Early Mock Newbery Titles: It’s time for April Suggestions

A month ago we collected our first batch of suggestions of Newbery-eligible books that just might be considered for the 2025 Medal. That first list of eleven titles can be found here. We’ll keep building this list at the beginning of every month, so now it’s time for April suggestions. Emily posted the guidelines for suggestions in early March, and I’ve also copied that list below for your convenience. Please add your April suggestions in the comments section from now through Saturday, April 6th. We’ll total things up and share an updated list a couple days after that.

• Suggestions are books that might have a chance to contend for the Newbery. They don’t have to be perfect, best-book-of-year type titles, but can include books that could possibly be in that discussion.
• Suggestions must be eligible books. Eligibility is addressed in the Newbery Terms and Criteria. If you’re not sure if a book is eligible, go ahead and include it. We’ll make our best guess at eligibility later.
• For Suggestions, please include title and author. If you want to add a comment, great, but we’ll save critical discussions for the Fall.
• You can suggest up to 5 titles per month. Less is fine. The real Committee typically doesn’t have a Suggestions limit, but we’ll use one to make sure our list doesn’t get too long.
• Suggest only books that you’ve read or listened to. Sometimes you hear that a book is great or you know from the author that it’s something we should all read…but you still can’t suggest it until you’ve read it yourself.
• Suggestions should be books that are already published. If you read an advance copy, please hold off on suggesting until it’s actual release date. That keeps us roughly on the same time line.
• If a book you’ve read is already on the list, go ahead and include it. We’ll post an update every month listing titles and numbers of Suggestions. Early favorites tend to lead the suggestions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll win it all.
• If you missed a suggestion deadline, it’s ok. Just go ahead and post next month!

As always, we’re looking forward to learning what everyone’s been reading!

Filed under: Suggestions