The ALMA nominations are out

Found out yesterday that the ALMA nominations are out now. For those of you who may not know but the ALMA prize is a yearly award given to either authors, illustrators, oral storytellers and reading promoters.
The awards is to indicate that reading by children and young adults is extremely important.

With 226 candidates from 60 countries. 63 are nominated for the first time. 

For more information about the ALMA prize check out their official homepage.

I am really hyped for this prize as it brings out all my best childhood memories. The authors I read when I was a child or young adult. The authors today I may end up loving and enjoying just as much.

Tournament of Losers by megan Derr

Tournament of Losers by Megan Derr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

3 stars of 5 rating

All Rath wants is a quiet, peaceful life. Unfortunately, his father brings him too much trouble—and too many debts to pay—for that to ever be possible. When the local crime lord drags Rath out of bed and tells him he has three days to pay his father's latest debt, Rath doesn't know what to do. There's no way to come up with so much money in so little time.
Then a friend poses an idea just ridiculous enough to work: enter the Tournament of Losers, where every seventy-five years, peasants compete for the chance to marry into the noble and royal houses. All competitors are given a stipend to live on for the duration of the tournament—funds enough to cover his father's debt.

Rath is a pretty typical anti-hero-but-really-a-hero-in-his-heart. Rath is an ok character and we get a few developing moments with Rath, but overall I wouldn’t call this a story with much focus on characters but rather on driving the story forward.
Raths’s challenges in this story during the Tournament are quite similar what you may have heard in fairy tales. The peasant competes with other competitors (usually his brothers) and somehow alaways manage to take the prize. All in all the story isn’t very deep, whether in intrigue or with its character. That however doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy this read.

While the characters are many and we get to see situations with both Rath and Tress and their interaction with each other. I would have even loved this story more if the other characters in this story would get more time with our main character Rath. Some of them like Toph or Kelni or Warf. We just get an small insight to these people and their motive for being in tournament. And while I don’t want their whole life story I wouldn’t have minded to more dialogue or interaction between these people. As it stands we just have our main character interacting with a whole lot of other characters but very few involved in the story as a whole.

And while it seems like I didn’t like this book, I DID enjoy it. It is a nice short story with an likable character, but I do feel (like with all stories) it has its flaws and while I wish it could have been better it was still an enjoyment read.
I wouldn’t recommend this to any hardcore fantasy nerd, those who enjoy a lot of world building and a gritty look of the world. A lighthearted fairy tale love story it is something I will recommend for those of us which enjoy a short but easy read.


View all my reviews

The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is something, it was later that I found out this was also gonna be made into a movie. While this story is another post-apocalypse with the human world on the brink of extinction we have our main character Melanie. Melanie who waits every morning to be collected from her cell, the guards are always afraid of her even though she’s just a little girl. She tries to joke with the guards that she won’t bite but they never laugh.
To Melanie this is the world she has always known and the part she loves most is school because she gets to learn everything about the outside world. And she tells her favorite teacher all the things she’ll do when she grows up, but she doesn’t understand why it always makes Miss Justineau look so sad.

The girl with all the gifts is not you usually run of the mill zombie story, this is first and foremost a look through the eyes of the “zombies”. Melanie and the other children in custody give us as a reader a look into the frightening situation they are in, we can’t just view them as monsters. Like I said The girl with all the gifts” isn’t the usually story with humans against the monsters, but a character driven philosophical book about what does it mean when we talk about being human.
This is a story for us who like deep insight into the idea of being human, what makes a human and what will happen to humans.

All in all this was a book I truly enjoyed but it was hard to say what exactly drove me to enjoy the book so much. But what I would say stuck with me most is that this story is mostly character driven. All the characters we are introduced via their point of view are developed well and good. They are flawed humans and not-humans and we will hate and understand them as the story continues.

This is a book for us who love character driven stories with a deep philosophical story and that will leave you reeling long after you finished reading the book.

View all my reviews