West Chicago Public Library District: Book Award Spotlight 2021 BookTube Prize

The BookTube Prize brings an award to everyday readers in the bookish community on YouTube and other social media.

Fiction

Hamnet : a novel of the plague
by Maggie O'Farrell

A thrilling departure: a short, piercing, deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare's 11 year old son Hamnet--a name interchangeable with Hamlet in 15th century Britain--and the years leading up to the production of his great play. A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a hypnotic recreation of the story that inspired one of the greatest masterpieces of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down--a magnificent departure from one of our most gifted novelists.

Fiction Gold Medal

Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois

Shuggie Bain : a novel
by Douglas Stuart

A young boy growing up in a rundown 1980s Glasgow public housing facility pursues some semblance of a normal life as his older siblings move on and his mother increasingly succumbs to alcoholism. A first novel.

Fiction Silver Medal

Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois

The prettiest star
by Carter Sickels

A young, gay man who left small-town Appalachia for New York City in 1980 returns home to die six years later after contracting AIDS, in a novel about love, family and redemption from the award-winning author of The Evening Hour.

Fiction Bronze Medal

Available on Overdrive

The death of Vivek Oji
by Akwaeke Emezi

In the wake of a southeastern Nigerian mother's discovery of her son's body on her doorstep, a family struggles to understand the enigmatic nature of a youth shaped by disorienting blackouts, diverse friendships and a cousin's worldly influence.

Fiction Finalist

Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois

The vanishing half
by Brit Bennett

Separated by their embrace of different racial identities, two mixed-race identical twins reevaluate their choices as one raises a black daughter in their southern hometown while the other passes for white with a husband who is unaware of her heritage.

Fiction Finalist

Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois

My dark Vanessa : a novel
by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Asked to help defend an older high-school English teacher with whom she had an affair at age 15, Vanessa struggles to choose between her romantic teen illusions and harrowing adult perceptions. A first novel.

Fiction Finalist

Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois

Nonfiction

Caste : the origins of our discontents
by Isabel Wilkerson

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns identifies the qualifying characteristics of historical caste systems to reveal how a rigid hierarchy of human rankings, enforced by religious views, heritage and stigma, impact everyday American lives.

Nonfiction Gold Medal

Available in print and on audiobook CD, Overdrive, and eReadIllinois

Our bodies, their battlefields : war through the lives of women
by Christina Lamb

Across the world women are victimized by wartime atrocities that are rarely recorded, much less punished. The first ever prosecution for war rape was in 1997 and there have been remarkably few convictions since, as if rape doesn't matter in the reckoning of war, only killing. Some courageous women in countries around the world are taking things in their own hands, hunting down the war criminals themselves.

Nonfiction Silver Medal

Available in print

After the last border : two families and the story of refuge in America
by Jessica Goudeau

Documents the intimate stories of two refugees in present-day Texas, describing how a Christian from Myanmar and a Muslim from Syria narrowly escaped their home countries only to be introduced to the worst and best of the American dream.

Nonfiction Finalist

Available in print and on Overdrive

The dead are arising : the life of Malcolm X
by Les Payne

A revisionary portrait of the iconic civil rights leader draws on hundreds of hours of interviews with surviving family members, intelligence officers and political leaders to offer new insights into Malcolm X’s Depression-era youth, religious conversion and 1965 assassination.

Nonfiction Finalist

Available in print, on Overdrive, and on eReadIllinois

A promised land
by Barack Obama

A deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy.

Nonfiction Finalist

Available in print and on audiobook CD, Overdrive, and eReadIllinois

The address book : what street addresses reveal about identity, race, wealth, and power
by Deirdre Mask

Tells the story of how streets got their names and houses their numbers, and why something as seemingly mundane as an address can save lives or enforce power.

Nonfiction Finalist

Available on Overdrive