NBA Season: Books, not Basketball

I’m supposed to be reading Ab(solutely) Normal: Short Stories That Smash Mental Health Stereotypes edited by Nora Shalaway Carpenter and Rocky Callen (Candlewick, 2023). In fact, I have a copy on top of my TBR pile waiting its turn. The list of young people’s literature finalists for the National Book Award has excited me so much that I decided to read through all five of them before the event next month. Then, when I was invited to actually attend the event, I realize I’m completely ignoring my TBR pile, so while I was at it, I threw in couple of titles from the adult lists as well. I have finished a couple of young people’s books and have a few thoughts to share. I’ll write about the others after I’ve read them, too.

Kyle Lukoff’s A World Worth Saving (Dial/Penguin Random House) was an audio event for me. Of course I’ve listened to other books on audio, but for intentions of reviewing a book, this format offers me a very limiting experience. I do like listening because it offers the opportunity to multitask, most often driving while listening, but Carplay doesn’t allow Libby to rewind, so passages don’t get explored as they would if I were reading. I don’t seem to maintain plot connections, or the development of various story elements when listening. Essentially, this was an activity in getting the book done ASAP so I could move on to the next. None of the other finalists were available in audio through my library, so I’ll be reading those.

A World Worth Saving is middle grade speculative fiction that uses Judaic mythology to validate the existence of transgender lives. A (the character’s name) came out as trans and his parents are not pleased, to put it mildly. They maintain his old identity and force him to attend Save Our Sons and Daughters meetings every week. This group manages to connect A to others who are trans. Yarrow, who attended the meetings with family members, disappears after one of the meetings and events quickly begin to cascade when A runs away from home and a golem whirls into his life. I needed to sit with this and dig into the mythology and the elements of the hero’s journey so that I could get more than what felt like the author’s voice through the main character explaining and validating the trans experience. Do we need that in youth literature? You better believe we do, and Lukoff is skillful in the way he contextualizes information. I just expected a little more here.

At the same time, I was reading (S)Kin by Ibi Zoboi (Versify/HarperCollins).  Zoboi began developing this story in A Phoenix First Must Burn: Sixteen Stories of Black Girl Magic Resistance, and Hope (ed. by Patrice Caldwell; Viking, 2020). That story set in Haiti, was also the story of soucouyant who shed their skin to become fireballs on a full moon. (S)Kin is set in Brooklyn, in the Haitian American community where Marisol and her mother are escaping the ways that their skin confined them in Haiti, only to find the same but different circumstances in the United States. There was a line in the book that stuck with me the moment I read it, “there is no good or bad, only outcomes.” I found that so profound! In the context of this story, ‘there are no monsters, only outcomes’.

I read this as an ebook from my library on my phone. There are pages where I know the magic is happening just as a know the formatting might have been off. I wonder shat would this have looks like in a print copy?

Zoboi, like Lukoff, pulls from personal reality to shape a world that exists in the margins that are formed to reduce outcomes. To define good and bad. To create monsters of golems, soucouyant, trans people, immigrants, Black people, and Jewish people, rendering them inconsequential.   

I just picked up The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story by Daniel Nayeri. I have that, as well as Amber McBride’s The Leaving Room and Truth Is: A Novel in Verse by Hannah V. Sawyerr to read in print.

I’m listening to The Antidote by Karen Russell (Fiction; finalist). Such a beautifully crafted story! I need print, but I really don’t have time! I’m listening at 1.9x speed, can’t do that with a print book!

My plan is to get these done by the event on Wednesday 19 November 2025. You can register to watch here. I noticed there will be a livestream of the authors reading from their works Tuesday 18 November, but I’ll unfortunately be in the air at that time.

Which books will you be hoping to see named a winner at this year’s National Book Awards?

Be well and do good

Filed under: Awards, Reviews