Hidden Gems

Recently, one of the regulars at my #SundayMorningBookBlether chat suggested I ran some end of year awards. I loved the idea and said yes (although I didn't realise quite what an undertaking it would be at the time). The categories are linked to subjects that have been discussed in the book chat this year and one of my favourite categories was 'Hidden Gems' as I am always keen to champion fantastic books that don't always get the publicity they deserve.

So I asked for nominations for the category and was overwhelmed with the amount of responses and the diverse range of fabulous books that are not getting the profile they deserve. Here is the twitter feed if you want to take a look:

Or if you want to see the individual books I have organised them on a Wakelet as well:

The difficulty I have with all the nominations is that there are so many of them (over 50) and they are all deserving. I didn't want to discount any books because although I consider one or two of them popular on Twitter, the fantastic book community on Twitter is not a reflection of the general teaching world and what I may consider well known may in fact have very little traction in the real world.

I have divided the books into 2 categories: Middle Grade (including books suitable for approx. aged 7-11) and Young Adult (including books suitable for 11+ so this list has some upper KS2 books in it) to make the lists more manageable there are some books on the YA list that could easily fit in the MG list but are also appropriate for YA (otherwise i would have ended up with one very long list and one very short one as the majority of books nominated were suitable for Middle Grade). Apologies for any names misspelt or any books that are in the wrong category-some were borderline and the split was mainly to make the lists more manageable.

So here are the lists. I have tried to link in book reviews to as many as possible so that anyone interested in the books can learn a bit more.

Below the lists are the Google Forms for you to vote. This is such a difficult category to vote for as surely the more popular books will get more votes? (Which is sort of defeating the point of the category), so to be honest I'm more interest in helping these fabulous books get a higher profile so please share this post widely to help get the names out there. Also, perhaps you could buy one or two of the books you don't already have and then rave about them on social media-help create the book buzz these books deserve.

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