2007  AML Award: Young Adult Literature Honorable Mention

Presented to:
Brandon Sanderson

For:
Alcatraz Vs. the Evil Librarians

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Alcatraz Vs. the Evil Librarians begins by deliberately undermining the reader’s faith in narrator Alcatraz Smedry—a technique not often used in juvenile fiction, and therefore startlingly effective. This is only the first of the ways in which the novel challenges our assumptions about what we know and how we know it. The idea that everything we know about the world is wrong is played for laughs, but underlying the humor is the very serious observation that we can’t know truth if our methods for discerning it are faulty. Inherited abilities that seem like curses—a talent for falling down, or a talent for breaking things—turn out to be useful gifts under exactly the right circumstances, suggesting that blessings are often a matter of perception. Though in style and concept this novel fits squarely into the popular subgenre of snarky, self-aware juvenile fiction a la Lemony Snicket, its highly subversive nature makes it stand out from the crowd.

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