What are the qualities you find essential in a book that makes the GGNFT list?
Robin: It must be accomplished—the art, the writing, the style, and the publishing itself (i.e., the binding, the editing, etc.) must all be solid. We have actually had titles lose points, so to speak, because they were poorly bound or full of typos. It must have teen appeal—even if teens themselves have not adopted it yet, we try to get teen feedback, and we use our own knowledge of what teens enjoy to judge how much teen appeal a title has. There have been many great titles over the years that didn’t make the list because the committee felt their teen appeal was not strong. This is no way diminishes their greatness, just their appeal to the target audience. As I said before, being great is not easy to judge. We are not judging only literary quality, as the Printz Award Committee does. We are judging everything mixed together: quality, teen appeal, popularity, art, writing, presentation. We are also judging for a wide range of ages (there’s a lot of differences between your average 13
