2003 Book Sense Book of the Year Finalists -- Rediscovery and Paperback

The Book Sense Book of the Year Awards will be announced at the Celebration of Bookselling, on Friday, May 30, during this year's BookExpo America at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California.

All current ABA member bookstores can vote for the Book Sense Book of the Year. The remaining four finalists in each category will be awarded the title of Book Sense Honor Book. All nominated authors and illustrators will be invited to attend the award ceremonies and the Book Sense 76 Lunch, also to be held on Friday, May 30, at BEA.

Ballots are being mailed to all ABA bookstore members on Friday, March 28, and must be returned by April 30. The ballot will also be available at www.BookWeb.org on the 28th. The tabulation of votes will be handled by KPMG, and the results will be kept secret until the May 30 event.

For the complete list of 2003 Book Sense Book of the year Finalists, click here.

REDISCOVERY

AUNTIE MAME , Patrick Dennis (Broadway)
The public has long clamored over this 1955 book about a 10-year-old orphaned boy sent to live with his glamorous, outlandish aunt. Upon release, over two million copies were promptly sold and Auntie Mame spent over two years on the New York Times Bestseller List. Many critics have commented on the fine craft evident in this outrageously humorous tale. The book inspired two long-running plays, including a musical (Mame), and two films.

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation:
"This 1955 classic is a scream! Just reissued, this delightfully shocking novel kept me smiling with each and every madcap adventure. I love Mame and her zest for life!" --Katie Abbott, Scott's Bookstore, Mount Vernon, Washington

THE CHILDREN OF GREEN KNOWE, (The Green Knowe Chronicles), L.M. Boston, illustrated by Peter Boston (Odyssey/Harcourt)
The Children of Green Knowe, first in the series of The Green Knowe Chronicles, is set in a haunted manor deep in an overgrown garden in the English countryside. In 1935, author Lucy Boston bought Hemingford Grey, a venerable though decrepit manor house near Cambridge, England, restored it, and used it as the evocative setting for the books. Boston was 62 and had lived in the old house for 20 years before writing The Children of Green Knowe. Her son Peter, an architect, drew the black and white illustrations based on his intimate knowledge of his childhood home. His illustrations have been retained and Brett Helquist (illustrator of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events) has contributed the contemporary cover art.

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation:
"A series of five reissued classics from the early '50s, great for fans of Lemony Snicket, Eva Ibbotson, and J.K. Rowling. These are great fantasies featuring a cavernous old mansion, some magic, and great characters to get to know." --Jennifer Brenninger, Doylestown Bookshop, Doylestown, Pennsylvania

THE DANGEROUS LIVES OF ALTAR BOYS, Chris Fuhrman (University of Georgia Press)
A gang of irreverent eighth-grade, Catholic school boys create endless problems for the authorities in this southern tale set in the early 1970s. Behind all the pranks and hilarity, a dark shadow looms, particularly for Francis Doyle, a ringleader of the group. The school principal's discovery of the boys' blasphemous and obscene magnum opus, a comic book titled Sodom vs. Gomorrah '74, triggers a series of audacious and irrevocable acts. The book is seasoned with details of the boys' school day routines and the initiatory rites of male adolescence.

Fuhrman was born in 1960 in Savannah, Georgia and attended graduate school at Columbia University. He died of cancer in 1991, while working on the final revision of The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, his first and only novel. Fuhrman's book was the basis for an award-winning film of the same name in 2002.

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation:
"A touching and surprising coming-of-age story, originally published in 1994. It's too bad it was published after the author's death; who knows what we've lost?" --Linda Cohen, Little Professor Book Co., Temecula, California

PAPER MOON , Joe David Brown (Four Walls Eight Windows)
Originally published as Addie Pray, Paper Moon was Joe David Brown's last and most acclaimed book. Alabama born, Brown, former police beat reporter, foreign correspondent, and war hero, created the indelible character of Addie, the book's 11-year-old narrator and gifted con artist. One year after the 1971 publication of Paper Moon, director Peter Bogdanovich made the hugely successful, Academy Award-winning film based on the book. An editor at Four Walls Eight Windows discovered a copy of Addie Pray on a bookstore dollar rack and decided the house should republish the 30-year-old classic. Brown, who died in 1976, has a great-grand child named for the inimitable Addie Pray.

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation:
"This classic is a must-read for anyone who loved The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird." --Tonya Barrow Boggan, Mountain Lore Bookstore, Hendersonville, North Carolina

THE STORIES OF BREECE D'J PANCAKE, Breece D'J Pancake (Back Bay)
Pancake's stories reflect the world of his native West Virginia, where he was born in 1952. Other than some short fiction, published primarily in The Atlantic, these stories comprise most of his life's work. The book was published posthumously in 1983, four years after Pancake's suicide. Although he grew up middle class in a West Virginia family, when enrolled in the University of Virginia masters program in 1976, he affected the past of a poor mountain boy from Appalachia. His invented persona would speak of eating road-kill and fresh game as a result of the abject poverty of his youth. Pancake's unusual middle name stems from a magazine's typographical error, which he liked and then adopted. Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates described Pancake's stories as "tense, elegiac, remorseless in their insistence on the past's domain over the present."

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation:
"Leaving behind only one collection of short stories, Pancake was dead at the age of 26, a suicide. In his wake, this collection has stood the test of time and continues to dazzle first-time readers and critics alike. Since I read this book over 20 years ago, it has never left my memory. Now it's your turn to find out why." --Robert Segedy, McIntyre's Fine Books, Pittsboro, North Carolina

PAPERBACK

BALZAC AND THE LITTLE CHINESE SEAMSTRESS, Dai Sijie, translated by Ina Rilke (Anchor)
Born in China in 1954, Dai Sijie is a filmmaker who was "re-educated" between 1971 and 1974, during the Cultural Revolution. Since 1984, he has lived and worked in France. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, his first novel, was an immediate bestseller and award winner when it appeared in France in 2000. Rights to the novel have been sold in nineteen countries, and it is soon to be made into a film.

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation:
"A delightful story about love and anarchy in Maoist China. Two boys exiled to the countryside during the height of Mao's cultural revolution find a hidden stash of Western classics in translation, and these seductive retellings of Balzac become their forbidden treasures. Along with the cover's stunning design, this little gem is a literary stocking stuffer." --William Horan, Book Passage, Corte Madera, California

BEL CANTO , Ann Patchett (Perennial)
Ann Patchett based her complex novel on a real event, a hostage crisis precipitated by the 1996 takeover of the Japanese embassy in Lima, Peru, by the revolutionary Tupac Amaru. Patchett then created several dozen characters, each of whom undergoes a radical transformation during the course of the book. Bel Canto is narrated by a completely omniscient voice capable of switching ages, cultures, genders, and languages. Patchett is the author of three previous critically acclaimed novels, The Patron Saint of Liars, Taft, and The Magician's Assistant.

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation:
"One of my favorite books in 2001. I'm looking forward to recommending this to all of our book groups in paperback. A wonderful story about a hostage situation in a foreign embassy, with fascinating characters you grow to know and love, and not always just the 'good guys.'" --Liz Morgan, Village Bookstore, Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin

THE MIRACLE LIFE OF EDGAR MINT, Brady Udall (Vintage)
"If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head. As formative events go, nothing else comes close." So begins Brady Udall's picaresque debut novel following the trials and triumphs of Edgar Presley Mint. Udall, who was reared in a large Mormon family in Arizona, has published a book of short stories, Letting Loose the Hounds, and has had numerous short stories published in GQ, the Paris Review, Playboy, and Story.

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation:
"Something of a miracle in its own right, this Dickensian tale of childhood woe and redemption is as painfully funny as One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and as narrative-driven as early John Irving. Brady Udall may be the best-kept literary secret, but not for long."--Betsy Burton, The King's English Bookshop, Salt Lake City, Utah

THE No. 1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY, Alexander McCall Smith (Anchor)
Edinburgh University professor of medical law Alexander McCall Smith was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. He is the author of over fifty books on a wide range of subjects, including specialist titles such as The Criminal Law of Botswana, children's books such as The Perfect Hamburger, and a collection of stories called Portuguese Irregular Verbs. This, the first in the series, received two Booker Judges' Special Recommendations and was voted one of the International Books of the Year and the Millennium by the Times Literary Supplement.

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation:
"Hailed by the TLS as one of 1998's International Books of the Year, this book is now available here. And it is delightful, unusual, and captivating. Precious Ramotswe has opened Botswana's first and only detective agency staffed by women. Smith traverses this landscape with an air of simplicity, euphony, and harmony, never patronizing Precious and never boring the reader. I loved every word." --Barbara Peters, The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, AZ

YEAR OF WONDERS, Geraldine Brooks (Penguin)
Geraldine Brooks, an Australian war correspondent, debuts as a fiction writer in this historical novel based on the true story of Eyam, the "Plague Village," in the rugged mountain spine of England. The story is told through the eyes of 18-year-old Anna Frith, the vicar's maid, as she confronts the loss of her family, the disintegration of her community, and the attraction of a dangerous and forbidden love.

From the Book Sense 76 recommendation
"Brooks takes us to a village in 1666 Derbyshire during the Plague. She shows us every facet of human nature, as the villagers have voluntarily decided to isolate themselves for the duration of the sickness. An unforgettable reading experience; the best book I have read so far this year."--Louise Blake, Deerleap Books, Bristol, Vermont