ALA Youth Media Awards 2022 - Young Adults

Created on January 24, 2022, 1:56 pm

Last Updated May 7, 2022, 12:52 pm

Each year the American Library Association (ALA) honors books, audiobooks, and other outstanding materials for children and Young Adults. Recognized worldwide for the high quality they represent, the ALA Youth Media Awards guide parents, educators, librarians, and others in selecting the best materials for youth. Selected by committees composed of librarians and other literature and media experts, the awards encourage original and creative work in the field of children’s and young adult literature and media. This list includes awards such as the prestigious Printz, Morris, Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpré, and Robert F. Sibert book awards among others. www.ala.org/yma

1) Ace of spades

Author

Àbíké-Íyímídé, Faridah

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

At Niveus Private Academy, Devon and Chiamaka are the only students chosen to be Senior Prefects who are also black, which makes them targets for a series of anonymous texts revealing their secrets to the entire student body. Both students were on track toward valedictorian and bright college futures, but this prank quickly turns into a very dangerous game and they are at more than one disadvantage as it looks like things could turn deadly.

2) Ambushed!: the assassination plot against President Garfield

Author

Series

Medical fiascoes

Description

"James Abram Garfield, the 20th president of the United States, was assassinated when he was shot by Charles Guiteau in July 1881, less than four months after he was elected president. But Garfield didn't actually die until 80 days later. In this page-turner, award-winning author Gail Jarrow delves into the fascinating story of the relationship between Garfield and Guiteau, and relates the gruesome details of Garfield's slow and agonizing death. She...

3) Apple: skin to the core

Author

Gansworth, Eric L

Description

The term "Apple" is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly "red on the outside, white on the inside." Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist...

4) Black birds in the sky: the story and legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Author

Colbert, Brandy

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

"In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District--a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives. In a few short hours, they'd razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial...

5) The city beautiful

Author

Polydoros, Aden

Description

"Death lurks around every corner in this unforgettable Jewish historical fantasy about a city, a boy, and the shadows of the past that bind them both together. Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity, and he dreams of the day he'll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania. But when Alter's best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a...

6) Concrete rose

Author

Series

The Hate U Give

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Playaway

Description

Maverick feels strongly about family ties, making choices he feels necessary to help support his mom while his King father serves time, and leave him literally holding his son in a doctor's waiting room after he gets paternity test results back and his babymomma ghosts. Now the child he's raising is impacting the lives of his family and his girlfriend, and the gang life he led to support them all financially could leave them all bearing his responsibilities...

7) The darkness outside us

Author

Schrefer, Eliot

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

Earth's population is divided between only two existing countries which cannot manage to cooperate in any way, until a distress signal arrives from Titan's first settler. Neither country can afford to rescue her on their own if they act separately. Ambrose wakes up on board the Coordinated Endeavour under strange circumstances: he doesn't remember the launch, the ship's OS is voiced by his mother, strangers have been aboard, and Kodiak, the only other...

Author

Badger, Darcie Little

Formats:

Description

"Imagine an America very similar to our own. It's got homework, best friends, and pistachio ice cream. There are some differences. This America been shaped dramatically by the magic, monsters, knowledge, and legends of its peoples, those Indigenous and those not. Some of these forces are charmingly everyday, like the ability to make an orb of light appear or travel across the world through rings of fungi. But other forces are less charming and should...

9) A face for Picasso: coming of age with Crouzon syndrome

Author

Description

At only eight months old, identical twin sisters Ariel and Zan were diagnosed with Crouzon syndrome, a rare condition where the bones in the head fuse prematurely. They were the first twins known to survive the disease. They endured numerous appearance-altering procedures as they grew up. Surgeons would break the bones in their heads and faces to make room for their growing organs. While the physical aspect of their condition was painful, it was nothing...

10) Fallout: spies, superbombs, and the ultimate Cold War showdown

Author

Sheinkin, Steve

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

"As World War II comes to a close, the United States and the Soviet Union emerge as the two greatest world powers on extreme opposites of the political spectrum. After the United States showed its hand with the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, the Soviets refuse to be left behind. With communism sweeping the globe, the two nations begin a neck-and-neck competition to build even more destructive bombs and conquer the Space Race. In their battle for dominance,...

11) Fifteen hundred miles from the sun: a novel

Author

Villa, Jonny Garza

Description

"Julián Luna has a plan for his life: Graduate. Get into UCLA. And have the chance to move away from Corpus Christi, Texas, and the suffocating expectations of others that have forced Jules into an inauthentic life. Then in one reckless moment, with one impulsive tweet, his plans for a low-key nine months are thrown--literally--out the closet. The downside: the whole world knows, and Jules has to prepare for rejection. The upside: Jules now has...

12) Firekeeper's daughter

Author

Boulley, Angeline

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Playaway

Description

Daunis, who is part Ojibwe, defers attending the University of Michigan to care for her mother and reluctantly becomes involved in the investigation of a series of drug-related deaths.

13) From a whisper to a rallying cry: the killing of Vincent Chin and the trial that galvanized the Asian American movement

Author

Description

"A portrait of Vincent Chin and the murder case that took America's Asian American community to the streets in protest of injustice. America in 1982. Japanese car companies are on the rise and believed to be putting American autoworkers out of their jobs. Anti-Asian American sentiments simmer, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turns fatal, leaving Vincent Chin-a Chinese American man-beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald...

14) Home is not a country

Author

Description

"Nima doesn't feel understood. By her mother, who grew up far away in a different land. By her suburban town, which makes her feel too much like an outsider to fit in and not enough like an outsider to feel like that she belongs somewhere else. At least she has her childhood friend Haitham, with whom she can let her guard down and be herself. Until she doesn't. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life...

15) How Moon Fuentez fell in love with the universe

Author

Gilliland, Raquel Vasquez

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

When seventeen-year-old Star Fuentez reaches social media stardom, her polar-opposite twin, Moon, becomes "merch girl" on a tour bus full of beautiful influencers and the grumpy but attractive Santiago Philips.

16) Hunting by stars

Author

Dimaline, Cherie

Series

Marrow thieves novels volume 2

Formats:

Description

French has been captured by the Recruiters, confined to one of the infamous residential schools, where the government extracts the marrow of Indigenous people in order to steal the ability to dream, and where the captured are programmed to betray others of their kind, something which he discovers has been done to his brother; meanwhile the other survivors, his found family, are hunting for him, determined to rescue him--and French has to decide just...

17) In the shadow of the fallen towers: the second, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years after the 9/11 attacks

Author

Description

This graphic novel chronicles the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City through moving individual stories that bear witness to history and the ways it shapes the future.

18) Last night at the Telegraph Club

Author

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

"Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the question took root, but the answer was in full bloom the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father--despite...

19) The last words we said

Author

Description

Nine months after Danny disappeared, his closest friends, Ellie, Rae, and Deenie, deal with their loss very differently but will have to share secrets about the night he disappeared to uncover the truth.

Author

Description

"Moth has lost her family in an accident. Though she lives with her aunt, she feels alone and uprooted--until she meets Sani, a boy who is also searching for his roots. If he knows more about where he comes from, maybe he'll be able to understand his ongoing depression. And if Moth can help him feel grounded, then perhaps she too will discover the history she carries in her bones"--