2009 Cybils Winners

The winners of the 2009 Cybils were announced today, and in the category of Middle-Grade Fiction published last year our choice was:

The London Eye Mystery
written by Siobhan Dowd
David Fickling Books

Brother and sister, Ted and Kat, take their cousin Salim to see the London Eye, the city's gigantic Ferris wheel. While Ted and Kat watch, Salim gets into one of the glass pods, but thirty minutes later he doesn't get off. So the siblings set out to find their cousin.

Complicating the situation, Ted's brain "runs on a different operating system" from other people's, which makes him a lot better at facts and figures than he is at reading people. Narrated in Ted's voice, this is a page-turner that brings London to life and takes readers inside a powerfully rational mind.

The London Eye Mystery shows off kids' natural ingenuity and proves that difference can be a strength, as Ted and Kat work to solve the irresistible riddle of their cousin's disappearance.

One of the challenges of this evaluation was that the five nominated books are so diverse: in reading level, in genre, in narrative approaches, in settings, in protagonists. Each book had unique strengths. As I told the other judges at one point, it wasn't like comparing apples and oranges. It was more like comparing apples, grapefruit, tractor tires, pocket lint, and a shade of orange.

Visit the Cybils website for the complete list of winners.