2022 Bluestem Award Nominees

Twelve-year-old Ellie, who has cerebral palsy, finds her life transformed when she moves with her mother to small-town Oklahoma to help care for her grandfather, who has Alzheimer's Disease.

On the last night of summer, Emma and her Maine game warden father rescue a small domestic rabbit stuck in a fence; the very next day Emma starts fifth grade after years of being home schooled, excited and apprehensive about making new friends, but she is paired with Jack, a hyperactive boy, who does not seem to fit in with anyone--except that they share a love of animals, which draws them together, because of the rabbit.

Told that they will have to move out of their Harlem brownstone just after Christmas, the five Vanderbeeker children, ages four to twelve, decide to change their reclusive landlord's mind.

""You're so exotic!!" "You look so unusual." "But what are you really?" Eleven-year-old Isabella - whose father is black and mother is white - is used to these kinds of comments, but it doesn't mean she likes them. And now that her parents are divorced (and getting along WORSE than ever), Isabella feels like a push-me-pull-me toy. Being split between Mom and Dad is more than switching houses, switching nicknames, switching backpacks: It's switching...

Prairie Lotus is a powerful, touching, multilayered book about a girl determined to fit in and realize her dreams: getting an education, becoming a dressmaker in her father's shop, and making at least one friend. Acclaimed, award-winning author Linda Sue Park has placed a young half-Asian girl, Hanna, in a small town in America's heartland, in 1880. Hanna's adjustment to her new surroundings, which primarily means negotiating the townspeople's almost...

"A gorgeously written, hopeful middle grade novel in verse about a young girl who must leave Syria to move to the United States, perfect for fans of Jason Reynolds and Aisha Saeed. Jude never thought she'd be leaving her beloved older brother and father behind, all the way across the ocean in Syria. But when things in her hometown start becoming volatile, Jude and her mother are sent to live in Cincinnati with relatives. At first, everything in America...