I couldn’t be more pleased with this year’s winner of the Michael Printz award for young adult literature:  Geraldine McCaughrean’s The White Darkness.  I love, love, love, LOVE this book, but I was beginning to feel like some sort of oddity who has terrible taste in literature; like I had lost my touch for recognizing the great books.  The teen book group regularly refers to “that book,” and they all laugh at how they felt forced to be kind when writing their opinions on the book for this blog, since they knew that Geraldine McCaughrean would be reading their opinions and they didn’t want to hurt her feelings.  And then I recommended The White Darkness to one of my coworkers (whom I respect greatly), and she came back to me a few days later and stuck her tongue out and said, “Yuck!  I hated that book!  I couldn’t even finish it!!”

The book is a bit dark, a bit odd, and definitely unique.  Perhaps it doesn’t appeal to everyone, but to my mind it is a contemporary classic that will stand the test of time, and its selection as this year’s winner of the Printz award makes complete and total sense to this reader.  (And now I feel rather virtuous about the three extra copies of the book in my library’s collection, which I had to purchase for the book group.  Solid evidence that I know good stuff when I read it.  Because it’s all about me, of course.  :)  )