The recently announced winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Youth is THE THING ABOUT LUCK by Cynthia Kadohata.  Published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers in June of 2013, this realistic fiction work is a relative newcomer to most bookshelves.  As luck would have it (pun intended), I had just finished reading it the week before it won the NBA.  It is, indeed, well written.  Our protagonist, Summer, is an extremely well developed character and one that you will not soon forget.  Having said that, I am interested to see if kids like the book.  Summer and her family are Americans of Japanese descent (that’s an important element in the book) who work as harvesters in the summer.  Small farms in the Midwest cannot afford their own harvesting equipment.  So there are teams of harvesters that travel from Texas up to Montana, harvesting different crops with their equipment and hired harvesters all through the summer.  There is a bit of detail in the book about harvesting equipment.  Not a lot but some.  And I’m not sure if that will be of interest to a lot of pre-teens/early teens.  I found it interesting so - maybe.  On the other hand - even though Summer’s family life is VERY different in many ways - it is also amazingly familiar.  She fights with her younger brother.  She has conflicts with the adults in her life.  She meets a boy that she likes and dreams about a first kiss.  She misses her friends back home.  She struggles with her schoolwork. And she desperately wants her family's bad luck to change to good. So - maybe there will be enough common ground mixed in with the uncommon that it will draw readers in and they will discover how different and yet how much the same we all are.  Because of that, I hope it becomes a classic.  I do think it deserved the award and I hope winning the award gives it the push it needs to get in the hands of a larger audience.