And the Winner Is.... 2014 National Book Award For Young People's Literature

... Jacqueline Woodson, three-time finalist and first time winner) for her free verse novel Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014), winner of the 2014 National Book Foundation Award for Young People's Literature.  (See my review October 27 review here.)

Woodson was also a 2009 Newbery Honor Medal winner for After Tupac and D Foster.

Other short-listed finalists of books for young adults were Eliot Schrefer, for Threatened (Scholastic Press), Deborah Wiles, for Revolution (The Sixties Trilogy), (Scholastic Press), John Corey Whaley, for Noggin. (Atheneum Press), and Steve Sheinkin, for The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights (Roaring Brook Press).

Journal of the Plague Year: A Death-Struck Year by Makiia Lucier

"Cleo?"

"Hmmm?" I hunched over Emily's doll. The light in the stairway was poor, and I wondered if I should fix the doll back in my room near a window. I dismissed the thought. Fanny was there, more snappish than usual. When there was no response from Emily, I glanced up. The child looked at me, uncertain.

"In the library I heard Mr. Brownmiller and Miss Abernathy talking...." Emily said softly.

I paused. "What did you hear?"

"Well, Mr. Brownmiller said that people in Phil..., Phila...."

"Philadelphia?" I prompted.

"He said people in Philadelphia were dropping like flies. Because of the Spanish influenza. He said they were running out of coffins. Is that true, Cleo? Are we going to drop dead, too?" Emily's voice quivered.

Cleo resents being shuttled off for a month of dormitory life at the girls' school where she has always been a day student, while her guardians, older brother Jack and wife Lucy, are away for a vacation in San Francisco.  Sharing a small room with four restless seniors, all ready to move on with their life plans, has made her discontented with her own lack of  motivation. Cleo vaguely wants to go to college, but has no idea what the purpose of her life may be.

Although she tries to reassure little Emily and herself that the epidemic is thousands of miles away from Portland, Cleo soon hears that a troop of soldiers just arrived from Boston have begun to sicken and die and watches life changing all around her. Schools, churches, theaters and even stores close, as people don masks and avoid contact as much as possible. Then, when her school orders all residential students home, Cleo decides to slip away in the confusion of departures and stay put alone in the safety in her house until Jack and Lucy return.

But Lucy, pregnant with a long-hoped-for child, cannot yet travel, and when Cleo finds herself on her own, the silence in the house on her first night is not as welcome as she had thought. Unable to sleep, she pulls out a newspaper she bought on the way home and reads a surprising notice:

RED CROSS APPEALS TO WOMEN TO ENLIST

The American Red Cross has issued an urgent plea that all graduate nurses, practical nurses, and Red Cross nurses' aides enroll for immediate service in combating the Spanish influenza.

Also needed are members of the community willing to canvass neighborhoods, distributing prevention literature and helping to locate and transport unattended cases to area hospitals. Those with automobiles are particularly encouraged to make themselves known.

The words "unattended cases" leap out, and her heart turns over, remembering how her parents died in a carriage accident, her mother slowly bleeding to death as the six-year-old Cleo watched while no one came.

I thought of my mother and father. Twelve years had passed, but I still knew exactly what it was to be an unattended case.

There are two cars in the garage, both of which Jack has taught her to drive. Perhaps, Cleo thinks, she can at least help locate those unattended cases.

But when Cleo puts on the Red Cross armband, she has no idea of the horrors before her. Soon she is working with Edward, a young soldier injured in the war in France, and with Kate, a brave young woman her own age, even helping dig graves for the unburied coffins stacking up in the morgues.

But then Kate is suddenly taken gravely ill, and Cleo knows that she may well be next.

Maciia Lucier's A Death-Struck Year (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014) is a hard-hitting story of that worldwide pandemic that killed more people than the historic Black Plague and World War I together. What Cleo and Lucier's other closely-drawn characters lived through is what many millions experienced in those two years of the pandemic which, along with the war that helped spread it, changed the world forever. A stunningly realistic picture of desperate courage, young love, and human endurance, this is a page-turning, eye-opening piece of young adult historic fiction which resonates today in a time of the instant spread of epidemic diseases unknown to us.

A twentieth-century account similar to Laurie Halse Anderson's Newbery-winning classic, Fever 1793., this novel offers historical notes and a bibliography which make this absorbing first-person narrative useful as adjunct reading for students of American history.

Crossing: The Line by Teri Hall

The Line itself was invisible. There was a barren ribbon of soil, running along the meadow as far as the eye could see, where the grass couldn't grow. And Rachel thought she could see a funny sort of haze, but even that was only apparent in certain lights--right before dusk or early in the morning.

Though the Line was almost imperceptible, it had affected many lives. It affected Rachel's, too. In a sense, the Line was the reason Rachel ended up working in the greenhouse, instead of just playing.

As a small child, Rachel's life on the Property felt safe and secure; there was just Mrs. Mason, the elderly owner for whom her mother gratefully worked as housekeeper, who allowed Rachel and Vivian to live in a small nearby guesthouse, and old Jonathan, who did odd jobs and helped in the orchid greenhouse which supported them all. But the greenhouse, in a corner of the Property, looked out upon the Line, some sort of government-ordered force field which prevented anyone from crossing into the benign-looking woodlands of what everyone called Away, where frightening beings called the Others were said to live, and so the greenhouse had always had a strange attraction for Rachel. She grew to love the orchids which Mrs. Mason skillfully tended there and longed to learn more about them, but her fear of the intimidating Mrs. Mason kept her from showing herself there. And the pull of the mysterious Line, taboo but so near, drew her there every day.

But as Rachel grows into her teens she sensed that beneath the sequestered life she lived, there were secrets being kept, hidden fears that her mother and Mrs. Mason shared. Her mother had always kept a low profile, venturing only into the nearby small town of Benson for household necessities, and in the lessons she assigned to Rachel was a strong distrust of government information. Rachel knew the United States had defeated at powerful enemy which had used radioactive weapons against her country and that her government had sealed off the devastated area behind the impenetrable Line, leaving the people there on their own, and controlling the rest of the population through rigidly managed media and a system of secret police whose "Identification Arrests" were feared. Rachel gradually comes to realize that her parents were some sort of collaborators against the government and that her father was conscripted forcefully and sent to his death somewhere in the forbidden territory.

Then Rachel finds a "corder," an old-looking device with a recorded message from the other side of the Line, begging for medicines for someone called Indigo, and as she struggles with what to do with the plea, she meets a boy of her age, Pathik, who says he comes from Away, asks for her help, and her efforts to provide that help reveal secrets about who she, her mother and father, Mrs. Mason, and the messenger Pathik really are. And when these secrets are spoken, it is obvious that choices must be made, choices which will end their secure, secluded lives.

Teri Hall's The Line (Dial Books, 2010) is, like Lois Lowry's landmark futuristic novel The Giver, an absorbing character-driven dystopian novel which develops slowly through dialog and its unobtrusive third person narration, building slowly but eventually coming to deal with serious issues of governance, individual liberty as opposed to group order and security, freedom of speech and due process, and the ethical responsibility of humans to each other. Hall does no preaching through her narration, unobtrusively allowing the major issues of the novel to evolve through the interactions of the all too human characters.

Hall's conclusion, in media res, leaves the resolution of these issues open, even as Rachel makes her choice to cross alone into the Away, with the outcome left unresolved in a way which encourages the reader to think about the issues of policy and ethics raised (and also laying the foundation for a second book as well.) Fans of Lowry's Newbery Award book, Margaret Peterson Haddix's best-selling Among the Hidden (Shadow Children #1) and M. T. Anderson's riveting Feed will find Hall's work equally absorbing, thought-provoking, and, yes, exciting.

On My Honor: The Last Full Measure by Ann Rinaldi

How could David always be so sure of his own rightness and never question himself? Never waiver for a moment to see the other person's side of it? Not even for a God-given little minute? Myself, somehow, despite my young years, I always knew there was another side to everything, and that was what frightened me in this world. The other side of things, and the fact that I might not see them.

But not my brother David--oh, no. He knew all and he saw all, God help him.

Tacy Stryker is 14, living in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in July of 1863. Her dad and two older brothers are off with the Union Army, and Tacy and her mother are left in the care of her older brother, David. David is both bitter and shamed that his shattered leg makes him unable to fight with his brothers, and Tacy, just beginning to feel herself a young woman, chafes under his harsh rule. She feels she is treated like a child, scolded for slipping out to check on Marvelous, her friend who is hiding in the nearby woods with other free blacks to avoid a return to slavery by the Rebels, or for daring to visit a friend treating the wounded in a makeshift hospital in the local church.

Until the war impinges on her world, she has been very close to David, the youngest brother, her playmate and ally, but as the war comes into her own home, David's assurance that he is always right crosses with Tacy's way of thinking often, and she struggles to meet her brother's expectations and be true to herself as well. But as the town fills with Confederates and she meets them face to face, she suddenly sees that she can never see the world in the same way David does.

Veteran historical fiction writer Ann Rinaldi sets up a family drama which is in a way a metaphor for the conflicting versions of honor which helped provoke the war itself. In her forthcoming The Last Full Measure (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), Rinaldi's Tacy Stryker is a protagonist who is a clear-eyed eyewitness to the events around the critical Battle of Gettysburg, a conflict which changes her family and the nation forever. In her surprising climax, Rinaldi shows how David's sense of honor leads him to an unexpected act, one of great courage and yet one which is, like many deeds of war, perhaps meaningless outside the framework of conflict.

Rinaldi gets inside her main character and skillfully lets the historical events flow around her in a way that is historically accurate and yet natural. Her plot unfolds briskly but not without the detail that heightens the reader's sense of being there and seeing it as only an impressionable and resilient young woman could.