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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