We hope you enjoy our early selections and come join us for a discussion, June 27. There’s no pressure to read them all. Just read the ones you think you would like the most!

Happy Reading!