Category Archives: Printz Award

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo

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Elizabeth Acevedo’s award-winning book introduces Xiomara Batista, the Poet X.  Xiomara lives in Harlem with Twin, Mami, and Papi.  Mami is deeply religious and strict.  Xiomara is feisty and fierce.  She pours her thoughts and feelings out as poetry in the leatherbound notebook her twin, Xavier, gave to her.  Poetry is her passion, and Xiomara aches for a regular teenage life outside her mother’s strict boundaries. Xiomara is asked to join the Spoken Word Club at school, something she knows will directly confront Mami’s rules, and yet Xiomara isn’t sure she has the courage to speak her words out loud in front of others.

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

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The world has conquered disease, hunger, war, and death.  To deal with the challenges of immortality and crowding on the planet, only scythes can take lives.  Scythes can glean people from the population. Honorable Scythe Faraday has taken on two apprentices, Citra and Rowan.  This is unprecedented!  If they fail their apprenticeship, it could mean the end of their lives. There are those is Scythedom that would do anything to see them fail. Scythes must follow The Scythe Commandments, but there are some up-and-coming scythes that are challenging these edicts and pushing the limits of their power. This clash of old ways and new ways will not be beneficial for H.S. Faraday’s apprentices!

I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson

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Ill Give You the Sun_

Jude and Noah are twins. They share an intense empathetic connection and are very close at age thirteen.  Jude is reckless, rebellious and communicates with the ghost of Grandma Sweetwine while Noah is awkward, isolated and thinks and feels in color. Both are artistically talented, and their mother has hopes of the twins going to California School of the Arts for high school. But at sixteen, events in their lives have divided and changed them. They are not themselves and the twins barely tolerate each other.

Told with alternating narrators, each twin narrates their tale. Noah describing their lives at thirteen and Jude picking up the story three years later. I’ll Give You the Sun is the 2015 Printz Award winner for excellence in Young Adult Literature.  (mature read)