2010 Alex Award Winners

The Alex Awards are given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18.

SOULLESS: AN ALEXIA TARABOTTI NOVEL
by Gail Carriger
Alexia Tarabotti is laboring under a great many social tribulations. First, she has no soul. Second, she's a spinster whose father is both Italian and dead. Third, she was rudely attacked by a vampire, breaking all standards of social etiquette. Where to go from there? From bad to worse apparently, for Alexia accidentally kills the vampire – and then the appalling Lord Maccon (loud, messy, gorgeous and werewolf) is sent by Queen Victoria to investigate.

EVERYTHING MATTERS!
by Ron Currie, Jr.
While still in his mother's womb, Junior Thibodeau is encoded with a prophecy: in thirty-six years a comet will obliterate life on Earth.

THE GOOD SOLDIERS
by David Finkel
In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it "the surge." "Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences," he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers. About to head to a vicious area of Baghdad, they decided the difference would be them. Fifteen months later, the soldiers returned home forever changed.

THE MAGICIANS
by Lev Grossman
As a senior in high school Quentin Coldwater became preoccupied with a series of fantasy novels he read as a child, set in a magical land called Fillory. After graduating from college and being admitted into a highly exclusive, secret society of magic in upstate New York, he makes a stunning discovery: Fillory is real. But the land of Quentin's fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he could have imagined for his childhood dream becomes a nightmare with a shocking truth at its heart.

THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND: CREATING CURRENTS OF ELECTRICITY AND HOPE
by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer
An enterprising teenager in Malawi builds a windmill from scraps he finds around his village and brings electricity, and a future, to his family.

MY ABANDONMENT
by Peter Rock
Inspired by a true story and told through the startlingly sincere voice of his young protagonist, My Abandonment offers a riveting and unsettling account of a girl and her father who live off the grid.

THE BRIDE’S FAREWELL
by Meg Rosoff
A young woman in 1850s rural England runs away from home on horseback the day she's to marry her childhood sweetheart.

STITCHES: A MEMOIR
by David Small
In this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen — with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist — will resonate as the ultimate survival statement.

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT: A MEMOIR
by Diana Welch and Liz Welch with Amanda Welch and Dan Welch
The poignant, harrowing story of four siblings who, despite their wrenching loss and subsequent separation, retained the resilience and humor that both their mother and father endowed them with – growing up as lost souls, taking disastrous turns along the way, but eventually coming out right side up and being together again.

TUNNELING TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH: STORIES
by Kevin Wilson
Southern gothic at its best, laced with humor and pathos, these wonderfully inventive stories explore the relationship between loss and death and the many ways in which people try to cope with both.

MORE ADULT BOOKS WITH TEEN APPEAL

The American Library Association's Alex Awards page