This week the National Book Awards announced the 2022 nominees in the category of Young People’s Literature. The Publishers Weekly summaries of the books give us a window into the world of YA fiction. Here’s a sampling:
• The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen is about an Orthodox Jewish boy who moves to a “mostly non-Jewish town” and begins dating the mayor’s daughter, a doubly hyphenated character named Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary. PW wraps up its summary by noting that “Hoodie and his family read as white; Anna-Marie is Latinx-cued.”
• A Thousand Steps into the Night, a story “inspired by Japanese mythology” with fantastical elements, features “interrogation and analysis of gender, cultural sexism, and patriarchy [that] add layers of contemporary resonance.”
• Swim Team “details segregation’s generational impact through a warmhearted story of community, Black diasporic identity, and learning.”
• The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School follows a 16-year-old Mexican-American lesbian as she finds her place in a new school where “the student body is overwhelmingly white” and “homophobia [is] seemingly baked into the curriculum.” The story “tackles difficult subjects such as intolerant religious institutions.”
• Victory. Stand! Raising My Fist For Justice is by the track-and-field athlete Tommie Smith, who famously raised his fist in the black-power salute while on the medals podium at the 1968 Mexico Olympics. The book is praised as “a powerful celebration of resistance.”
• All My Rage, concerning a Pakistani-American family, explores “grief, racism, financial need, trauma, and substance abuse.” It presents “solidly multidimensional characters alongside vividly wrought connections and pressure,” whatever that means.
• Self-Made Boys: A Great Gatsby Remix, according to the publisher’s own description, reimagines Nick Carraway as Nicolás Caraveo, a transgender boy in 1922 who follows Daisy Fabrega from Wisconsin to Long Island, where he meets Jay Gatsby. Finding himself “falling hard” for Jay, he “learns something else: Jay is also transgender.”
I haven’t read these books, so of course I can’t comment on their literary value. But it’s a curious thing how, these days, books appear to gain recognition on the basis of certain approved themes.