Fessing Up: how much of a book do you have to have read in order to say that you read it?
2008: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, by Laura Amy Schlitz - set in 1255 in an English manor village.Have I missed any books? It looks like more realistic medieval settings (and darker stories in general) have been especially popular in the last ten years. Before that, fantasy settings - Ye Merry Old England, or the Middle Ages as we like to imagine they might have been - (like in the tales of Robin Hood) were more popular.
2004: The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread, by Kate DiCamillo - ok, this is fantasy, but it's set in a castle with a dungeon, and there's a princess.
2003: Crispin: The Cross of Lead, by Avi - set in England in the 1300's.
2002: A Single Shard, by Linda Sue Park - an exception to the usual "merry olde England" setting, since this story is set in 12th century Korea - but the village society and feudal structure are very similar.
1996: The Midwife's Apprentice, by Karen Cushman - another English village in the 1300's.
1987: The Whipping Boy, by Sid Fleischman - like Despereaux, this is set in a fantasy world of castles, villages, and fairs.
1985: The Hero and the Crown, by Robin McKinley - set in a vaguely Arabic fantasy world, with castles and dragons.
1969: The High King by Lloyd Alexander - Prydain is not unlike medieval Europe.
1950: The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli - between 1350-1370, London and a castle on the Welsh border.
1943: Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray - 1200's England - Oxford and several other cities.
1929: The Trumpeter of Krakow by Eric P. Kelly - medieval Poland instead of England!
1924: The Dark Frigate by Charles Hawes - set partially in England in the 1600's, but the inns and blacksmiths and the like are very similar to those in stories set a few centuries earlier.
So why, instead of delightful and powerful fictions, give children these other insomnia-curing books written in terrifyingly earnest and plodding prose, full of stick figures -- books as free of passion as a bad educational documentary, books that could turn an imaginative child into a dedicated television fan?Graff goes to highlight some books that didn't win the Newbery, to compliment a few recent winners (like Holes), and to suggest that parents read the books before they give them to their kids (which I have to agree with):
It's time we adults grew up -- and start thinking of the Newbery medalists as suggestions, not final judgments. It's time to stop treating children -- the children we were, the children we know now -- as less perceptive and emotionally sophisticated than they are. It's time to chase away that lurking childhood belief that the ALA's committee of librarians -- the experts -- has some special insight into what children want to and should read. Before you buy a Newbery book for your daughter, your nephew, your young friend -- or yourself -- start reading. See how long it keeps you riveted. Ask yourself whether you'd rather read that or "Anne of Green Gables," "Tom Sawyer," Edith Hamilton's Greek myths, "My Antonia," "Annie John," "To Kill a Mockingbird," "War and Peace" or any other truly memorable book. Your guess may well be as good as the ALA's.
The award brings fortune (or what passes for it in the children's book world) as well as fame. Although the award itself does not include a monetary payment, it can double the sales of the book, as well as increase sales of the author's other books. It will also keep the book alive. The average shelf life (time in print) of a children's book today is eighteen months. But of the seventy-seven Newbery medal books, seventy-two are still in print today, including the second recipient, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, published in 1922.What do you think?
The Newbery winner is selected by a committee of fifteen members of the Association for Library Service to Children. Competition to get onto the committee is fierce. Seven members and the committee chair are elected from a ballot of twice that many candidates, and the President of the Association appoints the remaining seven, with an eye to achieving ethnic, gender, professional and geographic balance. Although the ALSC is itself a division of the American Library Association, membership is not restricted to librarians. Parents, authors, booksellers and publishers are members and have participated on the awards committees, barring conflict of interest.
E.L. Konigsburg, Joseph Krumgold, Lois Lowry, Katherine Paterson, and Elizabeth George Speare have all received the medal twice.
What does it take for a book to win? The official criteria state that it must have "conspicuous excellence" and be "individually distinct." It must be age appropriate as well. A good book for a fourth grader dealing with, say, racial prejudice, will be very different in style and presentation from a book on the same subject intended for eighth graders. The majority of winners have been novels, but other genres have been represented as well.
The award criteria declare that the award "is not for didactic intent." But to receive a Newbery, it helps to have a serious theme. Death, loss, injustice, and hard decisions have figured in winners throughout the history of the awards. There have been lighter books, including a recent winner, The Whipping Boy, a romp in which an appropriately nicknamed Prince Brat, accompanied by his whipping boy, discovers what life is like outside the castle. But, although it is difficult to generalize among so many books, it seems that many of the more recent winners display a decidedly more serious tone than the majority of the earlier books.
The award criteria also state that the award is not for popularity, and Ellen Fader acknowledges that a well-written book could be a serious contender for the award even if it didn't have a lot of "child appeal."....Which raises the question of the role of children in the Newbery awards, and in the world of children's books generally. Children's books are an anomaly -- they are for children, but they are written by adults, purchased (generally) by adults, and judged by adults.
For the Newbery Medal for children's literature, that means contemporary and historical fiction about Overcoming Hardships, societal or familial, almost always prevail over humor, adventure, and fantasy or science fiction. Stories that bring us into Other Cultures also have an edge, as long as those cultures are real. Of course, there are exceptions, like 2004's Tale of Desperaux, but the pattern holds up generally over several decades of winners. It's just the way our culture tends to think.
Since 1922, the single "most distinguished contribution to children’s literature" has been given the annual John Newbery Medal by the Association of Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association. Every list you’ve probably ever seen arranges these award winners by year of award, or perhaps by author. Not this one.
Finally, the list everyone really wants... the awards, arranged--not by year--but by how much a totally biased group of readers enjoyed them. What is this group's opinion of what is really the most fun Newbery winner to read? Well, read on...
The completely biased, non-scientific, Newbery Book Discussion Group met monthly to digest a randomly selected past Newbery book and an equally random pot luck dinner. Group members are primarily teachers and librarians. All like to read children's and young adults' books. None can pass up a Dove Bar while arguing the merits of the book under discussion.
For nearly five years, this Group read, debated, and ate its way to creating a list of Newbery winners in rank order of what we liked best. In November 2000, the Group "reordered" the list and decided to discuss and add the latest Newbery winner each year. The annotations, like the ranking itself, reflect the flavor of the Group’s discussion.
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