Annal:2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2003 Carnegie winner
- 2003 LATimes–Young Adult winner
- 2004 Printz honor
- 2006 YRCA-Senior nominee
- Score: 30.53
Mattie Gokey has a word for everything. She collects words, stores them up as a way of fending off the hard truths of her life, the truths that she can’t write down in stories. Yet when the drowned body of a young woman turns up at the hotel where Mattie works, all her words are useless. But in the dead woman’s letters, Mattie again finds her voice, and a determination to live her own life.
- 2004 Newbery honor
- 2003 LATimes–Young Adult finalist
- 2006 YRCA-Junior nominee
- Score: 16.54
“Olive Barstow was dead. She’d been hit by a car on Monroe Street while riding her bicycle weeks ago. That was about all Martha knew.”
Martha Boyle and Olive Barstow could have been friends. But they weren’t—and now all that is left are eerie connections between two girls who were in the same grade at school and who both kept the same secret without knowing it.
Now Martha can’t stop thinking about Olive. A family summer on Cape Cod should help banish those thoughts; instead, they seep in everywhere.
And this year Martha’s routine at her beloved…
- 2004 Scott O'Dell winner
- 2003 LATimes–Young Adult finalist
- 2003 NBA–Youth finalist
- 2006 YRCA-Intermediate nominee
- Score: 26.54
The whole country is changing in 1861 - even the folks from a muddy little Illinois settlement on the banks of the Mississippi. Here, fifteen-year-old Tilly Pruitt frets over the fact that her brother is dreaming of being a soldier and that her sister is prone to supernatural visions.
True Confessions of a Heartless Girl
- 2003 LATimes–Young Adult finalist
- Score: 6.53
In the midst of a heaven-rattling summer storm a young stranger blows into a small prairie town. On the run after taking her latest boyfriend’s truck, with a pocketful of stolen money and a heart full of pain, seventeen-year-old Noreen Stall seems to invite trouble. And trouble comes soon enough as Noreen’s new mistakes trigger calamities that shake the lives of the residents of Pembina Lake: Lynda Bradley, a divorced mother and owner of a failing café who’s given up on life and love; Dolores Harper, the village elder who, in spite of her signature sweatshirt…
- 2003 LATimes–Young Adult finalist
- Score: 6.53
The shootings in Pleasant Valley were fifty miles away, but at Central High a grief and crisis counselor is hired, security is increased, and privileges are being taken away. If you break the new rules, the punishment is severe. And the rules keep changing every day. It’s for their protection, yet fifteen-year-old Tom Bishop and his friends learn that things are far more sinister than they seem. Students and teachers begin disappearing.
And there’s no way to stop it.
From nationally best-selling and critically acclaimed author Francine Prose comes…
