The Winner's Circle: The Girl Who Drank the Moon (2017)

For our fantastic three-way review of this year's Newbery winner, The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill, we came up with a few burning questions each, and then asked and answered them in an online chat session, so you could bear witness to our witty repartee. Without further ado...

First, let's try to summarize the book in thirty words!

Rachael: Babies are left in the woods to be claimed by an evil witch. The baby-claiming witch is not actually evil, but there is evil afoot. Also dragons and swamp monsters.

Sam: Plutocrats, propagandists, and sadists are defeated by an Indigo Child, a failed bureaucrat, an ex-ninja nun, a witch, a swamp god, and a motley host of other characters.

Rachael: Show-off.

Tess: Creepy town ruled by totalitarian regime requires yearly infant sacrifices. One of these babies is secretly adopted by a witch, grows powerfully magical, and learns to conquer fear with love.

What did you think of Barnhill's world building?

Sam: I appreciated Barnhill's ability to mention things in passing, to give the impression that the world extends beyond the boundaries of the book covers. Her world's "creation story" is a good example of this - we get a sort of poetic form of it, but we never really get into the details of it.

Rachael: I'm not sure if that's a bug or a feature, but I agree that we only get a fuzzy idea of the parameters of this world. What I did like was the way she reveals it in sort of slow, concentric circles - first just the Protectorate, then Xan and the other towns, and then some sense of the history and origins.

Tess: For some reason, I thought the book was going to be set in east Asia, or some east Asian inspired fantasy locale. I think because the cover, which is really lovely, has paper cranes on it, and reminded me of the covers of some of Grace Lin's books. Also because the first character we meet in earnest is named Xan. And the walled city of the Protectorate reminded me of walled palaces I have visited in China and Korea. When I realized that the setting is not meant to be Asian, or Asian inspired, that the fantasy world of the novel isn't meant to be comparable to anywhere specific in our real world, I had trouble adjusting. So I guess you could say that's evidence that Barnhill's world building didn't really work for me. I found the poetic fuzziness a little distracting. Instead of just accepting Glerk is a world-creating bog monster with multiple appendages, I kept really wishing there was a more detailed description or even an illustration of him. That's just me though! I could see how it would totally work for another reader.

What did you think of the political undertones of the story?

Sam: I'm gonna be honest here and say that I thought the politics of the book gave it some of its weakest moments. I'm thinking specifically here of the Elders of the Protectorate, whose contempt for the populace and unabashed love of luxury goods and status symbols don't provide for much in the way of nuance or depth. It would be a more interesting book, I think, if its villains had more complexity.

Tess: Reading this book within the context of our current political climate, I found the political undertones of the story very intriguing. The idea of a government controlling its citizens through fear fueled by misinformation and isolationism really resonated with me. And the message that that can be combated and corrected with hope, love, and acceptance is one I think is important for readers, particularly young readers, to be exposed to.

Rachael: I found that it hit close to home as well, given our current political climate. That makes me wonder how it will age, though.

What did you think of the pacing? 

Tess: The pacing, honestly, wasn't my favorite part of the novel, but historically books where the focus shifts chapter by chapter, especially when the chapters are short, are hard for me. I felt like there were several distinct storylines going on, and not necessarily simultaneously, and the shifts in perspective from one character to another weren't seamless for me, so the pacing felt very stop-and-go, and made me feel generally impatient.

Rachael: I had the same kinds of feelings. It reminded me a little bit of Keeper [by Kathi Appelt, 2012] in that there was a constant sense of urgency, but after it didn't lead anywhere for a couple of hundred pages, I lost interest. Too much of a sense of "building to something big" without enough momentum to carry it along.

Tess: I think the "hurry up and slow down" pacing worked a little better in Keeper because the sea is a constant motif in that book, and the pacing felt a bit like the rising and falling of tides. The pacing in that book felt more purposeful than the pacing in this book.

Sam: I felt like it would have been a lot better of a book if the first 200 pages or so had been condensed down to 50. When the plot finally gets rolling, it's consistently interesting, but that doesn't really happen until everyone finally leaves the farm. I remember when I was taking poetry writing classes, I'd consistently be asked to chop off the first two stanzas of whatever it was I'd written, since that was just whatever I had to get out in order to write my way into the meat of the thing. I'm not sure we need all that backstory. The various visits to the tower and all the details of Stargirl's childhood? It's all beautifully written; I'm unconvinced it actually NEEDS to be there.

Rachael: That's the thing - the sentence-level prose is lovely. I feel like that should be mentioned.

Sam: Yeah. Any given sentence is truly wonderful. I just wanted it to meander less and just briefly hit the points that we actually need to know when we get into the meat of the plot.

What did you think about the choice to have so many adult characters in a children's novel?

Tess: Personally, as a librarian, I love books like this, where there are equally interesting adult and child characters, because I can suggest them to any age group, particularly folks looking for a "family read" that everyone in their family - little kids, big kids, parents, grandparents - could hypothetically enjoy.

Sam: I think you make really good points, Tess! I'd also add that I think part of the reason that this decision works is that Barnhill pulls the neat trick of letting us see many of the most important adult characters as children. We get scenes from Antain and Ethyne's childhood, flashbacks to Xan's, and even bits of Sister Ignatia's. I think that makes it even easier for a child reader to identify with the adult characters.

Rachael: Xan also has something of the childlike adult in her, in the tradition of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, etc. I think that makes it work as well.

What did you think of the ending? 

Rachael: I'm of a few different minds. On one hand, I love a book with lots of threads that finally come together in a satisfying way in the conclusion. On the other hand, as we discussed in the pacing question, I think Barnhill spends too much time stringing us along so that I was worn out as a reader before we got to the finish line. One thing I did appreciate though was Luna's reunion with her mother. It was nice to see a book that didn't feel the need to leave a child motherless in order for her to grow.

Sam: I agree with you on that last point especially, Rachael. I was kind of put off by the ending as a whole though, to be honest, and it had to do with the treatment of Sister Ignatia. She's spent the whole book as this implacable presence, and then we suddenly get an explanation for what's actually driving her. But... the book drops that idea almost as soon as it picks it up, and seems almost to forget about her during the coda. I don't always expect a redemption arc - the Grand Elder doesn't get one, and that seems fitting - but the treatment of Sister Ignatia at the end seemed remarkably incurious to me.

Rachael: I agree.

Tess: I also had mixed feels. As for the eruption that was coming that only Luna's extreme magic could save everyone from? Honestly? Meh. Especially since we don't even get to see what happens, we just get a flash forward to some time afterward. But I enjoyed all the stuff about the literal fog lifting from the Protectorate as its citizens get to live free from the tyranny of Sister Ignatia and her puppet Elders. And I actually loved the stuff about how even though Luna's mother is back in her life, she still loves her adoptive family, much like the star children who eventually return to the Protectorate. Their love is described as "multiplied, not divided" which I thought was really beautiful.

If you had to pair this one with another children's book or author, what would you choose?

Sam: So, this is maybe unfair of me, but as I was reading The Girl Who Drank the Moon, one of the things I felt like I was coming to understand even more was the genius of Anne Ursu. Ursu and Barnhill are both from the same group of Minnesota children's writers; heck, Ursu is actually thanked in the notes for The Girl Who Drank the Moon. They share similar concerns, such as the place in society for people who don't quite fit in, what happens when a normal-looking world is actually terrifying just below the surface, and how it's impossible to fully understand the world and everything in it. But Ursu is, IMHO, one of the most talented and meticulous of all of our American children's writers. Ursu carefully, methodically, only ever gives you shades of gray, and Barnhill can't resist the broad stroke. Barnhill may be more of a crowd-pleaser; it's probably easier to love The Girl Who Drank the Moon than it is to love Breadcrumbs for a lot of people. But the difference between the two is the difference between a good book and one of the most jaw-dropping achievements in modern children's literature.

Tess: Those are some deep thoughts Sam. I was just thinking that generally kids at my library love books about characters who discover they have magic powers and have to learn how to use them, so my instinct is to pair this book with books like the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, and the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan. But those books center on male protagonists, so I'm especially happy for this book's female representation.

Sam: You're probably thinking more like an actual children's librarian making actual recommendations to actual children than I am! And I definitely agree with you on the female representation issue.

Rachael: My mind keeps going to Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, for some reason. I think it's because I connected with this book more as a mother than as an imagined child, and there's no better portrait of motherhood in children's lit than Mrs. Frisby.

Any closing thoughts?

Sam: I think we've all learned a valuable lesson here.

Tess: LOL

Rachael: Um... I liked this book better than it sounds like I did?

Tess: There you have it folks!

Newbery Wayback Machine: A Visit to William Blake's Inn (1982)

Hello! As observant readers may have noticed, I have been silent in this space for several months. Perhaps I fell through a dimensional portal behind a Burger King, or perhaps a lot of sad things happened in my personal life, but either way, here I am. And I'm skipping ahead to the eighties, because... well, because A Visit to William Blake's Inn looked like a manageable read. Walk before I run, etc.

It also happens to be an excellent time to look back at the 1982 Newbery winner because for over thirty years it was the only book to have won both a Newbery Medal and a Caldecott Honor. This year, of course, Last Stop on Market Street duplicated that feat. Both books were total left-field choices for the Newbery, and both of them beat out some strong contenders for the gold medal (Ramona Quimby, Age 8, in the case of A Visit to William Blake's Inn).

I initially chose Visit as my 1980s selection because it's one of the few Newbery winners from the eighties that I hadn't read. Frankly, if it hadn't won the award, I wonder if it would have vanished into obscurity by now like so many other poetry books. In that sense, it's a winner very much in line with the original intent of the award: to encourage and reward excellence in American children's literature. It could be argued that it's the quirky books like this one that most need the signal boost that an award like this provides (though of course that's not a factor the committee would have taken into account).

And A Visit to William Blake's Inn is a strange little book, to be sure. It is a series of loosely connected poems about a child who goes to stay at an inn whose proprietor is the eighteenth-century poet (and painter and printmaker), William Blake. The inn is populated by the fantastical beings that Blake portrayed in his visionary creations. The verse is formal and metered, the imagery is vivid, and the tone swings back and forth between whimsy and melancholy.

Two things strike me as odd and gutsy about the idea of writing a book of children's poems inspired by William Blake. First: those are some big shoes you're trying to fill. Adult readers are necessarily going to be comparing your verse to Blake's, and that's daunting, to put it mildly. Second: it's going to be filled with allusions that your child readers will miss entirely. There is some chance the target audience (9-12-year-olds?) may have read "The Tyger," but it's unlikely they will have the familiarity with Songs of Innocence and Experience that would be required to fully appreciate this book.

And yet, it works. The poetry is not true Blake, but it's apparently good enough to have fooled a whole generation of teachers. As for the allusions? As we say so often in this field, the poems stand alone. You don't need to know the source material to appreciate these dragons, angels, tigers, and rats.

And so, though I am a huge fan of Beverly Cleary in general and Ramona in particular, I can't argue with the 1982 committee's choice. A Visit to William Blake's Inn is a rare jewel of a book, and it deserves its medal.

Newbery Wayback Machine: The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik van Loon (1922)

 So let's start at the very beginning. Word on the street is, it's a very good place to start.

The first Newbery Medal, handed out in 1922, went to Hendrik van Loon's mammoth history of the world, the portentously-titled The Story of Mankind. The book was something of a sensation at the time, but its reputation (along with that of its author) has faded as the years have rolled along. I'm not sure I've ever met a contemporary child who's read the thing, and John "Mr. Schu" Schumaker of Nerdbery fame declared it the worst Newbery winner ever.

However, after finishing The Story of Mankind (in its original version, rather than any of the later editions that attempt to bring the history up to the present), I have to say that this is one that, while not without its faults, seems unfairly maligned.

Let's get those faults out of the way first. Although it has a bibliography at the end, The Story of Mankind doesn't have any source notes or footnotes. At the time of his Newbery win, van Loon was head of the Department of Social Sciences at Antioch College in Ohio, so one would figure that he could be trusted with the facts anyway, but there is at least one brief section of the book, consisting of letters purporting to be written by Aesculapius Cultellus and Gladius Ensa on the subject of the rise of Christianity, that's woven from whole cloth. This isn't history as we'd expect it to be presented now, and it was, in fact, the subject of some controversy even during van Loon's lifetime.

By the standards of his time, van Loon was remarkably forward-thinking and progressive, castigating many of his contemporaries as "apt to be tolerant only upon such matters as do not interest them very much." However, to a 21st-century reader, he can seem hopelessly backward, and his unshakable belief in Progress feels naive at best. It's also easy to see where his true expertise lies. Van Loon was born and raised in the Netherlands (he did not become a US citizen until 1919), and his doctoral thesis was reworked into his first book, The Fall of the Dutch Republic (1913). When he's discussing the history of northwest Europe, he is clearly knowledgeable and authoritative. On the other hand, his grasp on the western hemisphere often seems shaky; it would be hard to find present-day defenders for his assertion that, during the second half of the 19th century, conditions were significantly better for African-Americans than for European factory workers.

Having said all that, however, The Story of Mankind does still have a lot to offer. The foreword, in which van Loon describes his boyhood experience of climbing to the top of the Old Saint Lawrence Church tower in Rotterdam, remains a compelling personal essay, and it's not the only occasion on which van Loon's prose bursts into a near-poetry of surprising feeling. The opening lines of the book, for instance, are worth quoting in their entirety:

"High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by."

Some readers find van Loon's self-insertions and personal digressions tiresome, but those were some of my favorite portions of the book. I especially loved his fearless examinations of his own biases and points of view, and his honesty regarding his opinion of his own writing. ("I suggested that we destroy the whole manuscript and begin once more from the beginning. This, however, the publishers would not allow.")

While time may not have been especially kind to the reputation of van Loon's work in general or The Story of Mankind in particular, it still stands as an entirely reasonable selection by the librarians who handed out the Newbery. Five other books were honored, but none of them is more than a footnote today, and nothing else from the 1921 publishing year stands out as an inexplicable omission.   

Thanks for taking this first trip in our

More to follow soon!

The Winner's Circle: A Wrinkle in Time (1963)

 In a sense, there's no point in reviewing A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle's first children's novel, and winner of the 1963 Newbery Award. It's securely ensconced in the upper echelon of the American children's literature canon, in the same realm as Charlotte's Web, The Giver, and Bridge to Terebithia. Indeed, the last time that Fuse #8 ran the Top 100 Children's Books poll, A Wrinkle in Time finished second, just below Charlotte's Web.

When I was a child, I loved A Wrinkle in Time, and read it through on several occasions. I hadn't picked it up in years though, and so I decided to read it again to refresh my memory of it.

Rereading my childhood favorites is always an interesting exercise for me. In some cases, I find that they're even better than I remembered -- that, now that I'm an adult, I find even more to appreciate in them. That's the case for Anne of Green Gables, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Hobbit, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, and many others.

On the other hand, sometimes I go back and fail to locate the magic that I once found in those titles. As a child, I adored The Chronicles of Narnia; as an adult, I find them almost unreadable. I was a huge fan of Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator back then, while it now seems too full of misanthropic (and racist) nastiness to really be enjoyable. I even, uncomfortably, remember a time when I was much younger when I wasn't thoroughly creeped out by Love You Forever.

Upon settling in to read A Wrinkle in Time again, I found that what I immediately noticed were things in the book I didn't care for. I almost instantaneously lost patience with Charles Wallace, who felt more like an excerpt from a book about Indigo Children than an actual character, to the point that his existence in the novel threatened my suspension of disbelief. (It's possible this was exacerbated by his proximity to his sister Meg, who is eminently real and believable.) L'Engle's Christian-infused mysticism felt dated and creaky to me, and her extensive use of quotations started to feel more like a crutch than a considered stylistic device. And I'd forgotten how slow the book is to start -- the pacing never seemed quite right to me.

This isn't to say that I found A Wrinkle in Time a complete disappointment. Even now, after I've read Orwell and Huxley and Kafka and Ray Bradbury, the Camazotz scenes retain a striking aura of surreal menace. And I remain charmed by Aunt Beast, the gentlest and tenderest of the many extraterrestrial beings who populate the book's pages. The ending too, remains warm and fitting, even though by now I know its beats by heart.

Interestingly, the Time series was possibly the first series that I lost patience with as a young reader. I loved A Wind in the Door, possibly even more than A Wrinkle in Time, but I found A Swiftly Tilting Planet confusing and bizarre, and I disliked Many Waters so much that I never bothered to read past that one to the books featuring Meg's daughter Polly.

Having said all this, I'm not entirely sure what conclusions to draw. There's no question of whether or not A Wrinkle in Time was a deserving Newbery winner -- as I mentioned, it has one of the widest and most loyal followings of any American children's book. Additionally, it has little competition. Although the 1962 publishing year was an amazing one for picture books (The Snowy Day, Chicken Soup with Rice, and The Sleep Book, just to name a few), it was less impressive on other fronts. The two Newbery honor books, Thistle and Thyme: Tales and Legends from Scotland, by Sorche Nic Leodhas, and Men of Athens, by Olivia Coolidge, are essentially forgotten. The one other "classic" novel published during that year was The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, by Joan Aiken, a British author who wasn't eligible.

My reactions may just say more about me as a reader than about A Wrinkle in Time as a book. I've come to be fairly skeptical of Good vs. Evil plots, and I place a premium on fully believable characters, and so A Wrinkle in Time may just not be the book for me anymore. It's certainly the book for a lot of other people though!

The Winner's Circle: Shadow of a Bull, by Maia Wojciechowska (1965)

Juan Olivar was a legendary bullfighter, the greatest -- and maybe the only -- pride of the small town of Arcangel, Spain. He died of a fighting injury at the peak of his career, but the town -- dominated by statues of Olivar, home of a museum honoring his legend -- has never forgotten him. Instead, it has pinned its hopes on his son, Manolo Olivar, who everyone knows will grow up to follow in his father's footsteps.

Manolo, however, knows something that no one else in town does: that he, the son of the great Juan Olivar, is a coward. How can he overcome this failing? How can he be certain that no one else knows his fear? And why must he be the one to take up his father's legacy?

Shadow of a Bull marches firmly, inexorably, from this initial setup to Manolo's moment of truth. The language of the book brilliantly captures the feeling of a dusty, impoverished country town, one that has staked its future on a child. The focus is narrow, the supporting characters few. It's particularly noteworthy that the townsfolk who take it upon themselves to supervise Manolo's bullfighting education are only ever referred to as "the six men"; they form a sort of Greek Chorus, commenting on the action while at the same time serving as a symbol of the town's willingness to strip away the individual identity of any one person in the service of its dreams.

The Newbery winners of the 1960s are a curious list. It was a time of transition in children's literature, and the Newbery was given to some books that feel decidedly modern (The Island of the Blue Dolphins, A Wrinkle in Time, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), as well as to some that clearly belong to the previous generation (Onion John, The Bronze Bow). Shadow of a Bull is more of a piece with the more "old-fashioned" books; using bullfighting as a way to talk about coming of age is a choice few children's authors would make today, and the world that Manolo inhabits is one of traditional concerns and values. In structure, theme, and "feel," if not in setting or plot specifics, the Newbery winners that it reminds me most of are books such as Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze (1933) and Call It Courage (1941).

It's fair to say, I believe, that Shadow of a Bull is not a novel that takes a lot of risks; to compare it to the other two best-known Newbery-eligible books of its year, it attempts neither the confrontational realism of Harriet the Spy nor the epic ambition of The Book of Three. The trade, however, is that Shadow does what it does almost perfectly. It's tightly-written and well-paced, a tiny jewel of a novel.

Maia Wojciechowska was, by all accounts, a fascinating woman -- a refugee from Poland who, in addition to winning the Newbery, worked as a private detective, played professional tennis, translated for Radio Free Europe, and yes, actually fought a bull in the ring. Her writing career spanned more than four decades, but Shadow of a Bull was the only one of her 19 books that took a major ALA award. If it's not the book that would win if we re-awarded the 1965 Newbery (that'd be The Book of Three, if they let me make that choice), it's still a fine novel, one that perhaps should be better-regarded than it tends to be.

The Winner's Circle: The Bronze Bow, by Elizabeth George Speare (1962)

When she reviewed The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Rachael praised the book as a "harbinger of modernity." It's interesting to contrast that novel with The Bronze Bow, Elizabeth George Speare's second Newbery winner, which left a very different impression with me.

The Bronze Bow is a late example of that style of literature that gave us Ben-Hur and The Greatest Story Ever Told. It takes place in a version of the Holy Land that's based on orthodox interpretations of the Gospels, and filtered through 19th- and 20th-century Christianity. If the ending of the book especially feels like a Sunday School tract, that's because that's actually what it is -- Speare was a Sunday School teacher who was inspired to write the book by her class.

It's hard to think of a style of writing that's less in vogue today, or that feels more dated. For what it's worth, Speare does it pretty well -- the prose is as beautiful as you'd expect, and there's more depth to the characters than one might anticipate -- especially the protagonist, Daniel bar Jamin. The plot, however, always feels like it's following a template, and the moral and ethical issues are presented in terms that read as naively black and white to a modern reader. The last scene especially, where Jesus himself visits Daniel's home, was hard for me to read without an involuntary roll of the eyes.

Much like Witch, The Bronze Bow has also been the subject of challenges in recent years. Where people tried (laughably) to claim that Witch promoted the occult, however, the challenges to The Bronze Bow center on its full-throated promotion of Christianity and its denegration of Judaism, and whether those make the book inappropriate for classroom use.

That said, I don't think I'd class this as a mistake award, even as uncomfortable as the book made me, and as forced as the ending felt. You could make the case that a better choice would have been Belling the Tiger, by Mary Stoltz (which did Honor), or The Sneetches and Other Stories, by Dr. Seuss (which got nothing) -- and I think those selections would be easier on modern eyes. But in 1962, I'd guess that it was easier to see Speare's dexterousness with language and her detailed characters and settings (both of which are impressive), and a lot harder to see the book's problems. As much as we try to transcend it, we're all in the time that we're in, and if we notice things the committee in 1962 didn't, that should just encourage us to try to be that much more careful in our own reading now.

The Winner's Circle: Onion John, by Joseph Krumgold (1960)

Only five authors in the 90+ year history of the Newbery Medal have won that honor twice. But while E. L. Konigsburg, Lois Lowry, Katherine Paterson, and Elizabeth George Speare are all widely acknowledged as some of the most important authors in the history of American children's literature, Joseph Krumgold is more of a footnote.

Partly, that's because his writing for children was only a very small part of Krumgold's career. He was primarily a screenwriter, director, and documentary filmmaker; somehow, Krumgold won the Newbery twice while only writing five children's books total (one of which, Sweeny's Adventure, was a film adaptation). The three titles that didn't win the Newbery (the other two are Henry 3, and The Most Terrible Turk) are all long out of print and essentially forgotten, meaning that contemporary readers are unlikely to come across anything by Krumgold except ...And Now Miguel and Onion John.

Onion John, Krumgold's second Newbery winner, tells the story of twelve-year-old Andy Rusch, Jr., and his friendship with the highly eccentric immigrant man that everyone calls Onion John. John's firm belief in folk magic is at odds with the standards and mores of the community -- and especially with those of Andy's father. The town's efforts to bring John into the 20th century, whether he wants it or not, mirror Andy's father's attempts to plan the course of Andy's life, and these parallel plot strands converge at the end of the book.

The world of Onion John is that small-town America that's increasingly unfamiliar today, where the most influential organization in town is the Rotary Club, and the most important social event of the year involves beating on the ice of the frozen river in order to drive the fish into a downstream net. The speeches that Andy's father gives about how John ought to be "civilized" are based in a worldview that seems horribly out of date today -- though it's to Krumgold's credit that he doesn't seem sympathetic to that set of ideas. Indeed, there aren't really any villains in Onion John; everyone in the book is sincerely trying to do the right thing, which is the source of its pathos, its tragedy, and even its cautious optimism.

If we were to give out the 1960 Newbery again, it's unlikely that Onion John would win. My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George, was one of the three Honor books (The Gammage Cup, by Carol Kendall, and America is Born: A History for Peter, by Gerald W. Johnson, were the others), and George's survival novel has probably aged better than the others. However, Onion John is still a well-written, surprisingly tender book, one that deserves to be better-remembered than it is.

The Winner's Circle: Bud, Not Buddy, by Christopher Paul Curtis (2000)

Ten-year-old Bud Caldwell isn't in the best of circumstances as Bud, Not Buddy opens. His mother is dead, all of his possessions fit into a single suitcase, and he's being shipped off to yet another foster home during the heart of the Great Depression. But after things at the foster home go very wrong, Bud sets off on his own to find the father he's never known, with little to help him other than a faded flyer for a band: Herman E. Calloway and the Dusky Devastators of the Depression!!!!!!

So begins one of the modern classics of children's literature. Bud's adventures bring him into contact with a whole host of some of the best-realized characters in any children's book I've ever read. From the loathsome Todd Amos, to the jovial Lefty Lewis, and on to the enigmatic Herman E. Calloway himself, each one of them seems fully real, with personalities that extend far beyond the boundaries of the pages. Indeed, the characters are so impressively developed that Christopher Paul Curtis was later able to spin an entire novel around a minor character, Deza Malone, whose whole appearance in Bud, Not Buddy barely spans eleven pages.

The tone of Bud, Not Buddy is also truly exceptional. It's a story full of deep sadness, albeit laced with real hope -- and yet it's also very, very funny. Bud is the kind of child who's learned to laugh in order to keep from crying, and his witticisms and sharp observations buoy the novel even in its darkest moments. It's extremely difficult to balance humor and pathos, and I'm hard-pressed to think of another children's book that does it better.

With over a decade's worth of hindsight, Bud, Not Buddy appears to be an example of the Newbery committee making an unassailable choice. There were three Honor books in 2000: Getting Near to Baby, by Audrey Couloumbis; Our Only May Amelia, by Jennifer L. Holm; and 26 Fairmount Avenue, by Tommie dePaola. In most other years, Holm probably would have won the Newbery, but even as well-regarded as Our Only May Amelia remains, I haven't really heard anyone argue that it was unfairly passed over. Bud, Not Buddy also won the Coretta Scott King that year, and that too is an award with almost no complaints.

Although his list of published works isn't particularly long, Christopher Paul Curtis is unquestionably a major author. In addition to his Newbery medal, he also has two Honors, for The Watsons Go to Birmingham - 1963 (1996 Honor), and Elijah of Buxton (2008 Honor); Elijah also won the Coretta Scott King, the Scott O'Dell, and the Canadian Library Association's Book of the Year for Children. But Bud, Not Buddy is still the cornerstone of Curtis's reputation, and a rock-solid one it is.

The Winner's Circle: Roller Skates, by Ruth Sawyer (1937)

Roller Skates is the story of ten-year-old Lucinda Wyman's year of "orphanage," as she calls it, as her parents go off to Italy for her mother's health, and she goes to stay with a pair of family friends. Freed from the shackles of her stifling upper-class home life, Lucinda and her roller skates spend the year exploring 1890s New York City, making friends with everyone from the local policeman to the Rags-an'-Bottles man.

The novel is highly episodic; though it has a strong overarching theme -- the almost Rousseauian exuberance and perceptiveness of childhood when unrestrained by the stuffy customs of adulthood -- it doesn't have much in the way of a plot. Instead, we follow Lucinda through a series of interconnected vignettes, as characters and locations are woven into a vibrant tapestry of an idealized Gilded Age city. Ruth Sawyer's prose is lovely, and the massive army of characters are for the most part excellently differentiated, especially for a book that's less than 200 pages long.

Roller Skates does suffer from a bit of period piece-ness. It has racial attitudes that, though fairly progressive for the 1930s, aren't modern, as when Lucinda fantasizes about being born an American Indian, or when everyone refers to one minor character simply as Black Susan. It's a bit alarming as well how often Lucinda simply runs off to have an adventure with some grown-up that she's only met once, though the world of Roller Skates is much more like a more urban Anne of Green Gables than one that would involve Nancy Grace.

Or at least, it is most of the time. Near the end of the book, Lucinda goes to visit one of her adult friends, a Chinese woman that (in a bit of uncomfortable exoticism) she refers to as Princess Zayda...only to find her body, stabbed to death in what it's implied was a domestic abuse incident. It's a horrifying moment, and one that's tonally very much at odds with the rest of the book. The consequences for Lucinda aren't anything like fully explored, and it strikes a jarring note.

Much better handled are the tender scenes where Trinket, the little neighbor girl who's become a close friend of Lucinda's, takes ill and dies. In particular, the passage where the family doctor takes Lucinda for a walk by the East River and tells her that Trinket is dead without using those words is gorgeous and heartbreaking.

So, it's not a perfect book, and it's one that has to be viewed through the right historical lens. It's still a great literary achievement, however, and almost certainly the best choice for the 1937 Newbery. Although Sawyer later published a sequel, The Year of Jubilo, and wrote the text for two Caldecott Honor books (The Christmas Anna Angel, ill. by Kate Seredy, 1945 Honor; Journey Cake, Ho!, ill. by Robert McCloskey, 1954 Honor), it's Roller Skates that's the primary foundation for Sawyer's reputation, and in my opinion, it's not a bad way at all to be remembered.

The Winner's Circle: King of the Wind, by Marguerite Henry (1949)

Marguerite Henry is a prime example of that group of Newbery winners whose winning book actually isn't their best or most famous. (Other authors I'd nominate include Beverly Cleary, Avi, and, depending on how we feel in another decade or so, maybe even Jack Gantos.) Misty of Chincoteague, Henry's 1948 Honor book, is much higher on the list of familiar and classic American children's books than her 1949 winner, King of the Wind.

Before I get much farther into this review, I should probably say that I've never been a "horse book" kind of reader. So if you love Black Beauty and National Velvet and The Black Stallion, you may well like King of the Wind more than I did. The novel's Goodreads page is full of people who swear by it, largely based on its excellent descriptions of horses and horse behavior.

I can't argue with that -- Henry clearly knew her horses -- but I still wasn't all that sold on King of the Wind. It's more or less based on the story of the Godolphin Arabian, a famous horse whose descendants were some of the finest racehorses of all time (including Man o'War, as the oddly disjunct introduction mentions), but it's so heavily romanticized and embellished as to remove any veneer of realism. We follow the Arabian -- known for most of the book as Sham -- from his initial home in the stables of the Sultan of Morocco, to the Royal Court of France, into disgrace as a cart-horse, and finally into triumph as the greatest sire of racehorses in all England. This whole plot relies heavily on chance coincidences, theatrical gestures, and soap-opera dialogue, and I didn't find it believable in the slightest.

Maybe that's just my resistance to the genre. After all, I've made no secret of my intense dislike of Smoky, the Cowhorse, and the arc of that book's plot, if not any of the specifics, isn't all that far off from King of the Wind. More troubling, though, is the book's lack of characterization. The Arabian is cared for and followed during the whole story by a mute boy named Agba, whose character exhibits almost no development through the novel, and who seems to exist in the story largely because Henry was unable or unwilling to follow the Will James model and have everything take place in the horse's point of view. (As far as I can tell, Agba seems to be entirely a product of Henry's imagination, as opposed to a real person that she worked into the story.)

So, no points for plot or development of characters from me, though Henry's prose is crisp, and the settings (the 1940's ideas about historical Morocco and Islam aside) are well developed. That said, although the 1948 publishing year was a pretty good one for picture books (Blueberries for Sal, Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose, The Big Snow), it was a weak one for older readers -- maybe the weakest of the decade -- and so I wouldn't characterize King of the Wind as a mistake winner, or anything like that. As I've said before, all publishing years aren't created equal, and King of the Wind was probably as good a choice as anything else. But -- those kids who are really into horses aside -- I think it's a very minor entry in the Newbery canon.

The Winner's Circle: The Westing Game, by Ellen Raskin (1979)

The Westing Game is an odd Newbery, one that exists as a kind of anomaly in the world of children's literature. Its genre, a sort of ensemble-cast mystery, bears much more resemblance to certain Agatha Christie novels than to any of its predecessors in juvenile fiction. Similarly, although there have been much-loved children's books since then that have elements of seemingly inscrutable mystery (When You Reach Me, The Puzzling World of Winston Breen) or that tie together huge casts of characters (Harry Potter, Criss-Cross), it's hard for me to think of one that really attempts anything analogous to The Westing Game.

I didn't encounter The Westing Game as a child, though it won the Newbery only a decade or so before the peak of my middle-grade fiction reading years. Reading it as an adult, I found it easier to admire than to like. The plotting is every bit as deft and intricate as its reputation would indicate; I've read precious few books for any age level that were as careful in their construction. But it felt empty somehow; though the characters were well-rounded, I had a very hard time connecting with them emotionally. It seemed like, given that there were sixteen choices, I should have been able to pick someone that I wanted to win the game. And Samuel Westing himself never fully snapped into focus for me; he seemed more like a semi-benevolent Jigsaw -- a plot device, rather than a real character.

Indeed, the tone of the book -- its full-on embrace of a rose-colored American Dream, its sentimental patriotism, its eulogizing of stock-market capitalism -- seems out of step with the post-9/11, Great Recession-scarred world of today. Its hero is the character who eventually becomes a lawyer, an MBA, and, it's hinted, the CEO of a large corporation, and yet never shares the answer to the game with anyone, not even her eventual spouse (who, it should be added, also played the game). I have a feeling that this isn't the facet of the book that most people who look back at it fondly are remembering -- and maybe I'm letting my personal views overly shape my reading of the novel -- but I found its moral center genuinely uncomfortable.

Perhaps too, I'm simply not the reader for this book. As I've mentioned before, I'm in general a character and setting reader rather than a plot reader, and so I'm in less of a place to appreciate the (genuine) merits of The Westing Game than someone else might be. It reached #9 on Betsy Bird's latest top 100 children's books poll, so there is obviously a large cadre of readers who are suitably impressed by Ellen Raskin's novel.

And, with all of that said, The Westing Game certainly wasn't a bad Newbery choice, even though its year was very crowded. The only Honor book was The Great Gilly Hopkins, by Katherine Paterson (#63 on Betsy's last poll) -- which means that the committee couldn't find room for Sideways Stories from Wayside School, by Louis Sachar; Anastasia Krupnik, by Lois Lowry; or A Swiftly Tilting Planet, by Madeline L'Engle. I probably would have chosen Sideways Stories, but I recognize that The Westing Game does what it does very well indeed, even if it wasn't a book for me.

The Winner's Circle: Shen of the Sea, by Arthur Bowie Chrisman (1926)

Few Newbery-winning authors are as obscure as Arthur Bowie Chrisman, possibly because few winners of the prize had literary careers that were as slight. Chrisman's first book of short stories, Shen of the Sea, took the 1926 Newbery, but despite the fact that he lived for nearly three decades afterward, he published only three more books: two additional short story collections, both long out of print, and a local history volume about Clarke County, Virginia. For all practical purposes, Shen of the Sea is the only thing associated with Chrisman that anyone other than a serious children's lit specialist will ever encounter.

The first thing to understand is that this is probably not a book that could be written today, and it's certainly not a book that could be published today. In order to deal with it at all, we have to have that understanding up front.

Although Shen of the Sea is subtitled "Chinese Stories for Children," it has no source notes of any kind, and none of the tales are recognizable versions of any standard Chinese folktales. All of the stories, in fact, seem to be either entirely Chrisman's invention, or so wildly changed from their original form as to be unidentifiable. This is true despite the fact that a large number of the tales are porquoi stories about the origin of such things as chopsticks, china plates, tea, and kites.

Indeed, Chrisman's "China" is a sort of hazy fairyland, one constructed almost without relation to any place or time that may have really existed. Although there's a definite fondness for the idea of China in his writing, his grasp on the details of the country and culture is tenuous at best -- perhaps understandably so, given that he knew only a handful of words and phrases in the language, and, unlike Elizabeth Foreman Lewis and Elizabeth Coatsworth, never personally visited Asia. One simply can't read this book and expect to find cultural or historical accuracy.

So, it's fairly off-putting to 21st-century eyes. It fails any given test of authenticity, and it smacks of cultural imperialism, to say the least. Those are the facts, plain and simple.

And yet, Chrisman's wry humor and folk-style plotting are still effective. I found Shen of the Sea perfectly readable; it wasn't a chore to trudge through in the same way that something like Smoky, the Cowhorse was. It's more comparable to The Matchlock Gun in that the writing is perfectly fine even when the content isn't -- and if Walter Edmonds' finely-tuned prose runs circles around Chrisman's sometimes stilted English, Chrisman doesn't consistently demonize and inhumanize his non-white subjects like Edmonds does. Is that faint praise? Maybe. You certainly couldn't give Shen of the Sea to a kid without any explanation, and you might not want to give it to them at all.

But like so many of the other early Newbery winners, it's hard to definitively say that Shen wasn't the most deserving book of its year. The best-remembered titles from the 1925 publishing year weren't eligible: Emily Climbs, by L.M. Montgomery (Canadian); Gallery of Children, by A.A. Milne (British); The School at the Chalet, by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer (also British). The only Honor book was Pádraic Colum's The Voyagers: Being Legends and Romances of Atlantic Discovery, which isn't one that inspires a lot of fervor. The few other eligible books that are more or less still in print aren't necessarily ones most people would argue for either: The Adventures of Little Joe Otter, by Thornton W. Burgess; Raggedy Ann's Wishing Pebble, by Johnny Gruelle; The Lost King of Oz, one of the many inferior sequels by Ruth Plumly Thompson.

Maybe it's another reason to be grateful that the Newbery was instituted. If these early winners tend to be of...uneven quality, I don't think it can be argued that the state of American children's literature is orders of magnitude better than it was back when the award was instituted -- and of course, that's one of the main things the Newbery was supposed to encourage.

The Winner's Circle: The Cat Who Went to Heaven, by Elizabeth Coatsworth (1931)

In the 1920s and '30s, American literature went through a period of fascination with east Asia. The most prominent author of this trend was Pearl S. Buck, who picked up a Pulitzer in 1932 and a surprise Nobel Prize in 1938. Buck, of course, wrote primarily for adults, but plenty of children's authors worked the same vein. Three of them managed to pick up the Newbery for their efforts: Arthur Bowie Chrisman, for Shen of the Sea (1926); Elizabeth Foreman Lewis, for Young Fu of the Upper Yangtze (1933); and Elizabeth Coatsworth, for today's subject, The Cat Who Went to Heaven (1931).

American literature long ago went in a much different direction. By the time I was in college as an English major in the late '90s / early '00s, Buck was essentially a footnote; we never read any of her work, and the only time she was even mentioned was as one of the most egregious mistakes made by the Nobel committee. The children's authors have fared even worse: Chrisman is almost forgotten now, and though Lewis won the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1960, both she and Coatsworth are considered minor figures in American children's literature, known mostly to specialists in the field.

Indeed, I'll confess that, despite the fact that she published over ninety books in a career that spanned nearly half a century, I've never read any of Elizabeth Coatsworth's other titles. As such, I don't feel qualified to pass judgment on her career as a whole, other than to note that the vast majority of the books she published are out of print. However, I do feel that I can say that, if The Cat Who Went to Heaven is a neglected Newbery these days, it's not without reason. 

Set "once upon a time" in Japan, The Cat Who Went to Heaven tells the story of a nameless artist and his (also nameless) housekeeper, who adopt a cat, which they name Good Fortune. The artist has been very much down on his luck, but he soon receives a commission from the priest of the local temple to produce a painting of the death of the Buddha. This tableau includes all of the animals except the cat, who, legend has it, rejected the Buddha's teachings. However, this omission seems to depress Good Fortune, which leads the artist to relent and include the cat in the painting anyway, which leads to Good Fortune's death (from joy!), and the (literally) miraculous ending. (The ending, by the way, led Rachael to exclaim "That's not a Newbery book, that's an e-mail forward!")

It's tough going for a modern reader. The overly exoticized Orientalism and weepy sentimentality are serious turn-offs, especially in the ending. The housekeeper periodically breaks into awkward songs in which she praises her master and expresses her intense desire to serve him; the power and gender dynamic at work here is uncomfortable at best. Simply put, it's a book whose whole sensibility seems very dated, far more so than many much earlier American children's classics such as Little Women (1868-69), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), or even The Velveteen Rabbit (1922). For a child today, it could just as easily have come from the moon as anywhere else.

I didn't put The Cat Who Went to Heaven on my list of obvious Newbery mistakes because there just weren't a lot of options for the 1931 award. Although a record eight Honor books were named, it's a depressing list that mostly goes to show that the powers that be were willing to fetishize pretty much any kind of exoticism: Floating Island, The Dark Star of Itza: The Story of a Pagan Princess, Queer Person, Mountains are Free, Spice and the Devil's Cave, Meggy MacIntosh, Garram the Hunter: A Boy of the Hill Tribes, and Ood-Le-Uk the Wanderer. I couldn't find any other classic books that went unhonored, though I could have missed something.

So was it a mistake? Eh, probably not. But is it worth reading? Not at all, unless you've got a thing for outdated 1930s books, or you're a Newbery completist.

The Winner's Circle: The Witch of Blackbird Pond

"No, writing is not lonely. It is a profession crowded with life and sound and color. I feel privileged to have had a share in it." —Elizabeth George Speare*

A couple of chapters into The Witch of Blackbird Pond, I had to flip back to the copyright page and double check that it was actually published in 1958. That's just four years after The Wheel on the School, which, while it has some admirable qualities, can most kindly be described as quaint.  

Witch, on the other hand, with its vivid, immediate language and strong heroine, could easily have been written last year. In the fifties, it must have been a groundbreaking read. Despite the fact that it takes place over three centuries ago, it feels like a harbinger of modernity in middle grade literature. In the next ten years, Island of the Blue Dolphins, A Wrinkle in Time, and From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler would all take their place in the Newbery pantheon. Witch feels much more a part of their world than that of The Wheel on the School and Ginger Pye. 

I suppose you could argue that the focus on "who marries whom" is feministically retrograde, but in this era of Team Jacob/Edward/Peeta/Gale, that hardly stands out as old-fashioned. And realistically, this is historical fiction.  In seventeenth century New England, a girl's choice of husband really did go a long way towards deciding her fate in life. Go Team Nat!

So yes, I'd hand this book to any kid today (and I would probably play up the love triangle plot as well, because frankly, the witch trial was a bit of a letdown after all the foreshadowing). I really like the cover they're using these days too, with rosy-cheeked Kit looking all ready to start some Caribbean-style trouble. Ahead of her time, just like her creator. 

But happily, Elizabeth George Speare is not one of those authors who had to wait for the world to catch up to her talent. She won the Newbery Medal twice, as well as a Newbery Honor, the Scott O'Dell, and, in 1989, the Wilder. Wilder Committee chair Anita Silvey commented on the "vitality and energy, grace of writing, historical accuracy and tremendous feeling for place and character" of Speare's writing. That feeling for place is very much apparent in Witch, where Kit is reluctantly seduced by landscape of Speare's native New England.

Aaaand it was in that very New England that the book was challenged a mere ten years ago. For promoting witchcraft. File under "unclear on the concept."   

Travis Jonker also re-covered the novel earlier this year. He put a bird on it!

The Winner's Circle: Moon Over Manifest, by Clare Vanderpool (2011)

There's a kind of novel that we have a tendency to think of as The Newbery Book. It has a female protagonist, one right on the edge of adolescence. Invariably, she's motherless. It's set in a small town, one populated entirely with "quirky characters." It's probably historical fiction, and odds are good that it contains some life-affirming lessons about the power of literature, or art, or story.

Even though it's The Newbery Book, it doesn't actually win as often as it sometimes feels like. It has a proud historical tradition that includes books such as Up a Road Slowly (1967), Dicey's Song (1983), Missing May (1993), and Walk Two Moons (1995), but in the past 15 years, I only count two or three Newbery winners of this type: The Higher Power of Lucky (2007), Moon Over Manifest (2011), and maybe, depending on how you think about it, Out of the Dust (1998). Yet, for reasons of which I'm not entirely sure (maybe because they tend to be tough sells to child readers?), it's a category that continues to loom large in the minds of librarians and other kidlit folks.

At any rate, Moon Over Manifest, Clare Vanderpool's surprise 2011 winner, fits the bill perfectly. It is set during the Depression, and its heroine, 12-year-old Abilene Tucker, has been sent by her itinerant father to stay the summer in the town where he grew up: Manifest, Kansas. She stays with the local bootlegger/temporary pastor, is befriended by the plucky newpaper columnist, and does gardening for the Hungarian medium. As she searches for clues to her father's past, she finds that the history of the town seems to hinge on the events of the year 1918 -- a story that has hurt the town deeply, but also has the potential to heal it.

2011 was the first year that I was involved with the Maryland Mock Newbery, and it so happened that we had the discussion/voting meeting on the same day as the announcement of the actual Newbery. When the news came in that Moon Over Manifest had won, it was followed by...some expressions of disbelief, and some uncomfortable silences. It wasn't on our shortlist, and even most of the librarians who had heard of it hadn't read it. It truly seemed to come from nowhere to win the award.

And...after having read the book, the award still doesn't make much more sense to me than it did that day. The pacing seems herky-jerky, speeding arbitrarily through some events, and slowing way down for others. Abilene is desperate to know about her father, but her other personality traits aren't particularly well-defined. Using Ms. Sadie, the medium, to tell the vast majority of the 1918 story threatens to turn her into a Ms. Exposition, the climax of the 1918 story features a Talking Killer, and the final revalations about Ms. Sadie felt to me more appropriate to a Guiding Light episode. I never felt truly engaged with the plot. I don't think that it's because it's The Newbery Book -- I really enjoyed The Higher Power of Lucky, so I know it's possible for those titles to appeal to me -- but because it isn't fully successful at telling an effective story.

If we were to give the award out again today, the most likely candidate might be Rita Garcia-Williams' One Crazy Summer, which did pick up a Newbery Honor, the Coretta Scott King, and the Scott O'Dell. Our 2011 Mock Newbery winner was The War to End All Wars, by Russell Freedman, which is also an excellent title, and probably should have gotten more acclaim than it did.

Moon Over Manifest didn't do it for me (though my daughter loved the audiobook, so opinions do differ), and I think it very likely that this award won't age very well. But that's, as always, only one man's viewpoint.

The Winner's Circle: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, by Laura Amy Schlitz (2008)

First things first -- I listened to Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! as an audiobook. I'm trying to give audiobooks more of a try, and this one seemed like a good candidate, given that it's a set of dramatic monologues (and two dialogues), written specifically for performance. This proved to be a good choice. The cast (Christina Moore and several others) is excellent, and the production and incidental music is tasteful and professional. If you have the opportunity, I'd highly recommend giving it a listen.

As for the book itself, it's quite good at what it does. Laura Amy Schlitz wrote it to be performed by students in her class who were learning about the Middle Ages, and the brief dramatic pieces put a human face (or faces) on a time and place that's more than a little foreign to a modern reader. It's excellently researched, with extra notes where applicable, and the way that several of the stories intersect, with specific events narrated from the points of view of more than one character involved, is a nice touch.

It was something of a controversial Newbery choice, however, and looking back on it with four years of perspective, I remain unconvinced it was the right one. Several excellent books were published that year, the best of which aimed for something both more universal and more personal. Schlitz stated up front that her reason for creating the book in the first place was to avoid putting on a school play that only starred one or two children, and the result of that when taken as a whole is that it's pure tableau; there's no central character or group of characters to hold one's focus. It's egalitarian, and it allows for a broad survey of what was going on historically, but the structure makes the book somewhat difficult to engage with emotionally. The work fulfils its own ambitions, but it doesn't transcend them.

As for those other titles, the Honor books in 2008 were Elijah of Buxton, by Christopher Paul Curtis; The Wednesday Wars, by Gary D. Schmidt; and Feathers, by Jacqueline Woodson. Elijah won most of the other available awards (the Coretta Scott King, the Scott O'Dell, the Canadian Library Association Book of the Year for Children), and the Schmidt title has a near-fanatical fanbase. My personal favorite of the year was Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware, by M.T. Anderson, which has a combination of humor and emotional nakedness that's intensely rare in a children's title. Now, that one was the third in the Pals in Peril! series, and sequels can be a tough sell, but I also had strong positive feelings about A Crooked Kind of Perfect, by Linda Urban (wonderful characters!), and Theodosia and the Serpents of Chaos, by R.L. LaFevers (thrilling adventure!). And all of this leaves out Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, which was probably too visual of an experience to be a fair Newbery choice, but which was still fantastic (and Caldecott-winning).

As a side note, Rachael makes a passionate argument that Schlitz deserves the Newbery -- but the 2007 award (which would have been for A Drowned Maiden's Hair), rather than the 2008 one. I haven't read that book -- and I note with a bit of surprise that the professional reviews of it at the time were somewhat tepid -- but I know that she's not the only one who feels that way. (We'll come back to this discussion whenever it is that I get to blogging about The Higher Power of Lucky, or whenever Rachael decides to write a full blog post on her love of ADMH.)

One has to commend the committee for looking outside the usual Newbery box, and as the only work for the stage ever to win the award, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! was hardly a predictable choice. But, while it's certainly good, I still think there were better options.

The Winner's Circle: The Slave Dancer, by Paula Fox (1974)

"It pretty much just borrows the ending from Moby Dick," I said.

"Don't tell me! I don't know yet how Moby Dick ends," was Rachael's answer.

"You don't know how Moby Dick ends?"

"No, although I get the feeling they don't catch the whale."

 So...um...consider this your spoiler alert, Rachael?

                                *****

For those of you still reading, Moby Dick more or less ends with the destruction of the vessel on which most of the novel has taken place. Ishmael, the narrator, is the only survivor of the wreck. The Slave Dancer comes to a climax with the destruction of the vessel on which most of the novel has taken place. Jessie, the narrator of the book, is one of only two survivors of the wreck. (Ras, one of the slave boys, is the other.) Now, obviously, very few members of the target audience for The Slave Dancer are going to be familiar with the ins and outs of Melville's plot (even though the author is on the record as saying she didn't think of it as a children's book at all), but it points out the greatest flaw with Paula Fox's 1974 Newbery winner, which is a failure of imagination.

To go back to Moby Dick for just a moment, the reason that book ends the way it does is that there isn't any other way it can end. Captain Ahab's monomania has so consumed him that he's quite willing to sacrifice anything, everything, up to and including his ship, his own life, and the lives of everyone depending on him for one more shot at the white whale -- and no one is willing to step in and really stop him. It's a direct result of the way the entire book has been plotted. No other ending would suffice.

On the other hand, there isn't any particular reason The Slave Dancer needs to come to a similar dénouement. The slave ship on which Jessie has been impressed is almost home, they're spotted by an American vessel and have to flee -- and toss the slaves overboard -- and then suddenly a huge storm sweeps up, kills everyone else on board, and then sinks the ship. It's a deus ex cumulonimbus that saves the author the trouble of having to deal with the rest of the characters. You could make the argument, I suppose, that it's the result of the Captain's having trusted Benjamin Stout, who misidentifies the American ship as English until it's too late, but I don't think it flows all that organically from the rest of the book.

But then again, I don't think the book has a plot, so much as it has a series of events that happen in sequence. The passages that deal with Jessie having to play his fife for the slaves to dance, and the descriptions of the horrific conditions of the Middle Passage are certainly powerful, but they're not connected to a story of particular interest. Jessie doesn't have the resourcefulness or personality of a Jim Hawkins, and most of the crewmembers who aren't Purvis and Stout blend into each other. Ras also doesn't emerge into an important character until he's almost out of the book, and the part where he and Jessie are rescued by an escaped slave named Daniel seems rushed and forced, a coda that happens for no reason other than that Jessie has to get back to New Orleans somehow. The book does cover Big Issues, important issues, but it's not much of a novel, really.

It would be one thing if 1974 had been a weak year, but in fact, it was more than a little crowded. That year's committee somehow only selected one honor book -- Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising, and gave nothing to Socks, by Beverly Cleary; Summer of My German Soldier, by Bette Greene; A Day No Pigs Would Die, by Richard Peck; and The House with a Clock in its Walls, by John Bellairs. (Interestingly, Cooper, Cleary, and Peck would later end up winning the Newbery for other books, and Greene was given an Honor the very next year.) You could argue that The Slave Dancer grapples with the weightiest subject matter out of that group, but when one evaluates a book based purely on its message and neglects the artfulness of execution, one ends up making mistakes. Like, for instance, giving The Slave Dancer a Newbery.

The Winner's Circle: The Matchlock Gun, by Walter D. Edmonds (1942)

Walter D. Edmonds won the Newbery in 1942, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award in 1960, and the National Book Award in 1976, but these days, he's mostly remembered because John Ford made a famous film adaptation of his 1936 adult novel, Drums Along the Mohawk. As Rachael noted, Meindert DeJong can sympathize with one's reputation deteriorating over time, but it's still fascinating to me how quickly someone can be relegated to the footnotes of history.

The Matchlock Gun isn't a very well-remembered Newbery, and I've had a hard time trying to figure out what to make of it. It comes billed as a novel, but it's barely a short story; my copy is 50 pages long, and though it does come with a four-page foreword by the author, it also uses somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 pages on illustrations. It's extremely brief, and it simply doesn't have the room for subplots or advanced character development.

The story, which Edmonds assures us is in its essential points a true one, takes place in 1757, "when the French were still leading Indians out of Canada against the settlers." The father of the Van Alstyne family is away on a militia defensive action, and when a group of Indians reaches the house, the only way for the rest of the family to save themselves is for Edward, a 10-year-old boy, to follow his mother's plan and use the titular firearm, a piece obsolete even at the time that is over six feet long and has no trigger.

So it's a war story -- albeit one set during the French and Indian war, which isn't one that's much remembered. My guess is that its theme of implacable invaders attacking the homes of innocent people was one with especial resonance in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, when it won the Newbery. The story is told, however, in the style of a family legend -- the sort of thing that would usually be preceded by, "Tell us again about the time great-great-grandpa Edward had to fire the matchlock gun." Its focus is so insular, indeed, that only a couple people outside the family even have speaking lines. We're being invited into the Van Alstynes' inner circle here, and so this isn't a neutral look at the events portrayed.

Edmonds was a master prose stylist. His way with metaphors and images is easily the best thing about the book; he uses them to create a sense of family warmth, as well as an atmosphere of creeping dread as the attack becomes increasingly imminent. The book is, however, highly problematic in its depections of both Native Americans and African Americans; Oyate hates it, and though I think it's a bit disingenuous to leave out the fact that the book is set during a war, the examples that they cite in their review are every bit as ugly as they're made out to be. Even given the book's extremely limited scope, its descriptions of its non-white characters are over-the-top unpleasant, and it's impossible for a modern reader to overlook. I know I was made uncomfortable by them as I was reading.

So what are we to make of a book with moments of great beauty that nonetheless contains such distasteful flaws? I don't even know, though I wouldn't recommend this to a child. It represents both the best (love of family, great personal courage) and worst (demonization of anyone "other," complete acceptance of violence) in the psyche, history, and literature of America.

As for its Newbery, the other best-remembered book of the year was probably Little Town on the Prairie. It's been ages since I've read that one, and I know that that particular series isn't unproblematic in its racial characterizations either, but it probably would have been a better choice than The Matchlock Gun. If anyone has a better suggestion though, I'd be more than glad to hear it!

The Winner's Circle: The Wheel on the School, by Meindert DeJong

Meindert DeJong is kind of an interesting figure in the history of American children's literature. He was the undisputed rock star of children's publishing in the 1950's, winning four Newbery honors, along with the medal itself. In the 60's, he was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award, and the National Book Award. He was clearly in the same echelon as his fellow Harper authors E.B. White and Laura Ingalls Wilder. But whereas the others are still household names, DeJong is now remembered primarily by overly enthusiastic children's librarians. 

What happened? Could the "influential librarians"* of the 1950's have been so wrong?

My own interest in DeJong came as a result of reading Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom. The legendary editor's letters to DeJong are so full of confidence in his literary abilities that some of her excitement rubbed off on me and I ran straight to my library to find a copy of The Wheel on the School. (There were no holds.)

To glean any reading pleasure from The Wheel on the School, you have to accept one premise going in: having a pair of storks nesting on the top of your one-room schoolhouse would be the best thing that could ever happen to you or your town. So good that it makes you hyperventilate a little bit just thinking about it. So good that it will inspire legless men to leave their backyards and tie themselves to dinghies for the privilege of helping your wish come true.

Despite the odd premise, The Wheel on the School is actually a very good book. The sense of place is so strong that the book probably deserves its Newbery on the strength of setting alone. It's set in a Dutch fishing village similar to the one where DeJong spent his early years, and the descriptions of storms, dikes, and fishing life are obviously drawn from experience. Characters, especially the older inhabitants of the village, are depicted with humor and sensitivity.

The plot is skillfully structured and fast-paced as well - at least for Part One (Operation Get the Wheel). Judith Hartzell wrote, in a 2006 DeJong centennial article for the Horn Book, "This is an action book, built, as the title suggests, in the shape of a wheel. It begins with the hub—Lina. Like spokes running out toward the rim, the six children go on their separate adventures, and bit by bit, through the children, the whole rim of the village comes into play. Near the end, in a celebration-of-community scene, the fathers climb the schoolhouse roof on a stormy day to put the wheel in place."**

Ah, but there's the problem. That scene (Operation Put The Wheel on the School) is not nearly close enough to the end of book for my taste. There are still 70 more pages to go (comprising Operation Get Some Storks). Maybe it's my modern sensibilities, but by the time they finally heaved the wretched birds onto the wheel I was ready to get out my shotgun and start scanning the horizon for wings.

So, despite its strengths, this is probably not a book I'd hand to most kids I meet in 2012. Unless they're really, really excited about storks. Like, Double Rainbow excited. I mean, read this passage:

"Lina sat quietly, looking down at her stork. She had to hold herself very quiet, absolutely still, or she'd burst out and scream and laugh and cry. It was so unbelievable, so wonderful, sitting in school with a stork on her lap. Storks in school, storks in Shora! She bent deep over her stork and cried a little and stroked its long white neck."

Now tell me it doesn't make you think of this:

*A phrase that always makes me laugh. 


**Hartzell, Judith. "Happy Centennial, Meindert Dejong!." Horn Book Magazine 82.2 (2006): 227. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 17 Feb. 2012.

The Winner's Circle: The View from Saturday, by E.L. Konigsburg (1997)

Fairly or unfairly, I think we often judge a book by a familiar author by different standards than we do one by someone unfamiliar. We may be surprised by greatness or incompetence once, but after that, we come to expect it.

I thought about this a lot as I struggled to figure out exactly how to evaluate The View from Saturday, the 1997 Newbery winner by E.L. Konigsberg. How much of my reaction, I wondered, was based on the knowledge that this was from the hand of the same person who produced From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler?

That was a book that I read and loved for its inventive setting and clever puzzles. The View from Saturday, by comparison, I found a frustrating climb with very few handholds. Where Claudia Kincaid, the protagonist of the earlier novel, was a believable and resourceful heroine, the four children in The View from Saturday seemed like cardboard cutouts. Nadia, in particular, seemed more like a construct than a character, and as a reader, I never felt like the four sections narrated by the children were told in a child's voice, even allowing for the fact that child narrators in literature often need to display a bit more sophistication than is likely. The adults weren't a lot better -- the way that Mr. Singh shows up at the end to provide some deus ex machina insights seemed to me especially grating.

Similarly, the puzzle in From the Mixed-Up Files was fresh and interesting. In The View from Saturday, the novel's structure itself is a puzzle; it starts in media res, then intercuts the action at the Academic Bowl with stories told by the four children, before moving into flashback and then catching up to its beginning. There are reasons to play with narrative structure -- When You Reach Me is a fantastic example of a book that uses its structure to deepen the sense of mystery. But there was nothing in The View from Saturday that required a nonlinear structure, especially since the mystery at its heart -- why did Mrs. Olinski chose these four children for her team? -- never felt all that compelling to me.

Also, for a book set at an Academic Bowl, it has something of a loose grasp of trivia. The climax of the book hinges on the question, "In what work of fiction would we meet the original Humpty Dumpty, and who wrote it?" Mrs. Olinski's team, unlike their opponents, know that it is Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, as opposed to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. However, the first printed reference to Humpty Dumpty is in Gammer Gurton's Garland, an 1810 collection of songs and poems for children, and the character achieved great popularity through George L. Fox's performances in the Humpty Dumpty pantomimes in the 1860s. Carroll's book may possibly have been the first novel to feature H.D., but it seems unfair to give him credit for creating a character that has its own Roud Folk Song Index number. And if this seems like churlish nitpicking on my part, consider that Julian manages to successfully challenge the judges' ruling and assert that the word "tip" (as in gratuity) is an acronym that has entered the English language as a word (it originally standing for to insure promptness) -- despite the fact that no less an authority than the Oxford English Dictionary had concluded by 1989 that this was a completely false etymology. (It's actually a word that comes into the standard language via rogues' cant, which is at least as interesting.)

Would any of this have bothered me as much if I wasn't expecting greatness out of Konigsburg? It's hard to say. But I don't think it's a particularly good book, and I certainly wouldn't have given it the Newbery, even in a year that didn't produce many "classic" titles.