An Ode to BoB
I don’t know about all of you, but I start to get the blahs after the YMAs are announced at ALA Midwinter. The excited buzz of the awards season pretty much vanishes into thin air, and February with all its dreariness soon descends upon Cincinnati. Thankfully, some enterprising folks – our friends Monica, Roxanne and Jonathan – created Battles of the Kids’ Books (BoB for short) a few years back as a way to cure us of our collective February funk. Okay, so they may have had other reasons, but no matter the motivations of our fearsome threesome, the bottom line is this: BoB rules.
This year, our heroic trio (in case you’re wondering, Monica+Roxanne=the Battle Commander, and Jonathan is the Commentator) has really come through in the clutch with some great new twists. First and foremost, by drawing out the announcements of the judges ever… so… slowly, they have raised the anticipation level higher than ever before. It’s a nice touch, kind of like the book version of Selection Sunday (the day that the brackets for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament go public) with the added bonus that we get to celebrate a different author every day.
On the subject of judges, I was looking through some old BoB decisions the other day just to read those gorgeous summaries. As I read I was struck by the consistently amazing quality of the BoB judges. I was going to attempt a statistical rundown… …
