Annal:2005 Batchelder Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Batchelder Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2005 Batchelder winner
- Score: 10.55
In the Libyan city of Ghadames, Malika watches her merchant father depart on one of his caravan expeditions. She too yearns to travel to distant cities, and longs to learn to read like her younger brother. But nearly 12 years old, and soon to be of marriagable age, Malika knows that — like all Muslim women — she must be content with a more secluded, more limited life. Then one night a stranger enters her home... someone who disrupts the traditional order of things — and who affects Malika in unexpected ways.
- 2005 Batchelder honor
- Score: 6.55
A timeless novel about the kindness of strangers.
Near a little cove where a brook runs out to the sea live a girl and her grandmother. All alone with no neighbors at all, the two lead a peaceful existence. They have a house, dine on sea kale and mussels and sand snails, and build fires from driftwood. But the grandmother is very old. When the time comes that the girl must bury the woman, she makes up a funeral song about the birds she is watching: Two crows never fly alone, and death is never, ever past. The next day the same crows seem to beckon her, and so the Crow-Girl begins her journey, one in which she will meet people both warm and cold, hurt and hurtful. And the Crow-Girl, before she knows it, has the makings before her of a new family.
This lyrical story, with its characters' moments of darkness always overcome through incredible humanity, introduces a strong new voice for American readers.
Daniel Half Human and the Good Nazi
- 2005 Batchelder honor
- Score: 6.55
All his life, Daniel has been hiding. He just doesn’t know it.
Until the spring of 1933, he's enjoyed a comfortable German boyhood with his well-to-do family, in school, at soccer. Daniel's even enjoyed jail — for one exciting night — with his best friend, Armin, after they’ve been caught painting a swastika on a wall in the hated Communist section of Hamburg. In their cell, the boys cut their wrists, mingle blood, and swear lasting brotherhood.
Then, a thunderclap: Daniel learns to his horror that his mother is Jewish, that he is therefore half-Jewish and, in Aryan eyes, half-human. Daniel keeps the truth a secret. He and Armin still talk of joining the Hitler Youth. But Armin's father, an out-of-work longshoreman and a Socialist, forbids it. Armin joins anyway, with fateful consequences for Daniel's family.
Throughout World War II, and until the story's haunting final scene, each friend holds the life of the other in his hands.
