Team Eight: "The Electric Kingdom" Shows "Show Me a Sign" The Door

I have to admit I am writing this post as a dissenting voice in a large majority victory for "The Electric Kingdom". However, while I placed the book in the "not for me" category, I did feel as I was reading it that it could really resonate with the right audience. That audience seems to have been my colleagues, and hopefully will also include students, as it does already have a pretty ardent fan base online. Since I am writing impartially, I am going to include primarily the impressions of my colleagues we collected below. Overall, we felt that neither was an absolute home run, and both had a lot to recommend. 

 "I read The Electric Kingdom first and initially thought I wasn't going to be voting for it because it was too slow to get into. I thought (and still think) that it would be hard to get kids engaged in because of the slow start. However, by the end, I was invested in the characters and actually really liked how the Deliverer storyline played out." 

 "I love a great Dystopian book and can get my head around a little time travelling twist! I actually thought the book was very masterful in circling back through each character and understanding the role of the Deliverer. I liked the analogy that was used in the book about nesting dolls, as that is how I saw the story unfolding - there was the big outline of the story, and every chapter brought in a narrower view of what was happening."

 "At first, I thought Electric Kingdom was slow going, as it took me a while to invest in the characters. But then I got quite attached to the characters - especially (spoiler redacted). While I don’t think every young adult reader will get into it to stick with it, I do know some more patient readers who will probably like this dystopian world and the idea of time loops." 

 With respect to "Show Me a Sign", we did appreciate the own voices story with a deaf protagonist, and clear narrative compared to "The Electric Kingdom" however, we thought that some of the plotting was a little weak, and the impactful topics it addresses (colonialism, racism, stigma of disability) were not as meaningfully engaged with as we might have hoped. 

 TLDR: "The Electric Kingdom" advances! We hope that it finds an audience, overcoming pandemic fatigue and a slow start, to allow readers to find a juicy middle and (mostly) satisfying conclusion!

Team Eight: Ben Severson; with input from Laura Johnson, Kerri Boyle, Maureen Roszell, Carla Gust, Chelsey McPherson, April Aitken, Shelley Gosse, Noelle Goudreau, Lisa Landry-Jones, and Krystal Eliuk