William Allen White Nominees Grades 3-5

History: Established in 1952 Ruth Gagliardo Directed by Emporia State University Purpose: Honors William Allen White, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist from Kansas Encourages Kansas children to read and enjoy high quality literature Distinction: First book award program in the country decided by children Background

Must be published within the past year Authors must be from the United States, Canada or Mexico Text must be fiction, non-fiction or poetry Selection committee chooses books for their originality, vitality, accuracy and sincerity

Who: 3 rd – 8 th grade Kansas students What: Read 4 of the nominated books Where: Check them out from the CCE Library, public library or read from your electronic device When: Read all year long and be ready to vote by April 15 th Why: To select the winners! Participation

Prairie Evers isn’t finding school all it’s cracked up to be. Having been homeschooled, she's learned the most about life and behavior from traipsing through the woods with her grandmother. Now learning is confined to a classroom, and the behavior of some kids isn’t nice. The only good thing is meeting Ivy, her first true friend. Ivy is wonderful, but her home is not. Prairie’s going to need every bit of her optimism and determination to hatch a plan to help.

When Malcolm the rat arrives as the pet at McKenna School, he revels in the attention. He also meets the Midnight Academy, a secret society of classroom pets that keeps the nutter’s (kids) safe. There’s just one problem…rats have a terrible reputation! So when the Academy’s iguana leader is kidnapped, Malcolm must prove his innocence—and that even rats can be good guys.

Eleven-year-old Frankie Joe Huckaby, forced to live with the father he never knew, a stepmother, and four stepbrothers in Illinois, starts a delivery service to finance his escape back to his mother in Texas, not realizing he is making a better life for himself than he ever had with her.

Tucker McBean enters a contest to win a scholarship to college to enable his mother to quit her job so she can go to school. He has always loved to draw comics so when there is a contest to create a sidekick to a comic book hero, he is a natural to enter. He creates Beanboy who achieves power through the bean.

No kid knows more about zoo life than Whit. That's because he sleeps, eats and even attends home-school at the Meadowbrook Zoo. It's one of the perks of having a mother who's the zoo director and a father who's the head elephant keeper. Now that he's eleven, Whit feels trapped by the rules and routine of zoo life. With so many exotic animals, it's easy to get overlooked.

Summer days drift by slowly in Meadville, South Carolina--that is, until Sherman the one-legged pigeon flies into town and causes a ruckus. First Stella, who's been begging for a dog, spots him on top of a garage roof and decides she wants him for a pet. Then there's Ethel and Amos, an old couple who sees the pigeon in their barn keeping company with a little brown dog that barks all night.

Stella loves living with Great-aunt Louise in her big old house near the water on Cape Cod for many reasons, but mostly because Louise likes routine as much as she does, something Stella appreciates since her mom is, well, kind of unreliable. So while Mom "finds herself," Stella fantasizes that someday she'll come back to the Cape and settle down. The only obstacle to her plan? Angel, the foster kid Louise has taken in. Angel couldn't be less like her name—she's tough and prickly, and the girls hardly speak to each other. But when tragedy unexpectedly strikes, Stella and Angel are forced to rely on each other to survive, and they learn that they are stronger together than they could have imagined.

Oona and her brother, Fred, love their cat Zook (short for Zucchini), but Zook is sick. As they conspire to break him out of the vet’s office, convinced he can only get better at home with them, Oona tells Fred the story of Zook’s previous lives, ranging in style from fairy tale to grand epic to slice of life. Each of Zook’s lives has echoes in Oona’s own family life, which is going through a transition she’s not yet ready to face. Her father died two years ago, and her mother has started a relationship with a man named Dylan— whom Oona secretly calls “the villain.” The truth about Dylan, and about Zook’s medical condition, drives the drama in this loving family story.