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.

Maryland Mock Newbery Winners 2013!

Our fourth annual Maryland Mock Newbery program was held today! After an exciting morning of high-spirited discussion and debate, we held the vote, and the winner was:

The One and Only Ivan, by Katherine Applegate

We also named one Honor book:

Splendors and Glooms, by Laura Amy Schlitz

Thanks to everyone who participated, discussed, and voted!

2013 Contenders: Water Sings Blue, by Kate Coombs

"I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."

"For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea."

Admission: I have a great weakness for sea poetry. Like Melville's Ishmael, "when my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." Or at least to seek out some nautical literature.

And sea poets, in turn, seem to have a weakness for formal meter and rhyme. Maybe it's something about the rhythm of the sea itself, but look at those two excerpts above, from poems by John Masefield and e. e. cummings. Don't they just capture the great, surging rhythm of the world's oceans? I think so.

So it was with great pleasure that I opened Water Sings Blue to find that Kate Coombs has chosen to write about the sea in rhyming, metered verse. It feels like there's not a lot of "serious" modern children's poetry that rhymes. Plenty of light verse and nonsense verse rhymes, of course. But when children's poets get all SRS BSNS, they seem to feel the need to do so in free verse.

Not that Water Sings Blue is uniformly serious. To paraphrase one of the reviews, it has as many moods as the sea. While the individual poems vary in tone, though, they are united by the poet's arresting use of imagery and metaphor. "Please, O Lord," entreats a fish in "Prayer of the Little Fish. "Protect me from / the high, dry, breathless air." Breathless air, y'all. That knocks me out.

At its best, the musicality of Coombs' language adds another layer of meaning to the poems. In "Sand's Story" she writes, "Now we grind and we grumble / humbled and grave, / at the touch of our breaker / and maker, the wave." All that alliteration and internal rhyme just reinforces the relentlessness of a force that slowly crumbles mountains.

And yet... and yet. Despite the gorgeousness of the language, despite the stunning imagery... not all of this verse scans properly. In fact, quite often, it doesn't. "I'm going shopping at the tide pool. / They carry everything there - " My, that feels awkward. Incongruously awkward, given the talent of the poet and her attention to detail otherwise.

Ultimately, though, the weird scansion is not nearly enough to sink this pretty little book. No pun intended. Content trumps form for me, so it's definitely among my top ten of the year. As for Newbery... well, it's a strong year and poetry rarely medals, but I'd be happy to see a silver Honor sticker on the cover of this one.

(Thanks to reader Brandy for the recommendation!)

Digressions: Okay for Newbery

Meanwhile, on Google chat... 

Sam:  Man, I hope Wonder doesn't win.

Me:  I think it probably won't, but I would actually rather have Wonder win than something that's both flawed and unappealing. coughsummerofthegypsymothscough... 

Sam:  Gah. I'm trying to think how many of this year's books I'd actually be ok with winning.

Me:   Good question!

It is a good question, isn't it? At some point in the discussion and voting process, I guess that's what the committee members have to decide: not only which book they're pushing for, but which ones they would accept as winners. Which books would leave them at the "I'm not super excited, but I am at peace with this choice" level on the consensus meter.

For me (and these are, of course, my feelings prior to the Mock Newbery discussion next Monday, so everything is subject to change), the list looks something like this. 

Top Choices (totally behind any of these; smiley face on the consensus meter) 

• Twelve Kinds of Ice (my actual first choice right now)
• Splendors and Glooms
• Liar and Spy
• Starry River of the Sky
• Mr. and Mrs. Bunny, Detectives Extraordinaire 

Second Tier (wouldn't go away from the table seething; "meh" face on the consensus meter) 

• Wonder
• The One and Only Ivan
• No Crystal Stair
• Crow
• Moonbird

I won't go into my third tier. I've already mentioned my non-fandom re: Summer of the Gypsy Moths, but to delve further would be petty. 

How about you guys?

2013 Second Takes: We've Got a Job, by Cynthia Levinson

We've Got a Job was a late addition to our Mock Newbery reading list. Actually, it wasn't on our list of semifinalists at all, but after Sam and I read all of the nominees, we found ourselves at an impasse. We wanted a nonfiction title to be part of the discussion, but I vetoed Moonbird and he wasn't keen on Titanic. I hadn't read We've Got a Job, but Sam said it was not only one of the best nonfiction books of the year, but one of the best of the many books published this year on the topic of civil rights.

And, of course, it is. I'm most impressed by the original research and the meticulous documentation. Copious source notes, an index, a discussion of the language of race, and numerous primary documents all help to paint a rich, nuanced picture of a time and place many of us know only through headlines and sound bites. Levinson does an excellent job, too, of getting out of the way of her sources and letting the reader see the events through the eyes of the children themselves.

I have to disagree with Sam about organization, though. Since (after a brief prologue), the book begins with profiles of the four young people, it ends up jumping back and forth chronologically, which I found disorienting. It could really have benefited from a longer introduction to set the historical stage and establish a steady pace before it starts to meander. 

That's a relatively minor point in the overall evaluation of the book, but it's enough to sink it as a serious Newbery contender for me. Staying just within the realm of nonfiction, I felt that both Titanic and Temple Grandin were better organized and more evenly paced, and that's leaving out Bomb, which I have not yet read. A highly impressive piece of research and writing, but not a title I'll be looking for on Newbery Day.

2013 Contenders: Penny and Her Song, by Kevin Henkes

Some of the best-known and best-loved American children's books are easy readers. However, if you added up all the Newbery mentions given to The Cat in the Hat, Are You My Mother?, Owl at Home, Bread and Jam for Frances, Sammy the Seal, and There Is a Bird on Your Head!, you wouldn't even have to use any fingers to tabulate the result. In fact, outside of the Honor taken by Frog and Toad Together in 1973, the list of easy readers on the Newbery rolls is essentially blank.

Sure, since 2006, we've had the Geisel award, which is devoted specifically to easy readers. And sure, it's hard to separate the text of many of the best easy readers from the illustrations. Still, given how insistent the Newbery criteria are about including books for the entire age range from birth to fourteen, it's interesting that almost every committee has elected not to give even the most distinguished easy readers a nod.

Back at the beginning of 2012, there were some rumblings that perhaps Penny and Her Song would be the book to break that streak. As the year went on, those noises got quieter, and at this point, almost nobody is predicting that the book will pick up any non-Geisel awards.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that it's so much harder to hit many of the Newbery criteria in the limited space available in an easy reader. Penny has great characters -- the excited but obedient title character, her kind parents, her baby siblings who serve as the book's source of understated humor. But are they as beautifully and incisively drawn as those in Liar & Spy, or Splendors and Glooms, or even Mr. and Mrs. Bunny? I don't think that's even a real question.

That this is a function of the format rather than the author is borne out by a look at Kevin Henkes' middle-grade novel from last year, Junonia. That one was one of our finalists at the Maryland Mock Newbery, and though it didn't end up winning anything (either there or in the Newberys proper), it did make the Notables list, and it certainly rated very highly in each of the Newbery criteria. Is that because it's an objectively better book than Penny and Her Song? I don't think it actually is -- it's just longer, and has more room to develop its characters, setting, and themes.

The more I think about it, the more I'm puzzled as to what an easy reader Newbery winner would even look like. Are You My Mother? and Green Eggs and Ham are classic books, ones read and beloved by generations of children, but to win the Newbery, either one would have had to beat The Island of the Blue Dolphins. The year that The Cat in the Hat was eligible, the winner was Rifles for Watie. That one was on my list of Newbery mistakes, but would I take The Cat in the Hat over Gone-Away Lake, another classic that was eligible in that year? That seems to me to be a tough position to take, especially since the Newbery criteria mean that one can't give any weight to Dr. Seuss's iconic illustrations. It might just be that, given the rules as they're currently constituted, there isn't an easy reader that could win.

So maybe it's a good thing we have the Geisel award now, a place to recognize the best easy readers and discuss their unique strengths. Though I don't imagine Penny and Her Song will make a Newbery appearance, I'll be looking for it (and possibly the sequel, Penny and Her Doll, which also came out this year), when the Geisel awards are announced.


Published in February 2012 by Greenwillow / HarperCollins

2013 Contenders: The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, by Christopher Healy

It's hard being Prince Charming -- people know some version of your story (which may or may not be accurate), but they don't know anything about you personally, not even your name. That's one of the problems faced by Princes Liam, Frederic, Duncan, and Gustav (of Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, and Rapunzel fame, respectively), but as The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom barrels along, they soon acquire any number of other problems, including trolls, giants, the King of the Bandits, and a witch intent on staging one of the largest and most spectacular demonstrations of evil the world has ever seen. Can they survive, save the world, and possibly even become real, genuine heroes?

The closest spiritual predecessor of Christopher Healy's novel isn't a book at all, but the Shrek series of films. Both are built on taking the premises of familar fairy tales, and then fracturing them with ironic characterizations, mugging one-liners, incongruous pop-culture references, and a tendency to take different tales and smash them together. Indeed, the film rights to The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom were sold before the book was even published, and it's hard to imagine that the eventual movie won't strongly resemble Shrek.

If you are willing to play along, The Hero's Guide is enjoyable enough. It's clever, and some of its twists, such as the portrayal of Sleeping Beauty as a teenage sociopath, are amusingly unexpected. I laughed in places, and I can see the book acquiring a devoted group of fans.

At the same time, I may have run out of patience for the whole Fractured Fairy Tales scene. Sure, you can create interesting effects by changing the structure of a familiar tale -- here's to you, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs -- but too often, these kinds of stories devolve into rote humor, winking sarcasm, and a sentimentality that's both cloying and superficial. The Hero's Guide is better at sidestepping these pitfalls than many other efforts in the same vein, but it doesn't do so completely. The ending of the novel, which all but ensures a sequel, also felt to me less like an organic outgrowth of the story, and more like a blatant attempt to make another book necessary.

It's possible that I'm projecting too many of my own feelings onto The Hero's Guide. Certainly, I'd recommend booktalking it, promoting it, and trying to put it into the hands of children who will appreciate its charms. But I don't think it's innovative, profound, or even funny enough to be a real contender for the Newbery.



Published in May 2012 by Walden Pond Press / HarperCollins