‘The Hunger Games’ Wins SLJ’s Battle of the (Kids’) Books
By Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 5/7/2009
Lois Lowry has spoken—and she chose Katniss over Octavian.
Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (Scholastic) is the winner of School Library Journal’s Battle of the (Kids’) Books contest, beating M. T. Anderson’s The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. II (Candlewick).
And it wasn't just Lowry who loved the book. The Hunger Games also won SLJ's People's Choice Poll, which asked readers to vote for their favorite Battle of the Books title.
Why did Lowry, the final judge in the three-week competition, choose Collins’s book, about teens trying to survive a reality TV fight-to-the-death, winner-take-all tournament? Mainly because it starts out with 24 children and ends up with 22 of them dead—one of them eaten alive by canines. “That’s tough to beat,” quips Lowry in her hilarious blog entry.
Collins graciously accepted her victory, writing on the Battle of the Books blog that she found “Octavian Nothing’s life to be, as promised, astonishing.”
“I happily embrace it, with great admiration to the other authors for their exceptional books, and thanks to those who orchestrated and judged the competition.”
Indeed, the contest was in some ways a vindication for books like The Hunger Games and Kristin Cashore’s Graceling (Harcourt), which were ignored at the American Library Association’s children and young adult literary awards last January. Anderson also says he’s “tremendously pleased” that Collins’s book won because it was robbed of honors earlier in the year.
His reason for why the book deserved the grand prize? Because, it asks “a central and real and deeply troubling question—to what extent is compassion merely a weakness—and kindness merely an evolutionary flaw?” he writes.
The competition brought together some of the hottest kids' books authors: Coe Booth, Chris Crutcher, Jon Scieszka, Linda Sue Park, and John Green, who each judged one round of the contest, which pitted 16 of last year’s best books for children and teens against each other. And as judges, they provided very insightful analysis, often going beyond what you’d find in a typical book review.
Take Meg Rosoff, for example, who in round one chose Margo Lanagan’s Tender Morsels (Knopf) over Philip Reeve’s Here Lies Arthur (Scholastic). “This was a book unlike anything else I’d ever read in the genre," Rosoff writes."Tender Morsels takes on unexplored, almost unexplorable territory, its fairy tale format allows access to the deepest darkness that inhabits the human soul.”
That kind of commentary, coupled with the fact that this marked the first time that so many children’s authors came together to judge a favorite book written by one of their peers, helped gain Battle of the (Kids’) Books a lot of followers. There were close to 20,000 visitors to the BOB blog.
Lauren Downey and Summer Ogata, two recent college grads who are YA book fanatics, were so inspired that they created a highly entertaining Battle of the Books video on YouTube.
Someone should give these gals a prize. They were rooting for The Hunger Games, even before Lowry unveiled her pick.
