Those Shiny Gold and Silver Stickers

At the synagogue preschool where I serve as librarian, we have a special springtime tradition. Each year, we give all graduating Pre-K children the gift of a hardcover Jewish book. The idea is to jump-start or add to their own personal Jewish home libraries with high-quality titles. We also hope the gift will encourage them to continue their Jewish involvement beyond preschool.

This year we'll be giving the children their own copies of The Bedtime Sh'ma by Sarah Gershman, the 2008 Sydney Taylor Book Award winner. We don't always choose the Sydney Taylor winner as our gift book - some years the winner isn't the right reading level for Pre-K kids. For instance, last year's Sydney Taylor winner in the Younger Readers Category was Hanukkah at Valley Forge by Stephen Krensky, too long and complex for Pre-K. Instead, we gave our kids Much, Much Better by Chaim Kosofsky, which had been a 2007 AJL Notable Book.

I ordered plenty of copies of The Bedtime Sh'ma, and when I opened the boxes I was so very, very pleased to see that the Sydney Taylor Book Award gold seals were already on the covers! Thanks, EKS Publishing! This may not sound like a big deal, but you would be surprised at how few publishers add book award seals to their books. It's a task that must be done by hand, and publishers sometimes have to pay a service to add the seals for them. I've even heard of publishers creating policies that restrict their use of seals to the best-known ALA awards (Caldecott, Newbery, etc.), just to simplify their lives and keep expenses down!


Of course, the publishing house is not the only place where books can receive the seals that are their due. The Association of Jewish Libraries sells Sydney Taylor Book Award seals so that librarians, booksellers, or other individuals can add them to the books at any time.


AJL also offers digital images of the gold and silver Sydney Taylor medals, so that publishers can simply add an image of the seal to the cover of a winner that is being reprinted. For example, here's the paperback edition of Real Time by Pnina Moed Kass, the 2005 winner in the Older Readers Category, with the seal imprinted right on it. This is an easy and cheap way to give winning books the credit they deserve!

If you need images of the gold or silver seals, here they are! Publishers, please use them on your books or your publicity materials. Anyone is welcome to use them on websites or blogs, booklists, posters, flyers... anything that helps spread the word about these terrific books! These are JPG's, but there are TIFF's available too at the AJL website.


Thanks again to EKS for taking the initiative to put medals onto their books! I can't wait to give them to the kids!

STBA Winner Lauded in New Zealand

Creating Readers, a blog run by staff at the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, exists to help create motivated and engaged young readers. They cover children's and YA literature (especially from New Zealand), literacy research, and ways to get, and keep, kids reading.

They recently reviewed Real Time by Pnina Moed Kass, the 2004 Sydney Taylor Book Award gold medalist in the Older Readers Category. Here's what reviewer Janice Rodrigues said:

You probably hear about the complexities of the Israel-Palestinian situation almost every week on the news. Real Time by Pnina Moed Kass is a frighteningly real minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day depiction of how quickly lives can change by acts of terrorism.

The story is set in contemporary Israel. The book is strung together through narrations by Thomas, a German boy on a mission to find out more about his grandfather, Vera, a Jewish girl trying to escape her distressing past, Baruch, a Holocaust survivor working on a kibbutz, Sameh, a Palestinian boy on an assignment and his friend Omar, Dr Ibrahim Stitti, a Palestinian doctor working in a hospital in Israel and Clive Burleigh, a Middle East news correspondent.

The format of the book is brilliant as it sets the pace for the events that unfold. The author Pnina Moed Kass says in her interview that writing this book seemed to be her only act of release from feelings of overwhelming sadness, bitterness and incomprehension.

This book was the winner of the 2004 Sydney Taylor Award. Read this book and get a feel for the effects of terrorism from different points of view.