So You Want To Be An Explorer
by Linda Soules
MOST ATMOSPHERIC PROSE BOOKY
The judge's reasoning
So You Want To Be An Explorer earns its Booky on the strength of a prose style that is, for a middle-grade nonfiction series entry, genuinely unusual — precise, rhythmic, and unafraid to trust a young reader with a complete idea. Linda Soules writes with the cadence of someone who has thought hard about what it feels like to discover something, not just what exploration looks like from the outside. The opening salvo — "Eighty percent of the ocean floor has NEVER BEEN MAPPED — not approximately, not roughly. Eighty percent." — is not a statistic dressed up for children; it is a rhetorical choice, and it works. The repetition lands. The capitalization earns its place.
The cave-survey anecdote about the explorer who crawled one more meter and found 500,000-year-old aragonite crystal formations is the book's emotional and structural center, and Soules knows it — she names the stakes clearly: "Those formations were not famous. They were written up in a journal article that perhaps twelve people would ever read." That is a sophisticated idea for any age, and she delivers it without softening it.
The Author's Note elevates the whole project. Where most series books of this kind end on cheerful encouragement, Soules turns to face the ethics of exploration directly — the history of extraction, the responsibility that comes with naming, the question of who benefits. She writes: "To go somewhere is to change it. To describe it is to change it more." This is the kind of sentence a ten-year-old will carry for years without knowing why. The book knows exactly who it's for, and it meets them at full height.
Judged by Brooke Hayes — Reader-at-Large · Cross-Genre · Emerging Voices
"Every book is the only book for somebody."
Supporting passages
"Eighty percent of the ocean floor has NEVER BEEN MAPPED — not approximately, not roughly. Eighty percent. We have better maps of the surface of Mars than we have of the bottom of our own ocean."
The deliberate repetition and capitalization turn a statistic into a gut-punch — this is a writer deploying emphasis as craft, not decoration.
"To go somewhere is to change it. To describe it is to change it more. The question is not whether to explore; the question is who benefits, and who pays, and what you owe the place you just changed."
This passage does something rare in a middle-grade nonfiction series: it introduces genuine moral complexity without resolving it neatly, treating young readers as capable of sitting with an unfinished question.
"Those formations were not famous. They were written up in a journal article that perhaps twelve people would ever read. But those twelve people knew something about the Earth that nobody had known before. Because someone went one more meter. One more meter. That's the heart of the job."
The rhythmic diminishment followed by quiet insistence — 'one more meter, one more meter' — gives the book its emotional spine and a phrase young readers will actually remember.
Per-axis rubric scores
Every Booky-winning book is scored across all ten craft axes. The award is given on the top axis (or top two for premium tiers).
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