YA Dude book awards

I founded YAdudebooks in March 2021 as a “COVID project,” to keep isolation at bay and expand on my passion for encouraging boys to read.

Aimed at young-adult (YA) and middle-grade teachers, librarians, parents and teen readers, it now offers well over 100 book reviews and several dozen author interviews, including some of the most prominent YA authors in the world. (Thank you, all authors who’ve agreed to be part of our inaugural year.)

But of all the markers of success we’ve enjoyed (including authors and librarians thanking us for this specialized site), what gives me the greatest pride is the contribution of our 14 book reviewers, many of them published authors, teachers and librarians. (And that’s not even counting our former book trailers reviewer, Irfan Rafi of Pakistan, and our dedicated techie, Darian Tichler of Vancouver, Canada).

So, when I asked each of our reviewers to select their favorite book(s) of all the books they’d reviewed the past year (one fiction, one nonfiction if they liked), I loved the enthusiasm of their replies. And I am unspeakably proud of all they’ve contributed, for the love of literacy, the past year.