2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist

Fiction

The Someday Birds

Charlie, twelve, who has autism and obsessive compulsive disorder, must endure a cross-country trip with his siblings and a strange babysitter to visit their father, who will undergo brain surgery.

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David can eat an entire sixteen-inch pepperoni pizza in four minutes and thirty-six seconds. Not bad. But he knows he can do better. In fact, he'll have to do better. He's going to compete in the Super Pigorino Bowl pizza-eating contest, and he has to win it because he borrowed his mom's credit card and accidentally put two thousand dollars on it. So he really needs that prize money. Like, yesterday.

Can you See Me?

Eleven-year-old Tally is starting sixth grade at Kingswood Academy and she really wants to fit in, which means somehow hiding her autism, hypersensitivity to touch, and true self, and trying to act "normal" like her former best friend, Layla, who is distancing herself from Tally, and her fourteen-year-old sister, Nell, who is always angry with Tally for being different; but as she records her thoughts and anxieties in her coping diary, Tally begins to wonder--what is "normal" anyway?

Do You Know Me?

Tally Olivia Adams is a twelve-year-old (just) autistic girl faced with the prospect of a week-long end-of-the-year class trip, which worries her, because there will be "teams" and "activities" and "competition" all of which terrifies her, especially whenshe finds out she is not bunking with her friend Aleksandra; the other girls on her team are often nasty, especially Skye--and Tally needs all the life-skills she has learned to cope with and expose the bully, and maybe make some friends along the way.

Al Capone Does My Shirts

When Moose’s family moves to Alcatraz so his father can work as a guard and his sister can attend a special school in San Francisco, Moose has to leave his friends and his winning baseball team behind. But it’s worth it, right? If his sister, Natalie, can finally get help, maybe his family will finally be normal.  But as it turns out, life on Alcatraz is much more complicated than even Moose would have predicted.  His dad is so busy, he’s never around.