Literature for Children and Young Adults: Batchelder Award

(2024 Batchelder Award)
In Houses with a Story, more than 30 imagined houses and the people who make them home offer unexpected worlds to wander through and explore. Who is the mischievous bridge-tower keeper? What does the witch grow in her garden? How does the postal worker tame his delivery dragons?

(2023 Batchelder Award)
In this award-winning memoir translated from Italian to English, a Jewish girl grows up during a difficult time of racial discrimination and war, and discovers light in unexpected places. This classic, powerful story from Lia Levi is adapted for young readers, with beautiful black-and-white illustrations, a family photo album, and a powerful author's note to readers.

(2022 Batchelder Award)
Temple Alley Summer is a fantastical and mysterious adventure filled with the living dead, a magical pearl, and a suspiciously nosy black cat named Kiriko featuring beautiful illustrations from Miho Satake.

(2021 Batchelder Award)
Every night, at nine o'clock, wherever he is, Mr. Bianchi, an accountant who often has to travel for work, calls his daughter and tells her a bedtime story. But since it's still the 20th century world of pay phones, each story has to be told in the time that a single coin will buy.

(2020 Batchelder Award)
New in the neighborhood and hounded by fort-wrecking bullies, Rusty is looking glum. And to top it all off, his grandfather has just died. Rusty is stuck sorting out his emotions while the adults are busy sorting out the "practicalities" with the hospital. But one dark night, after watching a superhero movie on TV, Rusty gets an idea...Dressed in brown pants, a black-and-brown striped shirt, a brown mask and cape, and his mother's brown belt, the superhero BROWN is born! Guided by his grandfather's ghost, two cans of paint, and a little help from his friends, Brown can do anything! Just as long as nobody's parents find out.

(2019 Batchelder Award)
Our story starts with a boy named Paul, who lives in a cozy treehouse in a big city with his family. And then something unexpected happens--Paul befriends a wise, friendly fox on a walk home from the bakery. The fox gives Paul a space to think about what makes him happy and what friendship means--all in the pages of a bright and quirky storybook. Join Paul and the fox while helping young readers decide what makes them happy.

(2018 Batchelder Award)
When her best friend, the sailor Henry Koskela, is falsely accused of murder, a gorilla named Sally Jones visits the run-down docks of Lisbon, embarks on a dizzying journey across the seven seas, and calls on the Maharaja of Bhapur's magnificent court--all in an attempt to clear Henry's name.

(2017 Batchelder Award)
Aware their grandmother is gravely ill, four siblings learn to realize the value of loss, life, and the importance of being able to say goodbye.

(2016 Batchelder Award)
"Eddie is five-and-a-half and thinks she is the only one in her family without a special talent. So when she hears her sister say 'birthday--Mommy--fluffy--little--squishy,' she worries that her sister will give Mom the better present. From that moment on, she is determined to find a fluffy little squishy of her own"--Book jacket.

(2015 Batchelder Award)
"Mikis is thrilled when his grandfather buys a new donkey, but soon begins to worry that he is overworking the animal"-- Provided by publisher.

(2014 Batchelder Award)
When Linus Muller takes over making deliveries for his family's Manhattan grocery store in 1943, including bringing a crate of oranges every other week to an artist from Europe, the two become friends as they discuss war, the future, freedom, and imagination.

(Batchelder Award 2013)
Before the start of World War II, ten-year-old Ziska Mangold, who has Jewish ancestors but has been raised as a Protestant, is taken out of Nazi Germany on one of the Kindertransport trains, to live in London with a Jewish family, where she learns about Judaism and endures the hardships of war while attempting to keep in touch with her parents, who are trying to survive in Holland.

(Batchelder Award 2012)
An orphaned Syrian brown bear cub is adopted by Polish soldiers during World War II and serves for five years as their mischievous mascot in Iran and Italy. Based on a true story.

(Batchelder Award 2011)
In the early 1990s, a boy with a mysterious past and the woman who cares for him endure a five-year journey across the war-torn Caucasus and Europe, weathering hardships and welcoming unforgettable encounters with other refugees searching for a better life.

(Batchelder Award 2010)
In 1939 Sweden, two Jewish sisters wait for their parents to join them in fleeing the Nazis in Austria, but while eight-year-old Nellie settles in quickly, twelve-year-old Stephie feels stranded at the end of the world, with a foster mother who is as cold and unforgiving as the island on which they live.

(Batchelder Award 2009)
The wandering warrior Balsa is hired to protect Prince Chagum from both a mysterious monster and the prince's father, the Mikado.

(Batchelder Award 2008)
With a determined plan to reunite his mother and father, the 10-year-old boy named Wataru knowingly enters a fantasy realm inhabited by a goddess who has the power to change destiny. With the help of the Lizard Boy, the Cat Girl, and the Fire-breathing Dragon, Wataru faces a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles on this once-in-a-lifetime adventure. One way or another, the young hero must reach the Tower of Destiny and bring his mother and father back together again.

(Batchelder Award 2007)
Loosely based on Charles Perrault's "Tom Thumb," seven brothers in modern-day France flee their poor parents' farm, led by the youngest who, although mute and unusually small, is exceptionally wise.

(Batchelder Award 2006)
A sixteen-year-old farmhand is tricked into fighting in the Napoleonic Wars by the farmer for whom he works, who secretly substitutes him for the farmer's own son.

(Batchelder Award 2005)
At the end of the nineteenth century in Libya, eleven-year-old Malika simultaneously enjoys and feels constricted by the narrow world of women, but an injured stranger enters her home and disrupts the traditional order of things.

(Batchelder Award 2004)
Based on the true story of a nine-year-old boy who escapes the Warsaw Ghetto and must survive throughout the war in the Nazi-occupied Polish countryside.

(Batchelder Award 2003)
Escaping the aunt who wants to adopt only one of them, two orphaned brothers run away from Hamburg to Venice, finding shelter with a gang of street children and their leader, the thirteen-year-old "Thief Lord," while also eluding the detective hired to return them to Germany.

(Batchelder Award 2002)
In 1902, ten-year-old Johann and his family, Germans who had been living in Austria-Hungary, board a ship to immigrate to Youngstown, Ohio, where they make a new life as Americans.

(Batchelder Award 2001)
Samir, a Palestinian boy, is sent for surgery to an Israeli hospital where he has two otherworldly experiences, making friends with an Israeli boy, Yonatan, and traveling with him to Mars where Samir finds peace over his younger brother's death in the war.

(Batchelder Award 2000)
Son of a Kikuyu mother and a Masai herdsman father, Morengáru the hunter lives on the edges of tribal society until an actual banishment forces him to make a life for himself among a troop of baboons.

(Batchelder Award 1999)
After struggling to survive in Nazi-occupied Lithuania, a young Jewish girl and her mother endure much suffering in Kaiserwald, Stutthof, and Tauentzien concentration camps and on an eleven-day death march before being liberated by the Russian army.

(Batchelder Award 1998)
Because he knows that the man accused of robbery is innocent, an eleven-year-old orphan struggles to find the courage to reveal the truth to his uncle in their small German village in 1867.

(Batchelder Award 1997)
Curious about death, three sixth-grade boys decide to spy on an old man waiting for him to die, but they end up becoming his friends.

(Batchelder Award 1996)
In 1947, seventeen-year-old Yulek, the only member of his immediate family to survive the German concentration camps, joins a group of young Jews preparing to live on a kibbutz in Israel, unaware that his aunt living in London is looking for him.

(Batchelder Award 1995)
In 1942, a group of young men begin a series of increasingly dangerous protests against the German invaders of their Danish homeland.

(Batchelder Award 1992)
Living on the outskirts of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, fourteen-year-old Marek and his grandparents shelter a Jewish man in the days before the Jewish uprising.

(Batchelder Award 1991)
A teenager who wants to be a journalist in a suppressed society describes to his diary his daily life in his hometown of Damascus, Syria.

(Batchelder Award 1990)
Buster's magic tricks get him in and out of trouble

(Batchelder Award 1989)
A young boy, searching vainly for his mother in post-war Vienna, is befriended by a man on crutches and together they find hope for the future.

(Batchelder Award 1988)
Spending most of a year with relatives on a farm in southern Sweden while his parents are busy building a new house in town, a young boy finds inner strengths and unexpected sources of entertainment.

(Batchelder Award 1987)
Jan, a fourteen-year-old Polish boy whose town is invaded in World War I, joins a German battalion and experiences the horrors of battle.

(Batchelder Award 1986)
During World War II, a young German girl's curiosity leads her to discover something far more terrible than the day-to-day hardships and privations that she and her neighbors have experienced.

(Batchelder Award 1985)
During World War II a Jewish boy is left on his own for months in a ruined house in the Warsaw Ghetto, where he must learn all the tricks of survival under constantly life-threatening conditions.

(Batchelder Award 1984)
Ronia, who lives with her father and his band of robbers in a castle in the woods, causes trouble when she befriends the son of a rival robber chieftain.

(Batchelder Award 1983)
A retelling of a mother's account of what happened to her family during the Flash that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

(Batchelder Award 1982)
The children on a Stockholm street engage in a modern-day jousting tournament in which the rich are knights and the poor are the horses who bear them.

(Batchelder Award 1981)
In Holland during the last months of World War II a 12-year-old girl and her father find shelter with a farm family who courageously give sanctuary to all in need of it.

(Batchelder Award 1980)
The time spent with her "revolutionary" tutor opens 10-year-old Sasha's eyes to more of life in turn-of-the-century Russia than her somewhat sheltered existence had previously allowed her to experience.

(Batchelder Award 1979)
Follows the adventures of two rabbits after they escape from the rabbit factory.

(Batchelder Award 1977)
An Ethiopian boy finds his life endangered when he discovers that a disguised blacksmith, not a leopard, is responsible for a great many missing cattle in the area.

(Batchelder Award 1976)
Once a cat and mouse shared a house and had a pot of butter to last them through the winter. Then the cat tried to get all the food for herself.

(Batchelder Award 1975)
A noted Soviet archeologist has written this story about a tribe living four thousand years ago in the Neolithic Siberia.

(Batchelder award 1974)
A ten-year-old boy and his family endure the Fascist occupation of Athens during World War II.

(Batchelder Award 1973)
For a fifteen-year-old boy from the slums of Bogotá, Colombia, being taken on as a truck driver's helper is an unbelievably good break.

(Batchelder Award 1972)
A young German boy recounts the fate of his best friend, a Jew, during the Nazi regime. The story of a Jewish boy and his family caught in the horror of the rise of the Nazi party and the Holocaust.

(Batchelder Award 1971)
Describes archaeological finds in Mesopotamia and what they have revealed of the ancient civilizations of that area.

(Batchelder Award 1970)
The Fascist dictatorship of Greece in 1936 changes the lives and divides the loyalties of a ten-year-old girl and her family.

(Batchelder Award 1969)
When Mikkel's older handicapped brother accidentally hurts someone and is threatened by that boy's friends, Mikkel resolves the situation in an unusual and interesting way.

(Batchelder Award 1968)
Maxie Pichelsteiner is slightly less than two inches tall. His parents have died, he is the ward of Professor Hokus von Pokus, the world-famous conjurer, and he wants more than anything to be a circus performer.