Wednesday, January 03, 2007

The Road to the Cybils

Now that the Cybils shortlists have been posted, I can breathe a sigh of relief. Working on the nominating committee for fantasy and science fiction was a lot of fun, but challenging. I loved reading all the books and discussing them with my fellow panelists. We had many interesting and thought provoking discussions, such as: Should books have to stand alone, even if they are in a series? Does a weak protagonist detract from the story, or is it appealing to kids who may be able to see themselves in the character? Will teens identify with or reject an angry, bitter protagonist? Is allegory always didactic, or can it be just a reflection of the concerns of the society in which it's written? These are just some of the many issues we wrestled with.

I've seen judges in other awards programs say that the first cut was the easiest, and we found that to be true also. Most of the books nominated were good (there were a few exceptions), but when you compare a list of books like this in such intense scrutiny, you quickly find that there is a difference between good and great. We very quickly narrowed the list from 88 nominees down to 28 possible shortlist candidates.

Some of the 28 had only one person supporting them, so in those cases, the supporter made a case for the book. In some cases, no one was convinced, and we removed the book, in other cases some of the team members agreed that the book should stay on the list. Eventually, we got the list of 28 narrowed down to 15 books. That was the point where our list started to reach equilibrium. Every book on the list had at least two team members supporting it, in many cases passionately supporting it. Then it started to get hard, because no one wanted to give up any of the books they supported.

It started to look bleak, until my wonderful husband asked me, "Which books would you fight for?" So we took his suggestion, and each of us posted a list of the 2 or 3 books we would fight for. By compiling that, we narrowed the list down to 10 really excellent books:

Avielle of Rhia
Beka Cooper: Terrier
Corbenic
The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle
The Last Dragon
Ptolemy's Gate
Pucker
Silver City
Travels of Thelonious
Wintersmith

Then it got ugly. We had to somehow cut the list in half, to only five books, and no one wanted to give up. Three of the books emerged as strong favorites (I won't say which ones lest we influence the judges!) but it was a close race between the other seven books. With only hours to go, we voted, discussed, voted again, discussed some more, ranked, discussed and voted. We all got pretty frustrated before it was over. Finally, (only about 12 hours late) we broke the tie and we had a shortlist:

Beka Cooper: Terrier
The Last Dragon
Ptolemy's Gate
Pucker
Silver City

Not everyone agreed with every book on the list, but I think that overall we ended up with a really good list that reflects the best of children's and young adult literature. View the shortlist with descriptions on the Cybils site.

It was great fun, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I made new friends and discovered great books that I wouldn't have read otherwise. I can't wait to see which of our five outstanding books the judges will choose as the winner!

11 comments:

Michele said...

Man it was ugly ! I spent ages mopping the blood up after Saturday night/Sunday morning...


I jest - of course... I didn't think it got that ugly, to be honest - I've been in far worse verbal fights !

Anonymous said...

What a great post! Thanks for the window into your team's process. I don't know how you managed to be on the nominating committee, and be the organizer. I could barely keep up without reading my team's books.

I was glad to see that Horatio Lyle made your top 10 list - thanks again for taking that one at the last minute.

Happy New Year!

Unknown said...

I really wish we could have had a shortlist of 10 books. I think some of the books that didn't make the final cut really deserved to be finalists, but we could only select five.

Unknown said...

Thanks for sending us Horatio Lyle, Jen. I do think that it was a good fit in our category. Most of us loved it and it came very close to making the shortlist. I hope that I get a chance to read the sequel soon.

Michele said...

I'm expecting the sequel The Obsidian Dagger (can't remember the rest of the title !) any day from Atom !

Sam said...

I don't know how you did it - I think of my bookshelf and having to pick only five books to save from a fire, maybe. Or maybe the five books I'd put in a time-travel machine to send five-hundred years to the future...LOL - I'm glad I wasn't a judge!

Unknown said...

Cool! I'm jealous! You'll have to let me know if it's as good as the first one.

Unknown said...

Or maybe the old one about which five books you'd want if you were stranded on a desert island... And then multiply that by five people with different opinions about which five books to choose!

MotherReader said...

Thanks for the insight. I'm judging on Picture Books, and now I'm starting to get scared. I kinda figured I would just know the right one and that everyone would agree with me. Hmm. This could be tricky.

Unknown said...

Yeah, well, good luck with that! I think in some ways you judges have it harder, because you're starting with the cream of the crop to begin with, and picking only one will be really hard. On the other hand, you only have to read five books...

Michele said...

Sheila - there'll be a review on my Blog once I've read it - and I will read it sooner rather than later once it's in my hands...

Mother Reader - your comment made me laugh out loud - sorry ! But that was *empathic* laughter...