Best Fiction for Young Adults (#BFYA2022) Nominations Round-Up, Spring

Each quarter, the Selected Lists teams compile the titles that have been officially nominated to date. These books have been suggested by the team or through the title suggestion form, read by multiple members of the team, and received approval to be designated an official nomination. At the end of the year, the final list of nominations and each Selected List’s Top Ten will be chosen from these titles.


The Awakening of Malcolm X. By Ilyasah Shabazz and Tiffany D. Jackson. Macmillan/Farrar, Straus & Giroux Books for Young Readers. $17.99 (9780374313296). 

While serving a sentence in Charlestown Prison, Malcolm Little is introduced to the teachings of Islam and begins to correspond with Elijah Mohammad. As he struggles to process his anger and his past, he begins to solidify his beliefs and become the man known as Malcolm X. 

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Best Fiction for Young Adults (#BFYA2022) Featured Review of Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley

Cover Art

Firekeeper’s Daughter by Angeline Boulley
Henry Holt and Co. (BYR) / Macmillan
Publication Date: March 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-1250766564 

In 2004 Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, eighteen-year-old Daunis Fontaine is navigating her complicated identity as the daughter of a white French mother and an Ojibwe father. Though she’s delayed college due to her grandmother’s ill health, Daunis has her family, her best friend, and the cute new boy on her brother’s hockey team to pass the time. But then tragedy strikes in the form of a deadly new drug that rocks her close-knit community. Using her love of science and her understanding of traditional Anishinaabe medicine, Daunis agrees to go undercover for the FBI, but what she finds cuts close to the bone, and Daunis will have to draw on all her strengths to face the hardest truths.

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