Annal:2002 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2005 YRCA-Senior winner
- 2002 NBA–Youth winner
- 2003 Mythopoeic-Children finalist
- 2003 Newbery honor
- 2003 Printz honor
- Score: 38.55
At his coming-of-age party, Matteo Alacrán asks El Patrón’s bodyguard, “How old am I?…I know I don’t have a birthday like humans, but I was born.”
“You were harvested,” Tam Lin reminds him. “You were grown in that poor cow for nine months and then you were cut out of her.”
To most people around him, Matt is not a boy, but a beast. A room full of chicken litter with roaches for friends and old chicken bones for toys is considered good enough for him. But for El Patrón, lord of a country called Opium—a strip of poppy fields lying between the U.S. and what was…
- 2002 LATimes–Young Adult winner
- 2003 Horn Book-fiction honor
- 2002 NBA–Youth finalist
- Score: 22.52
So says Titus, a teenager whose ability to read, write, and even think for himself has been almost completely obliterated by his “feed,” a transmitter implanted directly into his brain. Feeds are a crucial part of life for Titus and his friends. After all, how else would they know where to party on the moon, how to get bargains at Weatherbee & Crotch, or how to accessorize the mysterious lesions everyone’s been getting? But then Titus meets Violet, a girl who cares about what’s happening to the world and challenges everything Titus and his friends hold dear. A…
19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East
- 2002 NBA–Youth finalist
- Score: 6.52
“Tell me how to live so many lives at once …”
Fowzi, who beats everyone at dominoes; Ibtisam, who wanted to be a doctor; Abu Mahmoud, who knows every eggplant and peach in his West Bank garden; mysterious Uncle Mohammed, who moved to the mountain; a girl in a red sweater dangling a book bag; children in velvet dresses who haunt the candy bowl at the party; Baba Kamalyari, age 71; Mr. Dajani and his swans; Sitti Khadra, who never lost her peace inside.
Maybe they have something to tell us.
Naomi Shihab Nye has been writing about being Arab-American, about…
This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie
- 2002 Golden Kite-nonfiction winner
- 2002 Horn Book-nonfiction winner
- 2002 NBA–Youth finalist
- Score: 26.52
From the late 1920s to the 1950s, Guthrie wrote the words to more than three thousand songs, including “This Land Is Your Land,” a song many call America’s unofficial national anthem. With a remarkable ability to turn any experience into a song almost instantaneously, Woody Guthrie spoke out for people of all colors and races, setting an example for generations of musicians to come.
- 2002 NBA–Youth finalist
- Score: 6.52
Toswiah Green’s life ended the moment her policeman father decided to testify against a fellow officer. The Greens have had to change their identities and move to a different city. Now Toswiah is Evie Thomas, and that is the least of the changes. Her defeated father spends his days sitting by the window. Since her mother can no longer work as a teacher, she puts her energy into their new church. Her only sister is making secret plans to leave. And Evie, struggling to find her way, wonders who she is now and how she can make her future as bright as her past once was.
