Red Rose, from Wikipedia

We’ve done some of the hard work, in voting for and naming our winner. And what a winner — can you imagine getting to call Angie Thomas and say, “we loved your book and are giving you an award”?! I mean, we are not actually giving an award, let’s be clear. We are a mock committee. But what a great year to be reading YA, huh? As was noted, there are so many directions RealCommittee could go; the YMAs are going to be pretty exciting.

But! Our own Pyrite process  is not over yet! As I said earlier, we have more roses to give out — more tough decisions to make. There are more medals (roses? I’m feeling that Bachelorish metaphor this year, even though it’s really mixing things up, and we’ve tended to medal/sci fic jokes in the past) to award. We’re giving out up to four more spots, to be precise.

So! People! We will need to choose four more books before our work is done!

From RealCommittee’s bible, the P&P:

Honor Books All nominated titles are eligible for honor book consideration. Following the selection of a winner, a straw vote is conducted. Any title receiving no votes is removed from consideration. A formal, weighted ballot will follow. Based on the results of this ballot, the committee will decide if it wishes to name honor books and, if so, how many.

We will be streamlining and simplifying the process for our virtual, ad-hoc purposes, so there will be no straw vote.

Instead, we’ll go straight to the comments for our honor votes. As always, they’ll be weighted votes — so be sure to number them from 1-4 (with points allocated at 7/5/3/1). You are allowed four titles, but don’t have to fill each spot. Spots can’t be skipped, however, so if you only vote for three titles, they’ll be weighted 7/5/3.

For the RealPrintz, any officially nominated book is eligible, with the exception of the winner; in our case, that means anything that’s been written up this season other than The Hate U Give (because it won, yay!); plus the remaining books we’ll be posting about between now and ALA.*

*Planned for the week ahead in some cases in very brief form: The Language of Thorns, Dear Martin, Turtles All the Way Down, An Uninterrupted View of the Sky, They Both Die at the End, Far from the Tree, Devil Within, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, and possibly The Librarian of Auschwitz, Too Shattered for Mending, and Starfish, plus anything else we squeeze in.