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Gateway Readers Award

med-gateway-readers.pngThe purpose of the Gateway Readers Award is to promote literature, literacy and reading in Missouri high schools, and to recognize authors and illustrators of books that are favorites of Missouri students in these grades. Each year, Missouri students in grades 9-12 vote for their favorite book from a list of nominated titles. The Gateway Readers Award is awarded to the author of this book by the Missouri Association of School Librarians.

Gateway Award Winners

2024

You'd Be Home Now
You'd Be Home Now
by Kathleen Glasgow

After a fatal car accident that reveals Emory's brother Joey's opioid addiction, Emory struggles to help him on his road to recovery and make herself heard in a town that insists on not listening.

2023

The Inheritance Games
The Inheritance Games
by Jennifer (Jennifer Lynn) Barnes

When a Connecticut teenager inherits vast wealth and an eccentric estate from the richest man in Texas, she must also live with his surviving family and solve a series of puzzles to discover how she earned her inheritance.

2022

Heroine
Heroine
by Mindy McGinnis

When a car crash sidelines Mickey just before softball season, she has to find a way to hold on to her spot as the catcher for a team expected to make a historic tournament run. Behind the plate is the only place she's ever felt comfortable, and the painkillers she's been prescribed can help her get there. The pills do more than take away pain; they make her feel good. With a new circle of friends--fellow injured athletes, others with just time to kill--Mickey finds peaceful acceptance, and people with whom words come easily, even if it is just the pills loosening her tongue. But as the pressure to be Mickey Catalan heightens, her need increases, and it becomes less about pain and more about want, something that could send her spiraling out of control.

2021

The Unfortunates
The Unfortunates
by  Kim Liggett

After getting away with murder, Grant Tavish plans his own form of justice, but before he can act upon it a cave system collapse traps him and four other teenagers miles below the surface, where they soon discover that they aren't alone. ________ A Tom Doherty Associates book.

2020

The Hate U Give
The Hate U Give
by  Angie Thomas

After witnessing her friend's death at the hands of a police officer, Starr Carter's life is complicated when the police and a local drug lord try to intimidate her in an effort to learn what happened the night Kahlil died.

2019

Scythe
Scythe
by Neal Shusterman

In a world in which humanity has conquered death, Scythes are the only ones who are allowed to take a human life. Two unwilling teens are chosen to be Scythes and must learn the art of killing.

2018

Everything, Everything
Everything, Everything
by Nicola Yoon

Maddy has a serious autoimmune disease that prevents her from leaving the house. When a new family moves in next door, she begins a complicated romance that challenges everything she's ever known. The narrative unfolds via vignettes, diary entries, texts, charts, lists, illustrations, and more.

2017

The Book of Ivy
The Book of Ivy
by Amy Engel

In an apocalyptic future where girls from the losing faction are forcibly married to boys of the winning faction, sixteen-year-old Ivy is tasked to kill her fiancé Bishop, although when she finally meets him, he is not the monster she has been led to believe.

2016

The 5th Wave
The 5th Wave
by Rick Yancey

Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker. Beguiling and mysterious, Evan Walker may be Cassie's only hope for rescuing her brother--or even saving herself. But Cassie must choose: between trust and despair, between defiance and surrender, between life and death. To give up or to get up.

2015

The Fault in Our Stars
The Fault in Our Stars
by John Green

Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.

2014

Divergent
Divergent
by Veronica Roth

In a future Chicago, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior must choose among five predetermined factions to define her identity for the rest of her life, a decision made more difficult when she discovers that she is an anomoly who does not fit into any one group, and that the society she lives in is not perfect after all.

2013

Rot & Ruin
Rot & Ruin
by Jonathon Mayberry

In a post-apocalyptic world where fences and border patrols guard the few people left from the zombies that have overtaken civilization, fifteen-year-old Benny Imura is finally convinced that he must follow in his older brother's footsteps and become a bounty hunter.

2012

Hate List
Hate List
by Jennifer Brown

Sixteen-year-old Valerie, whose boyfriend Nick committed a school shooting at the end of their junior year, struggles to cope with integrating herself back into high school life, unsure herself whether she was a hero or a villain.

2011

The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games
by Suzanne Collins

In a not-too-distant future, the USA has collapsed and been replaced by Panem, a country divided into the Capitol and 12 districts. Each year, two young representatives from each district are selected by lottery to participate in The Hunger Games. Part entertainment, part brutal intimidation of the subjugated districts, the televised games are broadcasted throughout Panem as the 24 participants are forced to eliminate their competitors, literally.

2010

13 Reasons Why
13 Reasons Why
by Jay Asher

When high school student Clay Jenkins receives a box in the mail containing thirteen cassette tapes recorded by his classmate Hannah, who committed suicide, he spends a bewildering and heartbreaking night crisscrossing their town, listening to Hannah's voice recounting the events leading up to her death.

2009

Just Listen
Just Listen
by Sarah Dessen

Isolated from friends who believe the worst because she has not been truthful with them, sixteen-year-old Annabel finds an ally in classmate Owen, whose honesty and passion for music help her to face and share what really happened at the end-of-the-year party that changed her life.

2008

Twilight
Twilight
by Stephenie Meyer

When seventeen-year-old Bella leaves Phoenix to live with her father in Forks, Washington, she meets an exquisitely handsome boy at school for whom she feels an overwhelming attraction and who she comes to realize is not wholly human.

2007

Crank
Crank
by Ellen Hopkins

Kristina Snow is the perfect daughter, but she meets a boy who introduces her to drugs and becomes a very different person, struggling to control her life and her mind.

2006

Eragon
Eragon
by Christopher Paolini

Eragon, a young farm boy, finds a marvelous blue stone in a mystical mountain place. Before he can trade it for food to get his family through the hard winter, it hatches a beautiful sapphire-blue dragon, a race thought to be extinct. Eragon bonds with the dragon, and when his family is killed by the marauding Ra'zac, he discovers that he is the last of the Dragon Riders, fated to play a decisive part in the coming war between the human but hidden Varden, dwarves, elves, the diabolical Shades and their neanderthal Urgalls, all pitted against and allied with each other and the evil King Galbatorix.

2005

Lovely Bones, The
Lovely Bones, The
by Alice Sebold

The spirit of fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon describes her murder, her surprise at her new home in heaven, and her witness to her family's grief, efforts to find the killer, and attempts to come to terms with what has happened.

2004

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
by Ann Brashares

Four best girlfriends spend the biggest summer of their lives enchanted by a magical pair of pants.