News & Features

The winner of the award, which honors the best YA nonfiction title, will be announced during the Youth Media Awards ceremony on January 22.

Fiction and nonfiction about candy and the history of chocolate complement the film with Timothée Chalamet as the young Willy Wonka. 

Take a look at the SLJ book reviews editors' favorite book covers from the 2023 Best Books list.

PEN America's report, Spineless Shelves: Two Years of Book Banning, shows the spread of copycat book bans, as well as how several titles from an author were targeted after one of their works was banned.

Review committees decided to keep challenged books on the shelves in districts in Maryland, Tennessee, and North Dakota; two new grassroots organizations to fight book banning were started by Texas parents and grandparents across the country, respectively. 

While librarians, of late, have drawn some attention by mainstream press, the profession has always been central in SLJ's coverage. Of stories driven by school and public librarians, their perspectives and work, four drew the most views in 2023.  

We love our creators of children's and YA books and so do readers. Here are the five most popular stories centering writers whose stories inspired us over the past year. 

SLJ's most viewed coverage of book banning and censorship, which remained front and center in 2023.

These two titles, both young reader adaptations of adult nonfiction books, put readers in the shoes (or, more accurately, the feathers and families) of their animal counterparts.