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.
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.
Read full book review >
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.
Read full book review >
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.
Read full book review >
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.).
Read full book review >
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.
Read full book review >
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.
Read full book review >
