Adapted from photo by James St. John, CC BY 2.0

Yes, you read that right: It’s Pyrite time!

In case this is your first rodeo: The Pyrite is Someday’s Mock Printz. Instead of gold, we award fool’s gold — because mock/fool, right? (Puns may be the lowest form of humor to some, but I never met one I didn’t like.) We have no affiliation with the actual Printz, and no insider trading knowledge, but on the best years, our Pyrite slate overlaps with the RealCommittee slate, and then we get to pat ourselves on the backs and feel wicked smart.

This is a strictly voting situation, rather than a conversation — after all, we’ve been conversing about these books all along. However, sometimes the voting pressure inspires some deep insights — we encourage you to go back to any post from the season and hop back into the dialogue there, either by leaving a comment or by linking to things you’ve written elsewhere.

Pyrite voting will happen in the comments of this post. Votes are weighted (see process notes, below). Also, we STRONGLY recommend that you vote blind — don’t look at anyone else’s votes until you’ve entered yours. The RealCommittee vote is secret, because an open vote invites manipulation of the weighted numbers; our best approximation is just not peeking, since we aren’t locked in a room with scraps of paper for voting.

We’ll be doing our best to adhere to the RealPrintz voting procedures, as follows:

• For the RealPrintz, any officially nominated book is eligible; in our case, that means anything that’s been written up this season, plus the heap of books we’ll be posting about between now and ALA (which includes the handful of guest posts).*
• This vote is ONLY for the winner; the honor book vote will follow in a separate vote, and all books other than the winner will be eligible for honor voting, regardless of whether they received votes in this round.
• Votes are weighted, 5 points for first place, 3 for second, 1 for first. Be sure to number your votes! You don’t have to vote for three books but you can’t skip positions – if you vote for two books, they get 5 and 3 points, not 5 and 1 or 3 and 1. You can be strategic here because of the weighting (which I’ve never totally understood how to manipulate, because math, so just voting what you believe is fine too).
• The RealPrintz P&P say the winner must receive 5 first place votes AND at least five points more than any other title; we’ve usually interpreted that as 50%+1 of our voter pool for first place and the same five point or higher gap.
• If there’s a tie or the winner doesn’t meet the above criteria, anything that receives 0 votes in this round is out and we repeat the vote with the smaller pool.

Voting will stay open until midday NEXT Wednesday, 1/24, with the goal of posting our Pyrite winner (and opening the honor vote) on Thursday.

So start thinking and then come back and vote!

*Planned for this week and next, in some cases in very brief form: All the Wind in the World, The Marrow Thieves, The Language of Thorns, Dear Martin, Turtles All the Way Down, Spinning, An Uninterrupted View of the Sky, The 57 Bus, Undefeated, Eyes on the World, #notyourprincess, Release, They Both Die at the End, Far from the Tree, Devil Within, The Inexplicable Logic of My Life, and hopefully The Librarian of Auschwitz, Too Shattered for Mending, Starfish, Little and Lion, Who Killed Christopher Goodman, The Names They Gave Us, and Wild Beauty, plus anything else we pick up between now and ALA.

The Pyrite is a mock Printz, done in good fun and with an eye towards shadowing, in some small way, the kind of reading and discussion the RealCommittee participates in. We are not affiliated with the actual Printz, although we think it rocks, which is why we do this. The RealPrintz is formally YALSA‘s Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature and is sponsored annually by Booklist.