The 2012 Indies Choice Book Award winners, reflecting the spirit of independent bookstores nationwide, are:

Adult Fiction Book of the Year

• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Adult Nonfiction Book of the Year

• Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton

Adult Debut Book of the Year

• The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht

Young Adult Book of the Year

• Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys

The winners of the E.B. White Read-Aloud Awards, which reflect the playful, well-paced language, the engaging themes, and the universal appeal to a wide range of ages embodied by E.B. White’s collection of beloved books, are:

E.B. White Read-Aloud Award – Middle Reader
(Balloting ended in a tie between the works of sister and brother Maile Meloy and Colin Meloy.)

• The Apothecary by Maile Meloy, Ian Schoenherr (Illus.)
• Wildwood by Colin Meloy, Carson Ellis (Illus.)

E.B. White Read-Aloud Award – Picture Book

• I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen

Every year the American Library Association gives the Alex Award to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18. The awards have been given out yearly since 1998 and became an official ALA award in 2002.

While these adult titles have special appeal to teens, they also have great appeal to adults, such as myself who are young at heart, love Young Adult literature but are looking for more challenging reads or even those with a great sense of wonder in the world. These ten include, by far, some of the best books I read last year!

This years Alex Awards went to:

• Big Girl Small by Rachel DeWoskin- Sixteen-year-old Judy Lohden finds her three feet nine inches tall, incredibly talented self in the middle of a scandal, with the national media on her trail and the students at Darcy Academy, a local performing arts high school, involved in the mayhem.

• In Zanesville by Jo Ann Beard- Along with her best friend, the fourteen-year-old narrator navigates a 1970s American girlhood, including challenges from popular girls and the first hints of womanhood.

• The Lover’s Dictionary by David Levithan- A modern love story told through a series of dictionary-style entries is a sequence of intimate windows into the large and small events that shape the course of a romantic relationship.

• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern- Waging a fierce competition for which they have trained since childhood, circus magicians Celia and Marco unexpectedly fall in love with each other and share a fantastical romance that manifests in fateful ways.

• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline- Immersing himself in a mid-twenty-first-century technological virtual utopia to escape an ugly real world of famine, poverty, and disease, Wade Watts joins an increasingly violent effort to solve a series of puzzles by the virtual world’s creator.

• Robopocalypse: A Novel by Daniel H. Wilson- A tale set in the near future finds the world thrown into chaos by rebelling artificial intelligences under the leadership of a murderous technology called Archos that kills its creator and takes over the global network, triggering an unprecedented united front among all human cultures.

• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward- Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.

• The Scrapbook of Frankie Pratt: A Novel in Pictures by Caroline Preston- Using an array of vintage memorabilia, a novel told in the form of a scrapbook follows Frankie Pratt, who goes to Vassar in 1920 with dreams of becoming a writer, which becomes a stepping stone to an international adventure.

• The Talk-Funny Girl by Roland Merullo

• The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens by Brooke Hauser

The Story Prize finalists:

• The Angel Esmeralda by Don DeLillo
• We Others by Steven Millhauser
• Binocular Vision by Edith Pearlman
  

The Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and the Philip K. Dick Trust have named seven finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award, which recognizes distinguished science fiction published in paperback in the U.S.:

• A Soldier’s Duty by Jean Johnson
• After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh
• Deadline by Mira Grant
• The Company Man by Robert Jackson Bennett
• The Other by Matthew Hughes
• The Postmortal by Drew Magary
• The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy by Simon Morden

The Agatha Awards are given to mysteries that honor the “traditional mystery.” That is to say, books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie as well as others.

BEST NOVEL
THE BRUTAL TELLING – Louise Penny*

BEST FIRST NOVEL
THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE – Alan Bradley [Delacorte Press]

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
STARVATION LAKE - Bryan Gruley

BEST SHORT STORY
“On the House” – Hank Phillippi Ryan, QUARRY: Crime Stories by New England Writers

BEST CRITICAL NONFICTION WORK
DAME AGATHA’S SHORTS – Elena Santangelo