Armchair BEA, Day 2

On this, the second day of Armchair BEA, our question is: What are the best books you've read in 2011?


Here's my list!

First up: Diamond Willow by Helen Frost. A wonderful book of diamond-shaped poems, with a deeper message buried in the heart of each (a few words are bolded to spell out that message). You can read my review here.

Heartbreaking yet inspirational, this lovely middle grade book won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature for 2010, and for good reason. My review is here.

The Dairy Queen Trilogy are some of the best contemporary YA books I've ever read. Er, listened to. I love D.J. Schwenk and her farm and her sports-crazy family and her relationship angst! Every part of this series is fantastic. Oh, I listened to the audiobooks, by the way, and Natalie Moore is the most perfect narrator for this series. You can read my reviews of the audiobooks here, here and here.

Rita Williams-Garcia's One Crazy Summer deals with a part of American history that is usually glossed over in the middle grade literature I usually read, and that is the Black Panther movement of the 1960s. Told by 11-year-old Delphine, this is the story of how she and her two younger sisters spend the summer with their reluctant mother in Oakland, California. Check out my review here.

Those are the best books I've read this year, no doubt about it.