BLOOD GUARD a finalist for the Maine Student Book Award!

I don’t want to boast, but I had a very good spring and early summer. (Okay, maybe I want to boast a tiny bit.) Chief among the reasons for my happiness were notifications that The Blood Guard had been nominated for several state reading awards—including for the 2015-16 Maine Student Book Award!

It may be a cliché to say that it is an honor just to be nominated, but in terms of state awards, that is truly the case: Each year, a short list of books is nominated in each state, and over the following school year, students read the books and vote for their favorites. That means that copies of The Blood Guard will be stocked in school libraries across the entire state and will get passed around from student to student. And the books on these lists are often the latest and greatest—among those on the Maine list are Kwame Alexander’s Newbery-winning The Crossover, Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala, Jonathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener, and too many more to call out.

So, yeah: I am very honored that The Blood Guard has been nominated in the great state of Maine. Fingers crossed that it wins!