Caudill Award 2025

Avery Grambs has a plan for a better future: Survive high school, win a scholarship, and get out. But her fortunes change in an instant when billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves Avery virtually his entire fortune. The catch? Avery has no idea why - or even who Tobias Hawthorne is. To receive her inheritance, Avery must move into sprawling, secret passage-filled Hawthorne House, where every room bears the old man's touch - and his love of puzzles,...

Told in verse, Ellie lives by Fat Girl Rules to avoid being bullied, but with the support of her dad, her therapist and her neighbor Catalina, can Ellie set aside these rules and just be herself?

It's June's first day at Huey House, and as if losing her home weren't enough, she also can't bring her cherished viola inside. Before the accident last year, her dad saved tip money for a year to buy her viola, and she's not about to give it up now. Tyrell has been at Huey House for three years and gives June a glimpse of the good things about living there: friendship, hot meals, and a classical musician next door. Can he and June work together to...

"An inspirational nonfiction novel-in-verse about Zhanna Arshanskaya, a young Ukrainian Jewish girl using the alias Anna, whose phenomenal piano-playing skills saved her life and the life of her sister, Frina, during the Holocaust-from award-winning author Susan Hood, with Zhanna's son, Greg Dawson"-- Provided by publisher.

"When twelve-year-old Olive, who suffers from brittle bone disease and has been homeschooled all her life, finally attends school in person she soon discovers fitting in is not that easy, but if she can find the magical wish-granting hummingbird that supposedly lives nearby, and prove herself worthy, maybe her deepest wish will be granted."

Ever since Ms. Murphy told us about the witch trials that happened centuries ago right here in Juniper, I can't stop thinking about them. Those people weren't magic. They were like me. Different like me. I'm autistic. I see things that others do not. I hear sounds that they can ignore. And sometimes I feel things all at once. I think about the witches, with no one to speak for them. Not everyone in our small town understands. But if I keep trying,...

THE TRUE STORY OF HOW ONE BOY DID HIS PART TO END THE SYRIAN REGIME
A 2024 YALSA Top Ten Great Graphic Novel for Teens • An NPR Best Book of 2023 • A 2023 NCSS Notable Social Studies Book
 
"Inspiring and exciting, powerful and very poignant" —Anderson Cooper
 
★ "[A] gripping narrative, told with great immediacy" —Horn...

New York Times-bestselling author Claribel A. Ortega and star debut artist Rose Bousamra's Frizzy is about Marlene, a young Dominican girl whose greatest enemy is the hair salon! Through her struggles and triumphs, this heartwarming graphic novel shows the radical power of accepting yourself as you are, frizzy curls and all.

Marlene loves three things: books, her cool Tía Ruby and hanging out with her best friend Camila.

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Three months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States. Families, teachers, farm workers—all were ordered to leave behind their homes, their businesses, and everything they
owned. They were forced to live in incarceration camps, under hostile conditions, their futures uncertain. How did they...