Kirkus Prize announces Young Readers’ Literature finalists Two YA books made the nomination list for Kirkus’ Young Readers’ Literature prize. Traci Chee’s The Reader and Meg Medina’s Burn Baby Burn will contend for a $50,000 prize to be awarded on November 3.
After her father is brutally murdered, Sefia flees with her aunt Nin, who teaches her to hunt, track, and steal in Traci Chee’s The Reader. But when Nin is kidnapped, the only clue to her disappearance is a mysterious book.
In Meg Medina’s Burn Baby Burn, Nora Lopez is seventeen during the infamous New York summer of 1977, when the city is besieged by arson, a massive blackout, and a serial killer named Son of Sam.
Chee and Medina are competing against Sherman Alexie’s picture book Thunder Boy Jr., Ashley Bryan’s nonfiction picture book Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives and Dreams Brought to Life, and Russell Freedman’s middle grade nonfiction We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement that Defied Adolf Hitler.
Both The Reader and Burn Baby Burn are available now.
