Tennessee Kids Volunteer Their Choices: A Dog's Life and The Lightning Thief Earn Top Spot

Upper-grade kids know what they like, and Tennessee's middle readers and teens have voted their choices for the 2009 Tennessee Volunteer State Book Awards in the Grade 4-6 and 7-12 divisions.

Best-selling Newbery Honor author Ann M. Martin, writing in the first-person voice of a stray dog improbably named Squirrel, has won the top spot for Grades 4-6 with her A Dog's Life: Autobiography of a Stray, beating out such strong competitors as Mike Lupica's baseball saga Heat, Cynthia Lord's Newbery Award-winning Rules, and Margaret Peterson Haddix's sci fi thriller Double Identity.

For a review of this book, see my earlier post here.

Taking top honors with teen readers is the first book in Rick Riordan's wildly popular series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, titled The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)./

Riordan, who now has Book 5, The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Book 5), forthcoming on May 5, apparently has the touch for writing best sellers for male readers in the page-turning fantasy adventuress of a troubled dyslexic boy who learns that he is the demigod son of Poseidon in this series of modernistic updates of the Greek pantheon which has pleased critics and young adult readers alike.