Winner’s Circle

The ALA announced its Youth Media Award winners on Jan. 22, boosting sales for several of the medalists. One of them, The Eyes and the Impossible by Dave Eggers, illustrated by Shawn Harris, lands on our children’s fiction list for the first time, at #20. Our starred review said of the “unkempt and free” canine narrator, “Eggers crafts a marvelous, fully fleshed protagonist in Johannes, who is at once an ebullient braggart, a faithful and intrepid operative, and a drolly humorous reporter whose compassionate narration delivers a rousing tale of community, joyful self-reliance, and the pleasures of running very, very fast.”

Cooking the Books

Jamie Oliver has the #1 hardcover nonfiction title with 5 Ingredients Mediterranean, heralding a new wave of cookbooks highlighting the flavors of the region. (Look for more in our next cookbooks feature, March 4.) At #3 on the list, TikTokker Kat Cashmore, aka Kat Can Cook (2.2 million followers), debuts with Big Bites, a collection of “comforting, mostly gluten-free recipes,” according to her publisher. And at #9, actor Robert Downey Jr. and journalist Thomas Kostigen include two dozen recipes in Cool Food, a manual for making climate-conscious dietary choices.

TikTok Boom

Gothikana by BookTok favorite RuNyx is the #6 book in the country. She self-published the gothic romance in 2021, and #gothikana amassed millions of views on TikTok before being picked up by Tor’s new Bramble romance imprint. In what our starred review called a “deliciously edgy and erotic new adult outing,” the author’s “unflinching examination of mental health, suicide, alienation, and sexual power dynamics is especially commendable.”

NEW & NOTABLE

ONE IN A MILLENNIAL
Kate Kennedy
#11 Hardcover Nonfiction
“Kennedy debuts with a perceptive personal meditation on the late 1990s and early 2000s pop culture that shaped her childhood,” per our review. She “provides memoir by way of cultural commentary, cleverly using her hybrid approach to highlight the ways in which trends and media popular during one’s formative years profoundly influence one’s identity.”

LEGACY
Uché Blackstock
#15 Hardcover Nonfiction
Our starred review said this “passionate debut memoir” by physician and healthcare consultant Blackstock, whose mother was a pioneering Black doctor in Brooklyn, “is enhanced by her concrete diagnoses of the healthcare industry’s shortcomings and the firm, actionable steps she provides to fix them.”