Teens' Choice Award and TFIOS

Voting starts today for the 2014 Children’s Choice Book Awards and the 2014 Teens’ Choice Book Award.  Vote here:  http://www.ccbookawards.com/!

Nominees for Teen Book of the Year:

Allegiant by Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins)
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell (St. Martin’s Press)
Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices) by Cassandra Clare (Margaret K. McElderry/S&S)
Smoke by Ellen Hopkins (Margaret K. McElderry/S&S)
The 5th Wave by Rick Yancey (Putnam)

Dear Readers,

 

Please show your support for these fine authors any day and any time between today, March 25, through May 12.   

 

Finalists are determined with the help of Teenreads.com with over 7000 teens voting.  The five titles with the highest number of votes are then up for the title of Teen Book of the Year.

The voting, sponsored by the Children’s Book Council, reported over 1 million children and teens participating in the online selection for their favorites last year.  Of course, the winner for the 2013 Teen Book of the Year is The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  If you ask me, TFIOS could have been nominated again this year and could have won again!

In honor of last year’s winner here is my original, brief review of the TFIOS from a previous post (with a few changes):

I am in love with the authentic YA voice, and that coupled with some of the best writing YA has to offer (ala the greatness of all that is John Green) is what brilliant and contemporary YA is all about. It's YA with heartbreak, with happy and tragic, with awful and beautiful. Not to mention, the obvious allusions to so many things Shakespeare scattered perfectly throughout the novel, with best allusion being the title itself:  "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/ But in ourselves" from The Tragedy of Julius Caesar.

We English teachers just can not get away from a yearly dose of Shakespeare. I mean, I got this allusion on the first glimpse of the title, The Fault in Our Stars, way back when it came out about a two years ago or more. But you know, the title and all its implications bring to mind another Shakespearean tragedy instead. You know, the one about star crossed lovers... I guess it's in the word stars.

I feel sad already :(

I know many, many of you have already read this novel, so I am too many months/ years late for a review, but here is a brief summary from Goodreads. com If by chance you have not yet read it, then you are missing out. It's like me asking "And you, Reader?" (Just like "Et tu, Brute?" from Julius Caesar, meaning that you are betraying the YA genre by not having read The Fault in Our Stars.)

"Diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at 13, Hazel was prepared to die until, at 14, a medical miracle shrunk the tumours in her lungs... for now.

Two years post-miracle, sixteen-year-old Hazel is post-everything else, too; post-high school, post-friends and post-normalcy. And even though she could live for a long time (whatever that means), Hazel lives tethered to an oxygen tank, the tumours tenuously kept at bay with a constant chemical assault.

Enter Augustus Waters. A match made at cancer kid support group, Augustus is gorgeous, in remission, and shockingly to her, interested in Hazel. Being with Augustus is both an unexpected destination and a long-needed journey, pushing Hazel to re-examine how sickness and health, life and death, will define her and the legacy that everyone leaves behind."

And don’t forget the movie!

And if I were a teenager eligible of voting, my vote would go to the closest equivilant of TFIOS on this year's list--Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell. 

P.S. I dedicate this entire post to one of the biggest John Green fans--Anissa Lopez, a beautiful, smart, courageous survivor of the big C and high school life in general.  You are absolutely awesome!  Go class of 2015! Go Bears!

Fictionally Yours Siempre,

Minerva