Silver seems to be my novel First Descent’s favorite color! It just won another silver award last week. I’m flattered and pleased. I feel that it puts a bit of pressure on me for ensuring that my current young-adult novel-in-progress endeavors to meet or up the standards of the last one, but that’s a good pressure, really. 🙂
Here’s a full recap of the awards and mentions that First Descent has garnered:
Silver award for young-adult fiction, 2011 Book of the Year Awards (BOTYA) by ForeWord Reviews, announced at the American Library Association conference in Anaheim, California June, 2012:
https://botya.forewordreviews.com/winners/2011/young-adult-fiction/
2012 Silver award for 2012 mid-grade/teen fiction, Nautilus Book Awards, “better books for a better world”:
http://www.nautilusbookawards.com/2012_SILVER_Winners.html
Fall 2011 Junior Library Guild Selection designation:
http://www.juniorlibraryguild.com
Feb. 2012 honorable mention for a young adult book in the Ontario Library Association list of “Best Bets”:
http://tundrabooks.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/ola-best-bets-2011/
Meanwhile, I spent the past week in Washington state visiting Tony Dirksen (and his wife Elva) and Theresa Bateman, fellow team members of my youth literacy website, www.keenreaders.org. Theresa, who is also a children’s writer, cranks out an incredible number of middle-grade/young-adult book reviews for Kennreaders, and Tony is co-founder of the site with me. (Better yet, he and Elva have a hot tub in their back yard, from which they occasionally glimpse black bears.)
I also visited friends and relatives in San Francisco (including my nephew’s wife ZhengZheng, who works for Facebook and helps Mark Zuckerberg practice his Mandarin). Also visited Brenda Knight, publisher of Cleis Books (http://www.cleispress.com/index.php), which is publishing my forthcoming book on boys and literacy (fall 2013).
Have a good July!
