Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: Alex Awards Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool. 

One of my favorite awards is actually a list. It is the Alex Award:

The Alex Awards are given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18. The winning titles are selected from the previous year's publishing. The Alex Awards were first given annually beginning in 1998 and became an official ALA award in 2002.

The award is sponsored by the Margaret A. Edwards Trust. Edwards pioneered young adult library services and worked for many years at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore. Her work is described in her book Fair Garden and the Swarm of Beasts, and over the years she has served as an inspiration to many librarians who serve young adults. The Alex Awards are named after Edwards, who was called “Alex” by her friends.

On Monday, the list for 2024 came out. You can read it here or at the end of this post. But first a few comments about this year's list:

• 2 of the BEST BOOKS I read this year (Chlorine and Whalefall) are on this list and for both of those books, I note that teens would love them in my reviews. 
• Some of the overall bestselling books and top of the best lists titles are here (Fourth Wing, Chain-Gang All-Stars) and The Talk, a memoir, was a finalist for the Carnegie Medal. 
• Take a look at the fiction titles below. All of them not only embrace genre, they are all genre first. And those genres are speculative in nature. 
• I know first hand, from suggesting these books to readers, they are sure bets with adults and teens. Really anyone who considers themselves a "reader," these are titles that would work for them regardless of their general reading preferences. In fact, I consider the Alex Awards in general as one of my go-to sure bets lists, always.

As I hint to in that last bullet point, these observations not unique across the years. The Alex Award list often contains a few "Best of the Year" titles and is usually leans heavily on speculative titles. 

So, as good as the 2024 list is, you should 100% check past years' lists which are easily available at this link. This is a sure bet list for Adult and Teen readers, for any year. So make sure to consult the Alex Award list from the last 2-5 years frequently. When you are struggling for a book that is interesting, fun, and with wide appeal...this is the best place to start.

And come on, regular readers of this blog are probably not surprised that  I love this award precisely because it is a list, by definition. (Confused? See the series disclaimer at the top of the post, or the title of this post.)

I will be adding all of the 2024 titles to my Demystifying Genre program exactly for this reason. They are sure bets with a genre focus. 

And now, for those who did not click through yet, here are the 2024 Alex Award winners (with links to my reviews where applicable):

• “Bad Cree,” by Jessica Johns (nehiyaw/Sucker Creek First Nation), published by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House
• “Chain-Gang All-Stars,” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, published by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House
• “Chlorine,” by Jade Song, published by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
• “Fourth Wing,” by Rebecca Yarros, published by Red Tower Books, an imprint of Entangled Publishing
• “The Hard Parts: A Memoir of Courage and Triumph,” by Oksana Masters, published by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster
• “I Will Greet the Sun Again,” by Khashayar J. Khabushani, published by Hogarth Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House
• “Maame,” by Jessica George, published by St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
• “Starter Villain,” by John Scalzi, published by Tor Books, an imprint of Tor Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishing Group
• “The Talk,” by Darrin Bell, published by Henry Holt & Co., a division of Macmillan Publishing Group
• “Whalefall,” by Daniel Kraus, published by MTV Books and Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster