Acclaimed novelist Pat Conroy announced the finalists for the 2010 National Book Award winners on October 13. Among the nominees are many books to which Kirkus awarded starred reviews. Here's a list of all the 2010 finalists Kirkus reviewed.
NONFICTION
Released: Jan. 5, 2010
"Meticulous reporting reveals life in a country that tries hard to keep its citizens walled in and the rest of the world out."
A detailed, grim portrait of daily life under the repressive North Korean dictatorship, where schoolchildren are taught to sing anthems in praise of their leader asserting that they "have nothing to envy in this world.`
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NONFICTION
Released: Jan. 19, 2010
"Riveting and exquisitely crafted."
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (
Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and '70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: Feb. 1, 2010
"He offers no easy answers, but roots salvation in a few helping hands along the way and in personal moral decisions; Reese comes to realize that home and the streets are not where it's at: "I know I got to start with me." (Fiction. 12 & up)"
Fourteen-year-old Reese Anderson has already spent 22 months at the oxymoronically named Progress Center, and his prison world is delineated in painstaking detail—eternal stasis, a non-life, ever vulnerable to random violence and the threat of detention, added time and being sent upstate.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: Feb. 1, 2010
"The depiction of the time is well done, and while the girls are caught up in the difficulties of adults, their resilience is celebrated and energetically told with writing that snaps off the page. (Historical fiction. 9-12)"
A flight from New York to Oakland, Calif., to spend the summer of 1968 with the mother who abandoned Delphine and her two sisters was the easy part.
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FICTION
Released: March 9, 2010
"An overly schematic but powerful study of both marriage and medical care."
The American health-care system decimates the emotions and finances of one well-meaning citizen in the latest novel by the provocative Shriver (
The Post-Birthday World, 2007, etc.).
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CHILDREN'S
Released: April 1, 2010
"Erskine draws directly and indirectly on To Kill a Mockingbird and riffs on its central theme: The destruction of an innocent is perhaps both the deepest kind of psychosocial wound a community can face and its greatest opportunity for psychological and spiritual growth. (Fiction. 8-12)"
This heartbreaking story is delivered in the straightforward, often funny voice of a fifth-grade girl with Asperger's syndrome, who is frustrated by her inability to put herself in someone else's shoes.
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FICTION
Released: April 23, 2010
"Quirky and erudite, but the payoff in human-interest terms is meager."
A New World historical novel from Carey, the two-time Australian-born winner of the Man Booker prize.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: May 1, 2010
"Told in the third person, this stark, surreal story sends an alarm to heed the warning signs of climate change or suffer a similar fate. (Science fiction. 12 & up)"
A gritty teen betrays his father and flees his grim existence in a post–global-warming Gulf Coast village to protect a young woman he barely knows in this gripping futuristic thriller.
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NONFICTION
Released: June 15, 2010
"A scathing look at the human costs of war."
NONFICTION
Released: Aug. 24, 2010
"A vivid, candid portrait."
Provocative biography of a little-known university professor turned sex researcher and pornographer.
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NONFICTION
Released: Sept. 7, 2010
"An unrelenting, incisive, masterly comparative study."
Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning historian Dower (
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, 1999, etc.) draws astute ironies between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 in terms of the overweening arrogance of military superpowers.
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CHILDREN'S
Released: Sept. 14, 2010
"Notable for well-drawn characters, an engaging plot and, especially, hauntingly beautiful language, this is an outstanding book. (Fiction. 12 & up)"
This debut solo effort after several collaborations with husband Tom McNeal (The Decoding of Lana Morris, 2007, etc.) stands out in the crowded coming-of-age field.
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FICTION
Released: Oct. 1, 2010
"Brainy and often lyrically expressive, but also elusive and sometimes infuriatingly coy; Krauss is an acquired taste."
A many-drawered writing desk resonates powerfully but for different reasons with the various characters in this novel about loss and retrieval from Krauss (
The History of Love, 2005, etc.).
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FICTION
Released: Nov. 14, 2010
"Exceptional writing and idiosyncratic characters make this an engaging read. "
A novel of luck, pluck, farce and above all horse racing--not at tony and elegant sites like Churchill Downs and Ascot but rather at a rinky-dink racetrack in Indian Mound Downs, W.Va.
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