Hugo Award voting is open and will continue through the November 19, 2021 (The voting period is extra long this year due to COVID delaying the convention till December). For those of you new to the Science Fiction/Fantasy genre, the Hugo Award is one of the most prominent awards for works in the genre, with the Award being given based upon voting by those who have paid for at least a Supporting Membership in this year's WorldCon. As I did the last four years, I'm going to be posting reviews/my-picks for the award in the various categories I feel qualified in, but feel free to chime in with your own thoughts in the comments.
This is the fifth part of this series. You can find all the parts of this series, going over each category of the Hugo Awards HERE.
This time around we're going back to the main fiction awards with the Lodestar Award, which is technically not a Hugo Award, but is awarded with them anyway, so it counts for this series. The Lodestar Award is for the best Young Adult SciFi and Fantasy novels of the previous year - the Hugo equivalent of the Norton Award (which is the Nebula version of the same award). It's a newish award, added only a few years ago, but one well needed as young adult books have made up several of my favorite novels over the past few years. Indeed, two of the nominees for this award were also on my ballot for Best Novel*, so you can tell I really have high opinions of the works in this category.
*My only complaint about this category is that I wonder if its existence is costing these books votes in Best Novel, which they rightfully deserve*.
So yeah, the nominees are six really great books, all well worth your time although I do think they fit into several distinct tiers. The six books also all come from different publishing imprints, interestingly, which is not something you usually see. So after the jump, I'll post my rankings of the six works, as well as links to my greater reviews.
Tier Four:
6. A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik (Del Rey) (My Review Here)
A Deadly Education has a real shot at winning this, because Novik is a very popular author, and this is a very crowd pleasing book. And it's a good book - an enjoyable tale of a magic school that tries to kill all its students, told through the perspective of person of mass destruction El (short for Galadriel), whose magical gifts really don't fit her want not to turn into an evil mage.
There's a lot of fun here, even with the bit of info dumping (a quirk that is fine in this book, even if I hated it in the sequel), but this book isn't really anything more than fun....and is nominated among five other books that are not only good and enjoyable, but all have something to say at the same time. And it's not a problem for A Deadly Education to not really have a super strong message, even as it does deal with issues of class, cliques, and struggles of working together as part of its plot. But it does put it in a lower tier than the rest of this ballot.
Tier Three:
5. Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas (Swoon Reads) (My Review Here)
Cemetery Boys was the only one of these nominees I hadn't read prior to the nominations, although I'd heard plenty of good things about it. It's a YA Story set in a Latinx-community of Brujos and Brujas (Brujx) who derive powers from Lady Death, and more particularly the story of a trans boy Yadriel who just wants to be recognized for who he is in a community whose traditions are stratified by gender. But when he accidentally resurrects the bad boy from his school, who hangs out with those cast out on the streets for being queer, immigrants, or just not fitting in, Yadriel finds more than he imagined.
Cemetery Boys is a really strong story with a really strong main relationships (both romantic and platonic), as it tells a very relevant story of a queer boy just trying to get accepted for who he is, gendered traditions be damned. That said, the final act of the story, dealing with a mystery subplot, doesn't quite work, so yeah this does wind up 5th on my ballot and in the third tier - but that's also because of how good the rest of the ballot is.
4. Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko (Amulet/Hot Keys) (My Review Here)
Raybearer is a real threat to win this award, being another super heavily promoted YA novel - and a novel that was also nominated for the Norton Award. And Raybearer was well worth the hype, featuring an African-inspired fantasy world, dealing with issues like Empire, assimilation, class, gender, love, and free will all at once in a full package that generally works well. It's a story of a young girl raised for the purpose of killing the Empire's heir...an heir she must fall in love with (not romantically) in order to kill, and her struggle to try to make her own destiny instead, all the while working to make the world better. (Raybearer's sequel, Redemptor, is also very good)
I don't really have any issues with Raybearer - its main flaws are that certain characters are underdeveloped and thus have little impact, but there are enough developed characters that it never really feels like much of a loss. Again, like Cemetery Boys, it's only two tiers below my top book because of how tremendous the other half of this ballot is, and if it did manage to win the award, I wouldn't really be THAT upset. Still I would be a little surprised.
Tier Two:
3. A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking by T Kingfisher (Argyll Productions) (My Review Here)
A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking won the Norton Award and is my guess as to what wins this award - it's a novel that seemed perfectly timed for the pandemic (a sourdough starter is the protagonist's familiar!) and comes from a Hugo favorite in T Kingfisher - aka author Ursula Vernon. In a way it's like last year's Nebula winner, Song for a New Day (by Sarah Pinsker), in being a perfect match of author and subject matter for the time to catch voters' eyes.
Here's the thing though - if this novel wins, it will absolutely deserve it. This is a young adult/middle-grade novel featuring a story that is both incredibly fun - baking magic! gingerbread cookie familiars/soldiers! classically fun dialogue and character work as always from Kingfisher! - and incredibly poignant, telling a story about the costs of heroism, and how society forces the young and innocent to bear those costs out of our own poor supposedly "adult" judgment. The mix of strong themes, strong characters, and fun setup and world makes this a novel that can be read and enjoyed by audiences of basically all ages, and I love it tremendously. It's a credit to how good my top novel on this list is that I have a book in a tier clearly above this one - and this book is in a virtual tie with my #2 choice that shares this tier with it.
2. Elatsoe by Darcie Little Badger (Levine Querido) (My Review Here)
Elatsoe is one of the two nominees on this list that I actually nominated not just for this award, but for Best Novel as well. It's the debut novel of Lipan Apache writer Darcie Little Badger, featuring a Lipan Apache main character (and family) in an alternate urban fantasy of the United States, such that fantasy elements are pretty common...although the power dynamics of this world have not shifted. And in this world, Elatsoe tells the story of the titular character, a high school aged Lipan Apache girl from Texas with the power to bring back the dead as ghosts, along with her ghost dog, her best friend, and her supportive family, as they investigate the man her cousin's ghost told her was responsible for his death.
It's a book with some incredible characters - the protagonist is great, her family is loyal and supportive in ways that are really heartwarming, her best friend is always willing to help as a true companion - and strong plotting. The themes are similarly really strong, dealing with power dynamics between minorities (especially Native people) and powerful white men who use their power to treat outsiders as lesser, with support from entire masses of people, and know they can get away with it - and pulls together these themes, characters, and plotting in a truly great way, to result in a really wonderful read.
I suggest you go read my review for more specifics, because I'm kind of butchering my description, but well, when you have a book with this great characters, scenes, and themes, it's almost always going to be at the top of my ballot - and this is truly one of the books of 2020. The fact that this isn't my top book in this category is again nothing to say against this book, but instead something to do with......
Tier One:
1. Legendborn by Tracy Deonn (Margaret K McElderry/Simon & Schuster's Children's Publishing) (My Review Here)
Legendborn was one of my two favorite books of 2020 and easily was my favorite Young Adult book of 2020. It's a story that combines a lot of ideas and themes into a book filled with strong plotting and characters from beginning to end. It's the story of Bree, a Black teen, grieving the loss of her mom, entering a strange college environment (at a pre-college program at UNC), and discovering a near-entirely white secret society wielding the powers of King Arthur and his round table, who might have been responsible for her mother's death. As Bree attempts to investigate, she discovers an alternate magic passed down from Black families, painful histories in hers and others' pasts, and truths long forgotten.
I won't go more into depth into the plot summary here (check out my review for that), but this is a story that deals with racism, colonialism/imperialism, lasting impacts of historical wrongs (slavery), of grief for a loved one (Post Complex Bereavement Disorder) and more, all the while merging these themes to both life on a college campus for a black teenage girl and to the King Arthur Mythos, which it uses in some really great ways. The characters are incredibly strong and hell, there's even some very believable romantic turns to go with it all as well.
Legendborn's only flaw came with it trying to setup a cliffhanger for the sequel, but everything up to that point, which is the very end, is pretty much brilliant. Legendborn did win the Ignyte Award, so I suppose it has a shot of winning this award...and it absolutely should.
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