Award Winners You Should Know About

This is the season for staying warm and snuggling up with a good book. It is also award season for books. Listed below are a couple of award winners that are available at RFPL!



Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool is the 2011 Newbery award winner for the most outstanding contribution to children's literature.

It's 1936 and Abilene Tucker just jumped off a train in Manifest, Kansas. She remembers in great detail the stories her father told her about the town where he grew up, but when she gets there she discovers that the years have been hard on Manifest. The bustling town her father described has been hit hard by the Depression and drought. Soon, though, Abilene makes friends and finds adventure hidden in the floorboards of the room where she's staying while her father works on the railroads in Des Moines. This is an amazing story filled with rich history, humor, and adventure.





One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams Garcia 2011 Newbery Honor book and Coretta Scott-King Award winner for an outstanding children's book by an African American author.

When 11 year old Delphine's father put her and her sisters, Vonetta and Fern, on a plane to Oakland in 1968 to visit the mother who abandoned them seven years ago, Delphine expected a lot of things, but she didn't expect that she and her sisters would spend their days at a camp sponsored by the Black Panthers. She also didn't expect to eat Chinese takeout every night from Mean Lady Mings restaurant or to have her mother, Celine, hole up in the kitchen night and day on her type writer typing up poetry and pamphlets for the Black Panther party, but that's exactly what they got. This book is full of characters you'll never forget. The story is funny and heartbreaking, moving and inspiring.