Fantastic Nonfiction YA! VOYA 2018 Nonfiction Winners by Judith Hayn

For as long I have been working in higher education, Judy Hayn has been giving me sound advice and opportunities to flourish. I am thrilled to turn this week's blog over to Judy's capable hands. Judy talks about her experience reading nonfiction for VOYA. I have to say, if you are not reading your share of nonfiction YA, you need to give it a try. Remember, there are some of our students who don't take readily to fiction, but might be waiting for us to guide them to some nonfiction choices about topics that interest them.

Fantastic Nonfiction YA! VOYA 2018 Nonfiction Winners by Judith Hayn

As a long-time reviewer for VOYA (Voice of Youth Advocates), “the library magazine serving those who serve young adults,” I was excited to be asked to participate as a member of their 2017 Nonfiction Honor Award Committee.  Joining public school media specialists, teen and children’s librarians, high school teachers, and former educators, our group chose selections suitable for middle school/junior high readers in grades five through eight. 

I learned so much from this knowledgeable, collegial, opinionated, and dedicated group.  For example, the information at the end of a nonfiction book is back matter and ought to be stellar!  We searched through definitions, guidelines, and directions to identify a definition we could use.  Most of us liked this Celebrate Science blog post: "Behind the Books: The Nonfiction Family Tree". 

Seventeen winners are featured in VOYA’s August 2018 issue.  You have to be a member to access the entire article, but your library may subscribe to the journal through http://[email protected] .
 
Each of us had a bias and that showed in our choices.  My background is in the humanities, so some of the technical options were not as entertaining for me, but I learned what to expect from a good nonfiction book in the sciences.  

​However, my favorite winner is literary in scope.  Nikki Grimes’.  One Last Word: Wisdom from the Harlem Renaissancefeatures the works of poets of that era.  She uses the “golden shovel” technique by creating her own poems using the original words from the classics as her last lines or words. 

​The artwork by contemporary African American young adult/children’s artists adds emotional impact.  Language arts teachers should grab this multiple award winner whether teaching the Harlem Renaissance or not, powerful and inspirational tool.

I am a fan of biographies, and several resonated with me.  Martha Brokenbrough’s Alexander Hamilton: Revolutionary plays on the current popularity of the controversial firebrand.  Featuring impeccable research, the book for older middlers is filled with illustrations, subheadings and quotes, along with rich back matter.

I also love sports stories, but even in you don’t, you will get caught up in Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team by the popular, prolific Steve Sheinkin. Thorpe, a phenomenal athlete, set records and helped his coach “Pop” Warner create modern football before he was stripped of his Olympic Medals.  Sheinkin doesn’t negate the horrific practices at Indian boarding schools--part of our tragic history of native peoples.

Deborah Noyes takes a look at Harry Houdini’s role in the history of the spiritualism movement in The Magicians and the Spirits.  She examines Houdini’s efforts to expose the abundant fraudulent practices involved.  The layout of this book grabs the reader with its unique approach.

 My graduate assistant read Deborah Heiligman’s Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers for this blog. Daneele Dickerson says the story grabs readers and immerses them into the brothers’ close relationship. It’s filled with emotion, based on the actual letters written between famous artist, Vincent Van Gogh and his brother. The book creates a perfect balance between non-fiction and storytelling.

Sports journalist Tom Rinaldi ​in The Red Bandanna, presents an unusual subject, a book about one ordinary guy caught up in extraordinary events. Welles Crowther’s father gave him a red bandanna when he was a boy, and it became his signature, even as he went to his job at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and then disappeared. Eight months later his mother found survivor stories linked to red bandanna man. Crowther became an unlikely hero through horrific circumstances.

In another life. I taught social studies and language arts in tandem to seventh and eighth graders, and I have not lost my love of history.  Heather E. Schwartz unveiled the detention of thirty African American girls in 1963 in Locked Up for Freedom: Civil Rights Protestors at the Leesburg Stockade.  The discrimination the young women fought against through their teen activism followed by their subsequent arrest is a little-known incident in the Civil Rights Movement; black-and-white photos add to the power of the text.​

The work of Jacob Riis is familiar to me but not to contemporary young teens. Michael Burgan’s Exposing Hidden Worlds: How Jacob Riis’ Photos Became Tools for Social Reform captures the impact of the images the photographer published ground-breaking photojournalism that led to improvement in New York’s slums over a hundred years ago.  The stars of this book are the reproduced black-and-white photos of the misery Riis documented.
           
Informational books remain favorites with young teens, and popular actress Mayim Blayik wrote Girling Up: How to Be Strong, Smart and Spectacular for young girls.  “Girling up” is her terms for the transition to young womanhood.  Told in a conversational style, Blayik relies on factual information coupled with common sense advice.  A daughter of a friend, thirteen at the time, claimed that she learned a lot about growing up from the book.

Another book for young female adolescents is Reshma Saujani’s Girls Who Code: Learn to Code and Change the World.  The author knows her stuff from the fundamentals of computer operations to intricate coding projects.  The ultimate focus of her work, however, is on the empowerment of young women as they dream of entering the burgeoning world of computer science.

Stormy Seas: Stories of Young Boat Refugees by Mary Beth Leatherdale and illustrator Eleanor Shakespeare is the story of five different teens over several decades who risk their lives to escape horrific living conditions.  The mixed-media, collage-focused illustrations provide the backdrop that fits the needs of younger middle school readers.

A thoughtful, yet scary, informational selection called Eyes and Spies: How You’re Tracked and Why You Should Know by Tanya Lloyd Kyi  will have you updating your security settings after realizing the multiple dangers that reside in our cyber worlds.  She leads teens through real-life scenarios to show how technology tracks data from their online lives—a must for the young who believe themselves invulnerable and private when living through social media.

​Simon Winchester’s When the Sky Breaks: Hurricanes, Tornadoes, and the Worst Weather in the World. The photos are powerful and mesmerizing.  As a Midwesterner, I went back in time with the recounting of the Joplin, MO, tornado that destroyed much of that town. Winchester outlines the history of meteorology, ties weather events to history, and also examines climate change. 

Three science-focused books round out the selections.  Karen Romano Young’s ​Whale Quest: Working Together to Save Endangered Species examines the history of the whale through their exploitation to their role as communicators.  Alex Mihailidis and Jan Andrysek in New Hands, New Life: Robots, Prostheses and Innovation features the physically disabled whose lives change through cutting-edge technology.  HP Newquest in From Here to There: The Story of How We Transport Ourselves and Everything Else traces transportation’s cultural connections with historical influences.  All three books rely on vibrant photographs and illustrations.

The last nonfiction honor book defies prosaic categorization.  Alison Deering and Bob Lentz created Sandwiches!: More Than You’ve Ever Wanted to Know about Making and Eating America’s Favorite Food, a fun-filled collection of unpredictable recipes prepared from top to bottom, along with timelines and factoids.

Most of the winners are currently featured on author websites as they represent their most recent work.  VOYA loved the way the group worked together and appointed us to the 2019 Nonfiction Honor List Committee for this year.  Books arrive daily when the hurricanes and other natural events documented by Winchester don’t delay the process!

Until next week.