by Madeline Tyner Freimuth, Merri V. Lindgren, Megan Schliesman, and Tessa Michaelson Schmidt
© 2024 Cooperative Children’s Book Center
(This essay originally appeared in CCBC Choices 2024.)
As a statewide book examination center for children’s and young adult literature, the CCBC receives thousands of new books for children and teens each year. We engage with and around these books in many ways and encourage others to do so, too. Librarians, teachers, and university students come to the library to see and hear about new books. Our outreach, education, and reference services are all focused in one way or another on books for youth. The CCBC’s annual diversity statistics document our analysis of the books we receive, providing data to inform discussions about who is represented among stories and storytellers for children and teens.
And of course, throughout the year, we read—hundreds of books individually, hundreds and hundreds (and hundreds!) collectively—in order to choose books for this annual recommended list of high-quality literature that we share with librarians and teachers in Wisconsin and beyond.
We don’t have a checklist of criteria that books must meet to be a Choice, but as each of us reads and evaluates throughout the year we are looking for books that we think will engage, entertain, and inform young readers. We want a list that is broadly inclusive and encompasses a wide range of subjects, topics, and themes. We also want the list to be books we like (and agree on!) and want to share with librarians and teachers because we’re confident children and teens will like them, too.
Sometimes our enthusiasm for a book contains multitudes (The voice … the descriptive language … the plot … the humor … the art … I learned so much!) and sometimes it’s one or two elements that quietly fuel our appreciation. We also know that no book will appeal to everyone, and some books may appeal to only certain or limited tastes, but libraries and classrooms contain multitudes, too, when it comes to the needs, tastes, and interests of the children and teens they serve.
It’s important to note that we don’t receive everything published each year, and we can’t possibly read everything we do receive. Our list is one of many perspectives on excellence, and we always discover a handful of books we wished we’d included after Choices is published.
This edition of CCBC Choices recommends 238 books for children and teens from birth through high school age published/released in the United States or Canada in 2023. It’s a list encompassing books on a wide range of subjects, topics, and themes. We could parse the books in CCBC Choices 2024 in many ways, but here are just a few observations about some of them that reflect several of the things we took note of as we read last year.
Early on in our 2023 reading, three years after the start of COVID, we began encountering work after work of middle grade fiction that acknowledged the pandemic’s impact on young people’s lives. The titles fit into multiple genres and were set in various parts of the world, underscoring the global scope that is the reality of a pandemic. Among them were two low fantasy novels, the singular Elf Dog & Owl Head and the spirited Hamra and the Jungle of Memories, which is set in Malaysia; The Lost Year, which bridges centuries and generations through connected narratives about Ukrainian and Ukrainian American family members in both the 1930s and 2020; the tenderly amusing and eye-opening Too Small Tola Gets Tough, about a young Nigerian girl who gets a job to help her family financially; and the entertaining and heartfelt When Impossible Happens, in which an Indian girl finds solace after the loss of her mystery-loving grandmother by throwing herself into investigating a possible crime.
The pandemic novels set outside the United States are a reminder of the importance of books for children and teens that expand awareness and understanding of the wider world. Another such book, Flying Up the Mountain, is an eco-adventure-mystery set in West Africa. We were also pleased to read a number of outstanding translated books, including the picture books At the Drop of a Cat, originally published in France, and On the Edge of the World, which came from Russia and features two protagonists, one in Russia, one in Chile. Translated books for middle grade in this edition of Choices include The House of the Lost on the Cape, from Japan; Cross My Heart and Never Lie, from Norway; and To the Ice, from Sweden. The marvelous young adult novel Fire from the Sky, about a gay Sámi teen looking for assurance that he belongs in his community, is also from Sweden.
Living on a planet that just broke the unsettling record for hottest year ever recorded, we appreciated two books that examine the impact of climate change on young people. The 21 is a fascinating, frustrating, inspiring account of the court case Juliana v. The United States, first filed in 2015 and still working its way through the legal system today. The 21 plaintiffs referenced in the title were between ages 7 and 19 in 2015; they sued the United States for violating their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property by promoting fossil fuels. A fictional but no less honest look at climate change and youth is the young adult novel Down Came the Rain, about two teens struggling with climate anxiety in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
In recent years, we’ve been happy to see a growing number of middle grade and young adult novels in which religion or spirituality is an important aspect of a character’s personal identity and/or the context of their family life, whether or not it’s a central dimension of the plot. The result has been books that not only collectively showcase diversity within and across religious identities, but across genres, too, and this year was no exception.
The previously mentioned fantasy adventure Hamra and the Jungle of Memories is about a Malaysian Muslim girl’s quest to restore an enchanted tiger to human form in exchange for her grandmother’s failing memory, while The Witch of Woodland is about a contemporary Jewish girl navigating her belief in both Judaism and witchcraft. The graphic novel Enlighten Me sees a boy far more interested in video games than a Buddhist retreat use his familiarity with the former as a means of understanding the teachings of the latter. The historical young adult novel Buffalo Flats is about a spirited young woman living in a 19th-century Canadian Mormon community. An Impossible Thing to Say, set in 2001, a novel in verse in which an Iranian American teen finds his unique poetic voice through rap, acknowledges the two different faith traditions of his extended family: Baha’i and Muslim.
Two distinctive, outstanding contemporary novels in which friendship struggles, among other things, are complicating the lives of their Jewish protagonists are The Dubious Pranks of Shaindy Goodman and The Museum of Lost Things. The Year My Life Went Down the Toilet is about a Jewish girl learning to live with Crohn’s disease, while Will on the Inside, another middle grade book about living with Crohn’s, has Will, who is also beginning to think about his sexual identity, asking important questions about God and acceptance in his Baptist faith.
The two novels about Crohn’s disease are part of a welcome trend (we hope) toward publishing more books that offer authentic portrayals of characters living with physical disability or chronic illness. Among others are the graphic novel Stars in Their Eyes, featuring a young teen who uses a prosthetic leg and has chronic fatigue–both related to childhood cancer–who is eagerly attending her first fan con; and the young adult novel Where You See Yourself, in which a teen who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair prepares for life after high school by embarking on an eye-opening college search.
Finally, at a time when challenges to books, especially books about LGBTQ lives and experiences and Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) lives, threaten the diversity that is vital to classroom resources and collections in public and school libraries, we appreciate that diverse books continue to arrive in almost every shipment we receive at the CCBC, among them works by debut and early-career authors and illustrators such as Winsome Bingham, Dinalie Dabarera, Natalie Daise, X. Fang, Chrystal D. Giles, Byron Graves, Jane Kuo, Mari D. Lowe, Pedro Martín, Arya Shahi, Edward Underhill, and others, suggesting a bright long-term future for diverse books, and for young readers. We are heartened, too, by the librarians and teachers who are fighting to keep diverse books accessible to the children and teens with whom they work at a time when doing so is not just hard but sometimes risky.
We choose books for Choices first and foremost because we think they are terrific books that we want librarians and teachers to know about as they evaluate and select materials for collections, classrooms, displays, and programming. The fact that there were many diverse books for us to consider as we created CCBC Choices 2024 is something we appreciate and celebrate.
When we think about the tensions in the world, and the divisions in our country and in our communities, we believe the opportunities for visibility, connection, empathy, and understanding that books can foster has never been more important. Like many, we find it ironic that books are the focus of so much vitriol, and that under the guise of “protecting children,” children and teens are at risk of being harmed not only by limiting their access to information, but by seeing books that reflect their very lives and identities come under attack.
It’s a reminder that the work we all do—librarians, teachers, authors, illustrators, editors, and publishers—provides children and teens with access to books that can entertain and inform, to books that can delight and inspire, and to books that can affirm and assure they are seen, valued, and belong in their communities.