Annoucing the 2008 UBIE Award!

Here's an announcement from our Kids Department:

Not to be left behind in this busy awards season, University Book Store is proud to announce the 2008 recipients of our very own Ubie Awards, which we give to our favorite picture book and children's/young adult novel of the year!

This year’s picture book winner is How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird by Jacques Prévert and illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein. Prévert’s well-known poem is brought to life in Gerstein’s glorious illustrations, which positively burst with creative energy. Both poem and pictures work together perfectly to capture and celebrate the joy of artistic expression. This is a book that sings!

This year’s winner in the novel category, The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, is another book in which the text and illustrations work together harmoniously. (It justly garnered this year’s Caldecott Medal.) Hugo Cabret is a unique, masterful, and utterly absorbing blend of words and pictures that tells the suspenseful story of a young orphan living behind the walls of a Paris train station who gets caught up in a mystery involving the early days of filmmaking.


Because it is so difficult to choose just ONE picture book and ONE novel from the many wonderful books produced each year, we’ve decided to share the other choices on our Ubie shortlist with you, too. Here are the other books we fell in love with last year!

Picture Books:

Cowboy and Octopus by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith
The Incredible Book Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers
The Surprise by Sylvia van Ommen

Novels:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie (National Book Award Winner for Young People’s Literature—yay, Sherman!)
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale