You're listening to all the backlist, a weekly show about books that are not new.

I'm your host for the week Tricia Brown and this is episode number 461.5.

I don't know about all of you especially those of you who are living in spring right now

but I'm definitely dealing with a little bit of spring fever maybe overdue spring

fever since it's feeling more like summer in some parts of the northern

hemisphere. My spring fever also though may be partly because talking with all

of you on this podcast is one of the last things that I'm doing before I go on vacation.

It's very much a spring vacation in that it is going to rain, which is my fault.

We're going to British Columbia in early May, but honestly a rainy vacation is just more reading time while on vacation.

I've talked before about how I love a book that I can read in a day, whether on vacation or not,

although usually you don't have an entire day to read if you're not on vacation.

And I actually have a couple of books like that to recommend to you today. Specifically, we are heading into the

sci-fi fantasy realm with one sci-fi book and one fantasy. Both are award winners and we will talk more about them,

much more about them in just a minute.

Okay, as mentioned, we are talking one sci-fi and one fantasy book today.

Both are Newberry winners, which tells you that they probably

tells you that they are also middle grade books as Newberry books usually are. But they

won the award 37 years apart. One is from the 1980s and the other just came out a few years ago.

So let's start on the fantasy side with the Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley.

Published in 1984, this one is way backlist, and has actually been a favorite of mine for decades.

I don't always think of myself as a particularly good sort of fantasy reader, but then I reread the hero and the crown, and I remember that I absolutely am a fantasy reader, particularly when it kind of looks like this.

So this one is set in DeMar,

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