Annal:2003 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2003 NBA–Youth winner
- Score: 10.53
Love under trying circumstances
One night out of the blue, Ratchet Clark’s ill-natured mother tells her that Ratchet will be leaving their Pensacola apartment momentarily to take the train up north. There she will spend the summer with her aged relatives Penpen and Tilly, inseparable twins who couldn’t look more different from each other. Staying at their secluded house, Ratchet is treated to a passel of strange family history and local lore, along with heaps of generosity and care that she has never experienced before. Also, Penpen has recently…
- 2003 NBA–Youth finalist
- 2006 YRCA-Senior nominee
- Score: 10.53
Del has spent 17 years bouncing among foster homes. Smart, sharp-tongued, a master mimic, she’s fed up with her world and with being Del. Faking her own death, she leaves both herself and L.A. behind — until her escape lands her in an all-day traffic jam. Fast-forward eight years. It’s opening night for the one-woman play she’s written and is starring in — a show called Breakout, about a Los Angeles traffic jam. Wildly funny, she skewers workaholics, road ragers, pickup artists, and car culture in general. Readers will see what her audience can’t — that the show…
An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793
- 2004 Horn Book-nonfiction winner
- 2004 Sibert winner
- 2004 Newbery honor
- 2003 NBA–Youth finalist
- Score: 32.54
1793, Philadelphia. The nation’s capital and the largest city in North America is devastated by an apparently incurable disease, cause unknown…
In a powerful, dramatic narrative, critically acclaimed author Jim Murphy describes the illness known as yellow fever and the toll it took on the city”s residents, relating the epidemic to the major social and political events of the day and to 18th-century medical beliefs and practices. Drawing on first-hand accounts, Murphy spotlights the heroic role of Philadelphia”s free blacks in combating the disease, and the…
- 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.
- 2003 Horn Book-fiction honor
- 2003 NBA–Youth finalist
- Score: 12.53
When Lonnie was seven years old, his parents died in a fire. Now he’s eleven, and he still misses them terribly. And he misses his little sister, Lili, who was put into a different foster home because “not a lot of people want boys-not foster boys that ain’t babies.” But Lonnie hasn’t given up. His foster mother, Miss Edna, is growing on him. She’s already raised two sons and she seems to know what makes them tick. And his teacher, Ms. Marcus, is showing him ways to put his jumbled feelings on paper.
Told entirely through Lonnie’s poetry, we see his heartbreak…
