The Cybils are an award given out by bloggers on children’s and YA literature. While they are not exclusively for SF/F, their winners in the genre deserve notice, especially as speculative YA literature keeps growing its audience beyond kids thanks to Harry Potter, His Dark Materials and Narnia. This year’s awards went to The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex for elementary and middle-grade readers and Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale for young adults. The Hale book has the somewhat unique distinction of being a fairytale retelling and fantasy novel not set in a fictional England or France but rather in Central Asia, giving it a nice change of pace and tone.
