I’m happy to see that The Keeper of the Mist is a finalist for the Cybils Award this year!
We had 1163 books nominated, across all categories. Out of those books, 99.7% of the books were read by at least one panelist. And 98.3% were read by two panelists. Thinking of all the person-hours that entails boggles the mind.
It does, doesn’t it? Thanks to all the judges who devoted so much time to reading these books and to the hard task of sorting them out.
Mist up against tough competition. Here are the other titles in its category:
Illuminae by Amie Kaufman
Labyrinth Lost (Brooklyn Brujas) by Zoraida Cordova
Still Life with Tornado by A.S. King
The Door at the Crossroads by Zetta Elliott
This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity) by Victoria Schwab
When the Moon was Ours: A Novel by Anna-Marie McLemore
Now, Illuminae is the one that most catches my eye on that list. It’s not an ordinary novel; it’s epistolary or something like that. Amazon says: “Told through a fascinating dossier of hacked documents—including emails, maps, files, IMs, medical reports, interviews, and more—Illuminae is the first book in a heart-stopping trilogy about lives interrupted, the price of truth, and the courage of everyday heroes.” I understand one should get the paper copy, not the ebook, because there are lots of creative uses of page space and fonts and stuff. I’ve got a copy and I’m looking forward to reading it.
I have read Still Life With Tornado and that’s a good book but an interesting outlier on this list, because it’s hard to decide if it’s SF that reads like contemporary or contemporary with a magical realism element or what. I suspect most readers will not be thinking of it as SF, but I could be wrong. I did really like it.
The others I haven’t read. If you have, what did you think of them?
Please Feel Free to Share:
I have read all of them.
:)
I will say that of all the years I’ve done Cybils judging, this was one of the most interesting discussions as discussions! And we all had our favorites, but I think the list we ended up with was balanced and thoughtful.
I’m looking forward to taking a good look at everything on the list. At the moment, I’m dying to try Illuminae, but I MUST finish this one last revision for my space opera FIRST.