Top Pick

By far, the favorite book (and Newbery prediction) of many NPL children's staff, including Ms. Elaine, Ms. Tori, and Ms. Phyllis, is Brown Girl Dreaming, by Jacqueline Woodson. Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir that chronicles the incidents and emotions Woodson experienced as an African-American girl growing up in the 1960s and 1970s.

Miss Shain's Picks

Miss Shain loved the Junction of Sunshine and Lucky. This inspirational story is about Auggie, who creates trash into artwork and overcomes the prejudices of people in her town.

Miss Lindsay's Picks

Miss Lindsay loved Rain Reign, and wholeheartedly recommends Revolution. Rain Reign is about Rose Howard. Rose is obsessed with homonyms. She's thrilled that her own name is a Homonym, and she purposely gave her dog Rain a name with two homonyms (Reign, Rein), which, according to Rose's rules of homonyms, is very special. Revolution is about a girl named Sunny, who is dealing with family life and people from the north who are coming to town to help people register to vote

Miss Jane's Picks

Miss Jane's favorites include My Brother's Shadow and The Secrets of Eastcliff-by-the-Sea. And here we'd probably have a few lines about what these two books are about. But I'm lazy and won't look up a description. Not lazy enough to copy and paste the same sentence over and over, but too lazy to go to a new tab and type a search in the library catalog. Which, really, wouldn't have been very hard at all.

View all past Newbery winners

What are your favorites?

Phew! There were a lot of great chapter books published in 2014. What did we miss? What did we get wrong? What did you love this year?