2008 Alex Award Winners

Beah, a boy equally thrilled by causing mischief as by memorizing passages from Shakespeare and dance moves from hip-hop videos, was a typical precocious 12-year-old. But rebel forces destroyed his childhood innocence when they hit his village, driving him to leave his home and travel the arid deserts and jungles of Africa. After several months of struggle, he is recruited by the national army and made a full soldier. He soon learns to shoot an AK-47, and to hate everyone who comes up against the rebels.  (A/YA)

Future conqueror Temujin is born to the khan (ruler) of a fierce Mongol tribe that roams central Asia's steppes in the 12th century. When his father is killed by Tartar raiders before Temujin reaches manhood, a rival claims the tribe and banishes Temujin's family. Left behind without resources when the tribe migrates, the family struggles to survive the harsh environment, and Temujin dreams of gathering similar outcasts into a new tribe, and begins raiding Tartar camps. As his fame spreads, Temujin launches an ambitious campaign to unite the Mongol tribes "after a thousand years of warfare" into a single people, defeat the Tartars and invade China.  (A/YA)

Alice Winston, a 12-year-old loner with family troubles, lives in Desert Valley, Colorado. Her mother hasn't left her bed since Alice was a baby; her father struggles to keep their horse ranch solvent; and her beautiful older sister, Nona, has eloped with a rodeo cowboy. Alice resists befriending the rich girl who takes riding lessons from her father, becomes obsessed with a classmate who drowns in a nearby canal and entangles herself with adults whose motives are suspect.  (A/YA)

When the conflict between natives and invading soldiers erupts on a remote island in the early 1990s, 13-year-old Matilda Laimo and her mother, Dolores, are unified with the rest of their village in their efforts for survival. Amid the chaos, Mr. Watts, the only white local (he is married to a native), offers to fill in as the children's schoolteacher and teaches from Dickens's Great Expectations. The precocious Matilda, who forms a strong attachment to the novel's hero, Pip, uses the teachings as escapism, which rankles Dolores, who considers her daughter's fixation blasphemous. With a mixture of thrill and unease, Matilda discovers independent thought, and Jones captures the intricate, emotionally loaded evolution of the mother-daughter relationship.  (A/YA)

Xeric Award-winning cartoonist Jeff Lemire (Lost Dogs) illustrates the tale of Lester, an orphaned 10-year-old who goes to live on his Uncle's farm. Their relationship grows increasingly strained and Lester befriends the town's gas station owner, and damaged former hockey star Jimmy Lebeuf. The two escape into a private fantasy world of super-heroes, alien invaders and good old-fashioned pond Hockey.  (A/YA)

In a family of private investigators, privacy is nonexistent. The Spellman parents spy on the kids just as much as the kids spy on the parents. But after 28 years of this, middle child Isabelle wants out of the family business. Her parents agree, but only if she solves the 10-year-old cold case of a missing teenage.  (A/YA)

In 1862, led by Chief Little Crow and incited by the government's failure to provide their annuity, the Dakota Sioux staged an uprising in Minnesota, slaughtering hundreds of settlers. As a result, 38 Dakota men were hanged, the largest mass execution in U.S. history. Maltman's promising first novel bounces between the years leading up to this atrocity-laden conflict and 1876, when the James-Younger gang would stir up its own brand of bloody mayhem in Minnesota.  (A/YA)

In this smoothly written memoir, 98-pound weakling Polly makes the decision to turn his nerdy self into a fighting machine. Polly's quest for manhood leads him from Topeka, Kans., to the Shaolin Temple, ancient home of the fighting monks. As much a student of Chinese culture as he is a martial artist, Polly derives a great deal of humor from the misunderstandings that follow a six-foot-three laowai (white foreigner) in a China taking its first awkward steps into capitalism after Tiananmen Square.  (A/YA)

Kvothe, the hero and villain of a thousand tales who's presumed dead, lives as the simple proprietor of the Waystone Inn under an assumed name. Prompted by a biographer called Chronicler who realizes his true identity, Kvothe starts to tell his life story. From his upbringing as an actor in his family's traveling troupe of magicians, jugglers and jesters, the Edema Ruh, to feral child on the streets of the vast port city of Tarbean, then his education at "the University," Kvothe is driven by twin imperatives—his desire to learn the higher magic of naming and his need to discover as much as possible about the Chandrian, the demons of legend who murdered his family.  (A/YA)

Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder. She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons—"Bad Monkeys" for short. This confession earns Jane a trip to the jail's psychiatric wing, where a doctor attempts to determine whether she is lying, crazy—or playing a different game altogether.  (A/YA)

2007 Alex Award Winners

Twelve-year-old English boy David is thrust into a realm where fairy tales assume an often gruesome reality. Books are the magic that speak to David, whose mother has died at the start of WWII after a long illness. When a portal to another world opens in time-honored fashion, David enters a land of beasts and monsters where he must undertake a quest if he is to earn his way back out.  (A/YA)

In the fall of 1909 in rural Montana, widower Oliver Milliron hires Rose Llewellyn as housekeeper. Rose brings along her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the "several kinds of education" — none of them of the textbook variety — Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region’s one-room schoolhouse.  (A/YA)

Eagle Blue follows the Fort Yukon Eagles, winners of six regional championships in a row, through the course of an entire 28-game season, from their first day of practice in late November to the Alaska State Championship Tournament in March. With insight, frankness, and compassion, Michael D’Orso climbs into the lives of these fourteen boys, their families, and their coach, shadowing them through an Arctic winter of fifty-below-zero temperatures and near-round-the-clock darkness as the Eagles criss-cross Alaska in pursuit of their—and their village’s—dream.  (A/YA)

When 23-year-old Jacob Jankowski learns that his parents have been killed in a car crash, leaving him penniless, he drops out of Cornell veterinary school and parlays his expertise with animals into a job with the circus, where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures. He also falls in love with Marlena, one of the show's star performers — a romance complicated by Marlena's husband, the unbalanced, sadistic circus boss who beats both his wife and the animals Jankowski cares for.  (A/YA)

Born in Hawaii to Japanese parents, Sam Hamada leaves his family's plantation work behind to attend college on the mainland, where he meets Keiko, the daughter of Japanese immigrants. Yet while Keiko and Sam are falling in love, their adopted and native lands are preparing for war. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Keiko's family is incarcerated in internment camps while Sam is drafted into the U.S. Army, where he unwittingly plays a key role in the bombing of Hiroshima, still home to his mother and siblings.  (A/YA)

Toby Jenkins, now 72, has been living all her life in the same Sears, Roebuck farmhouse in the Nebraska Sandhills her father bought for her mother back in 1920. A string of family deaths, tragedies and abandonments have left Toby and her sister Gertie with no one to pass the place on to. Then Toby's 16-year-old pregnant granddaughter, Lila, arrives from Minneapolis. At first the unloved, metal-studded Lila, the child of Toby's adoptive daughter, a bitter airline stewardess, is surly and ungrateful, but eventually her curiosity about country rituals and her grandmother's life leads her to uncover long-buried family secrets.  (A/YA)

As he did so memorably for baseball in Moneyball, Lewis takes a statistical X-ray of the hidden substructure of football, outlining the invisible doings of unsung players that determine the outcome more than the showy exploits of point scorers.  (A/YA)

Thirteen chapters provide a monthly snapshot of Jason Taylor's life in small-town England from January 1982 to January 1983. Whether the 13-year-old narrator is battling his stammer or trying to navigate the social hierarchy of his schoolmates or watching the slow disintegration of his parents' marriage, he relates his story in a voice that is achingly true to life.  (A/YA)

When high-schooler Travis Shelton steals one too many marijuana plants and has a violent run-in with vicious drug-dealer Carlton Toomey, Travis' stern father kicks him out. Travis ends up bunking at the rundown trailer of bookish Leonard Shuler, a drug dealer and former schoolteacher who lost his job and his family because of false charges. Leonard sees in Travis something of himself in his youth, and the two bond over their shared fascination with the Civil War. Just as Leonard starts to get his own life in order and talks Travis into making plans for college, he becomes enmeshed in a confrontation with Toomey.  (A/YA)

Margaret Lea, a London bookseller's daughter and biographer, is contacted by author Vida Winter, who finally wishes to tell her own life story. Margaret travels to Yorkshire, where she interviews the dying writer, walks the remains of her estate at Angelfield and tries to verify the old woman's tale of a governess, a ghost and more than one abandoned baby. Contending with ghosts and with a (mostly) scary bunch of living people, Setterfield's sensible heroine is, like Jane Eyre, full of repressed feeling—and is unprepared for both heartache and romance.  (A/YA)

Check here for the Alex Award winners from 1998 to 2006.