2013 Contenders: Each Kindness, by Jacqueline Woodson

There is a truism that says that the quality that most clearly differentiates children's literature from other types of books is an inherent sense of hope and optimism. Does it have a happy ending? No? Not a children's book, then. I have used this rubric to defend improbably cheerful endings in any number of books, including, this year, Wonder, The One and Only Ivan, and Splendors and Glooms.

Child readers need happy endings, right?  

It has been a long time since I've come across a book that challenges that rule as thoroughly and beautifully as Each Kindness does. It is a book about bullying, in a year full of bullies (both fictional and depressingly real), told from the viewpoint of the bully.

When new student Maya walks into the classroom one morning, narrator Chloe takes an instant dislike to her and her ragged clothes. Lonely Maya reaches out to Chloe with smiles and invitations to play, but her awkward overtures are met with silent disdain. Chloe and her friends give Maya the kind of subtle and effective shunning that tends to go undetected by adults, and eventually Maya gives up and plays alone. After a poignant classroom lesson on kindness, Chloe resolves to treat Maya differently, but it's too late. Maya has moved away.

Is there hope in the ending? Technically, yes. This has been a profound and painful experience for Chloe - one that will clearly change the way she approaches the world in the future. But it won't change her relationship with Maya. It's too late for that. The last line of the book is terribly, effectively sad: "I watched the water ripple as the sun set through the maples and the chance of a kindness with Maya becoming more and more forever gone."

That kind of sentence-level writing, hard and clear as diamonds, characterizes the whole book. A commenter here recently said that it's easier for short books like this one to be flawless, but I couldn't disagree more. It's insanely hard to pack that kind of punch into a single sentence. The way the imagery of the sunset and the ripples parallels Chloe's feelings of regret while still staying true to her voice totally wows me. Woodson anchors her story with so many of these carefully chosen details - a broken shoe strap, a tiny rubber ball, a jump rope too long for one person to use. It's filled with the quiet poetry of the real world.

It's difficult to discuss this book without mentioning the gorgeous paintings, but I think the text clearly stands on its own. The good people at the Cooperative Children's Book Center agree - they just awarded it the Charlotte Zolotow award for outstanding writing in a picture book.

I feel a bit silly, raving about every book I discover at the eleventh hour, but golly this is a good one.

2013 Contenders: Chickadee, by Louise Erdrich

In order to properly evaluate Chickadee, I have to begin with a confession: I have not read the other books in the series. I recommend them all the time - whenever someone says "Little House," my reflex response is "Birchbark House" - but I had not personally made the acquaintance of Omakayas and family.

So, coming to the book as a Erdrich virgin, I'm left with two conclusions:

1. You don't need to have read the rest of the series to enjoy it. Total standalone.

2. If you haven't, you'll want to.

Quick plot summary: Omakayas, who readers met as a child in The Birchbark House, is now the mother of twin boys, Chickadee and Makoon. When Chickadee is kidnapped, the family must leave the woods of northern Minnesota and venture onto the Great Plains to retrieve him. In the process, their way of life changes forever.

For some reason Chickadee wasn't getting a lot of Newbery buzz early in the season, but it has certainly been lauded. It just won the Scott O'Dell award, and it's been starred in, I believe, six journals (though it only made Horn Book's "best of the year" list). Come to think of it, I have no idea why the initial buzz passed it by.

The hype (is it still hype if it's all very dignified and literary?) is well deserved: Erdrich writes masterfully for children. Her prose has a cozy, timeless quality that's immediately appealing. It's very clear and straightforward, while still packing in lots of evocative descriptions of the natural world. The novel is also deftly structured, interweaving the family's story with the larger narrative of the Anishinabe/Ojibwe. It has both emotional weight and moments of levity (the bumbling kidnappers are some of my favorite comic villains of the year).

Comparing it to some of the other Newbery hopefuls, I think it matches them in several categories. Setting and style are clearly distinguished, as is theme. Some of the characters are more developed than others - I think Splendors and Glooms may surpass it there. Splendors may be more distinguished in plot as well, especially as I found myself slightly confused about the timeline of events in Chickadee at times.

Will the committee agree? Are we totally off base? Is it going to be another Moon Over Manifest year? We'll know in less than a week! In the meantime, I'm going to go track down a copy of The Birchbark House for my daughter and make it our next bedtime read-aloud.

2013 Contenders: Penny and Her Doll, by Kevin Henkes

So after my post on Penny and Her Song, a couple of our readers chimed in to opine that I might have picked the wrong Penny book to highlight. Not that they didn't like Song a lot, but they thought that the sequel, Penny and Her Doll, might have been just a little bit better. This intrigued me enough that I decided to have a look at Doll as well.

In this installment, the titular heroine receives a doll as a present from her Gram. She loves the doll, but figuring out a name for it proves to be a real challenge. Which name is the right one?

One of the things I like most about Kevin Henkes is that he has an exceptional grasp of the issues many children take to heart, and a respect for those issues, whether or not an adult might consider them "important." What to name a cherished toy falls firmly into this category, and Penny's parents treat the question seriously, which is nice to see. The love that this family has for each other jumps off the page, and it creates a mood that's sweet without being cloying.

Is it indeed better than Penny and Her Song? In my mind, it's close to a dead heat, but Doll might be ever-so-slightly superior. There's probably a stronger conflict-resolution plot in Doll, and the ending flows satisfyingly from the rest of the book. Doll doesn't have anything quite like the magical childlikeness of the actual words of Penny's song in Song, but the sheer beauty of its construction might nudge it a bit ahead. (It's also worth mentioning that the Notables committee seems to feel so too, since Doll is on their Nominated Titles list, and Song isn't.)

Do I think that little bit extra is enough to make Penny and Her Doll show up on the Newbery list? No, not really, for the same reasons that I mentioned in my post about Song. I think it might well be the front-runner for the Geisel award though.


Published in September by Greenwillow / HarperCollins

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!)

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

2013 Contenders: Will Sparrow's Road, by Karen Cushman

By the end of the first page of Will Sparrow's Road, it's established beyond question that twelve-year-old Will Sparrow has had a hard life, and that it's made him hard in return. Sold by his father, and about to be sold again by the innkeeper for whom he has worked, Will makes his escape and runs away. Where is he going? Will has no idea, only that he wants to be as far as possible from everywhere he's ever been.

Along the way, Will is repeatedly forced to ask himself questions about trust. Can you trust anyone? Should you try? And what if the people you think you can trust and the people you actually can trust aren't the same?

There's a long tradition in the Newbery of books that follow a boy traveling through a medieval world, from Elizabeth Janet Gray's 1943 winner, Adam of the Road, on to Avi's 2003 titleist, Crispin: The Cross of Lead. Although Will Sparrow's Road is certainly a solid book, I don't think it quite has the sense of youthful adventure of the former title, or the atmosphere of danger and paranoia that permeates the latter. By choosing this genre and setting, Karen Cushman has set a high bar for herself, and I'm not certain that she clears it.

Nor am I convinced that Will Sparrow's Road manages to pull itself above the more general pack of this year's books. Will himself is an engaging protagonist, but none of the supporting cast feels particularly deep -- particularly not if we're comparing them to the supporting characters in Wonder or Liar & Spy. The Elizabethan British setting is well-drawn, but doesn't come to life as vividly as the New England snowscape of Twelve Kinds of Ice, the quietly sterile hallways of Breathing Room, or the soot-covered streets of Splendors and Glooms. And even though the themes of trust and belonging are consistent and carefully explored, I don't think they're examined as thoroughly as the meaning of freedom and humanity in The One and Only Ivan, or the poisonous nature of power in Wooden Bones.

This all maybe makes Will Sparrow's Road sound worse than it is. It's a Karen Cushman novel, and as a member of the select group of active authors with both a Newbery Medal (The Midwife's Apprentice, 1996) and an Honor (Catherine, Called Birdy, 1995), she probably can't write a book that's less than above average. Kids who like historical fiction, or even who are interested in low fantasy, will likely take eagerly to Will Sparrow's Road. There's a good chance it will show up on the Notables list; I just don't think it quite has enough to make it out of the field for this year's Newbery.


Published in November by Clarion / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt



P.S. Rachael and I are both off work until after the new year, so we'll catch you in January. Have a wonderful holiday season everyone!

2013 Contenders: My Mixed-Up, Berry Blue Summer, by Jennifer Gennari

Twelve-year-old June Farrell's life isn't complicated. She swims and boats in Lake Champlain with her friend Luke, helps her mom at the Stillwater Marina Shop, and plans to win this year's pie-baking contest at the Champlain Valley Fair. However, when her mom's girlfriend Eva moves in, June finds herself unwillingly drawn into the controversy over Vermont's new civil union law -- a controversy that divides communities, families, and even June's own mind.

Set in the summer of 2000, when the Vermont law went into effect, My Mixed-Up, Berry Blue Summer tackles a tough issue head-on. June is a sympathetic character, fierce in her love for her mother, uncertain how to deal with some of her neighbors, and pained by the realization that her dreams of having a father are destined to go unfulfilled. Jennifer Gennari used to live in Vermont, and she fills the book with small but beautiful details about the setting -- the rocky cliffs where the best berries grow, the way different weather affects the look of the lake, the noise of the hungry seagulls.

In honesty, those details made me wish the book were longer. At 119 pages, it simply doesn't have time to fully explore all its subplots, or to render its supporting characters entirely three-dimensional. The novel's brevity also means that the events of the last third of the book feel like they pile on top of each other too quickly, giving it an almost soap opera-esque tone that I don't think helps the story.

Those flaws mean that My Mixed-Up, Berry Blue Summer is highly unlikely to show up on the Newbery list. However, it's still a pleasant, engaging read. Even more than that, it's good to see another middle-grade novel from a major publisher that takes on LBGTQ issues and yet isn't solely a heavy-handed polemic. This is Gennari's first novel, and I'm really interested to see what she decides to write next.


Published in May by Houghton Mifflin Books for Children

2013 Contenders: Shadow on the Mountain, by Margi Preus

It was fascinating to read Shadow on the Mountain so soon after Bomb. A key point in Bomb is the destruction of the Vemork heavy water plant in Norway in a mission by British-trained Norwegian resistance fighters. Shadow on the Mountain takes us further into the world of the WWII Norwegian underground, a world of espionage, subterfuge, and secrecy, where old friends may end up on opposite sides, and the slightest misstep may mean death.

As the novel opens, fourteen-year-old Espen is just entering the resistance movement, distributing illegal newspapers that dare to carry anti-Nazi stories. The story proceeds to follow him as he becomes more and more involved -- and his missions become more and more dangerous. Several of his old soccer teammates, his sister Ingrid, and his girlfriend Solveig also join the resistance; however, always lurking in the shadows are Espen's former best friend Kjell, who has been blinded by Nazi propaganda, and Aksel, another old soccer teammate, who now works for the secret police.

Most of the elements in Shadow on the Mountain are based on true events. Epsen himself is largely modeled after Erling Storrusten, whose career in the resistance is described in the excellent back matter. This lends the book an authenticity that I think many readers will find exciting. Each scene is written with precision and suspense, and I know that I found myself drawn into the struggles of Espen and his friends as I was reading.

The other side of that, however, is that the book is episodic perhaps to a fault. When the Nazis take over Espen's soccer team just before the championship game, for instance, he and his friends quit; however, they declare that they're going to play the game in secret against the other team, whose members have also quit. But there's no scene of the secret championship, and in fact, it's never mentioned again.

Spoiler alert: I also need to talk about the ending of the book. After Espen's cover is blown, he flees to Sweden, which is not under Nazi control. After a harrowing struggle, he makes it...and that's the end. Although it's stated that the war is turning against the Nazis, we don't get to see it end; nor do we get to see whether Espen and Solveig are able to get back together, or what happens to Ingrid. The back matter does discuss what happened to Erling Storrusten, and so one can make inferences, but it's still quite an abrupt ending.

Even though Espen is fourteen when the book starts and nineteen when it ends, Shadow on the Mountain reads more as an upper middle school book than a YA title; the copy I read had indeed been catalogued in Juvenile Fiction. What it does well, that sense of immediacy and historical fidelity, it does well indeed, and I think it will find many well-deserved readers. However, it does have flaws, and I don't think in this publishing year that it's quite good enough to take home the Newbery.


Published in September by Amulet Books/Abrams

2013 Contenders: Twelve Kinds of Ice, by Ellen Obed

Ah, the elusive Twelve Kinds of Ice. Betsy Bird stepped out of her time machine and started talking it up way back in spring, and then reviewed it in July.  The rest of us have been hoping for a glimpse ever since, but ARCs were scarce as hen's teeth, so this reviewer had to wait until she could ILL it from a neighboring library last month.

(Yes, last month. I apologize for the radio silence, but every germ north of the equator descended upon my immune system a couple of weeks ago. It's been like a Michael Crichton novel up in here.)

In case you haven't been lucky enough to put your hands on it yet, Twelve Kinds of Ice is a sort of love letter to to an idyllic winter spent on ice skates. As the temperature drops, the narrator and her siblings watch for the first kind of ice - a thin layer on the top of the milking pail. From then on, it's a countdown until they can build their neighborhood skating pond. As spring creeps in, the pond shrinks and shrinks until only "dream ice" is left.

(And that there prosy description does it so little justice that it's basically like saying that Moby Dick is about some grouchy old guy looking for a whale.)

So, what is it? Where does it belong? Roger Sutton and his Horn Book crew had a hard time deciding. The copy I read was cataloged as juvenile fiction, but it's clearly a memoir too, and given the crystalline precision of the language, you could easily call the whole thing a prose poem.

It's not stuffy, though. It's not one of those dreaded books that appeals to librarians more than children. If I may, just this once, drag out the "my kid liked it" argument, um, my kid loved this book. I read it to her one night, all in one sitting, and then I basically had to restrain her from looking up property in Maine. It has such immediacy, such energy, and such joy that, despite its quaintness, it hits you like a gust of frosty air.

Can you tell that I love this book? It's almost perfect, and when I say "almost," the bug I'm thinking of may, as they say, be a feature. My feminist hackles were raised by the fact that the girls all go figure skating, the boys all play hockey, and there is no gender crossover whatsoever. I think that's a function of the autobiographical nature of the book, but it would be nice if that were made more clear in some way. A subtitle, perhaps? A Memoir of My Childhood, When Girls Didn't Play Hockey? 

As for the Newbery? I'd be hard-pressed to name a more deserving book this year. It has been a long time since I've seen prose this beautiful. Stylistically distinguished all the way.

P.S. - Sam lurves it too.

2013 Contenders: Face Book, by Chuck Close

First things first: Face Book has no shot at the Newbery, given that without the illustrations, the whole thing falls apart. But I wanted to talk about it anyway, because it's a kind of book that I think often slips through the awards cracks, despite its value.

As is fitting, given its subject, Face Book is heavily illustrated, not only with photographs of Close's artwork, but also with pictures of him in his studio, as well as personal photos. The book's centerpiece is actually a set of fourteen of Close's self-portraits, cut into thirds so that they can be mixed up, sort of like those old playground toys that let you put the head of a giraffe on a lion's body and an ostrich's feet. (The front cover shows one possible combination.) It's an excellent tool that lets children see how different art media can be used.

It's also, however, the sort of tool that often gets considered "gimmicky." Nonfiction books that test the boundaries of what a book can do don't tend to be recognized for the major awards. Often, that's a wise choice, but sometimes, I think it lets something genuinely useful go unrecognized.

Face Book is structured as an interview with Close, and the acknowledgments state that the book is based on an actual interview in which several 5th-graders were able to ask Close some questions. As such, most of the words are Close's, and he's listed as the author, but it's clear that the book was compiled and put together by someone else (the names Joan Sommers, Amanda Freymann, and Ascha Drake show up in the fine print of the copyright notice). Literary awards selectors don't generally like authorship by committee, so that's a second strike against Face Book being recognized right there.

Nonetheless, Face Book does a great job of getting inside an artist's head, explaining how Close chooses his subjects, discussing why he uses so many different media, and even giving readers an inside look into the process of overcoming his disability (Close suffered a spinal artery collapse in 1988, and lost much of the use of his legs and arms). I think the interview format and the liberal use of Close's art will make this a highly accessible book for young readers. Of all the children's biographies of artists that I've read, it's certainly the one that gets the closest (no pun intended!) to its subject.

So, despite the fact that it's constructed in a way that essentially precludes it from awards consideration, Face Book is a highly successful work. I'd recommend it in a trice to anyone with an interest in modern art.


Published in April by Abrams Books for Young Readers

2013 Contenders: Goblin Secrets, by William Alexander

As you may have heard, Goblin Secrets just won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Honestly, the first I'd heard of it was when it made the shortlist. Which is vaguely frustrating. It feels like Sam and I have covered a lot of what's out there in terms of Newbery-eligible books this year, and then something like this comes along. PUBLISHERS: STOP PUBLISHING SO MANY GOOD BOOKS! Wait. Strike that; reverse it.

(Apologies in advance for the rambling, feverish nature of this review. I've been up the past three nights with a sick six-year-old.)

Anyway, back to Goblin Secrets. Two minute summary: orphan Rownie lives with a raggle-taggle group of children under the protection of a Baba-Yaga-esque witch who moves her house around at will. In their city of Zombay, where sinister automatons patrol the streets, acting has been outlawed by the mayor. Against this backdrop, Rownie finds himself drawn to a mysterious troupe of goblin performers who may hold the key to the mystery of his missing brother.

It's not a bad book. It's actually quite enjoyable, but when I start to zero in on the Newbery criteria, I don't see a lot of distinction. The characters, aside from Rownie, are not particularly well-developed. The setting is super cool, but again, I don't feel like it's described as precisely as it could be. The plotting is neatly accomplished, but not extraordinarily so.

And then there's the question of whether it stands alone. It's billed as the first in the Zombay series.We don't usually talk about the first books in series in terms of the standalone question, but I think it's relevant in this case. Alexander introduces a lot of elements (the coal-making, the automatons, the peculiar qualities of the masks) that he clearly means to develop further in later books. While that works to pique the reader's interest, it also gives Goblin Secrets a sort of foggy, incomplete quality.

Looking over the list of past NBA winners, it seems that there's been very little overlap with the Newbery Medal. I wonder how much that has to do with who's judging. The National Book Award judges are all authors, while the Newbery committee is primarily made up of librarians. Clearly, we're looking for different things in books. I wonder if a judging panel made up of authors (a panel that includes Susan Cooper and Gary Schmidt this year) gives more credit than we do for ambitious world building - which is where Goblin Secrets really shines - and for ambition and risk-taking in general. If so, good on them. As I've mentioned before, I don't think we're as good at recognizing those more nebulous elements of excellence. 

Published in March by Margaret K. McElderry Books (Simon & Schuster)

2013 Contenders: Bomb, by Steve Sheinkin

Bomb is being talked up in many circles as perhaps the premiere nonfiction title of the year. Jonathan Hunt over at Heavy Medal has been a great champion of it, and a lot of other people agree with him.

Frankly, upon reading it, it's easy to see why. The fugue-like narrative braids three different story threads -- the American efforts to build the atomic bomb, the efforts by the Soviets to steal the designs, and the Allied attempts to keep the Germans from completing a bomb of their own -- and does so without sacrificing clarity or cohesion. It's a magnificent achievement, and one well worth praising.

A result of the narrative dexterity is that the book demands the reader's attention. I'm not the world's biggest WWII buff, but I still found that I couldn't stop reading until I'd finished Bomb. To me, that ability to draw in a reader who isn't a devotee of the topic is a hallmark of the best literary nonfiction. It's especially noteworthy that the book remains as intriguing when Robert Oppenheimer is brooding in his laboratory as it does during the commando raid on the heavy water plant in Norway. Sheinkin knows how to write action sequences, but he isn't dependent on them to keep the reader's interest -- an especially valuable skill in nonfiction, where one can't simply create an action sequence whenever one wants.

I had two possible issues with the book. One, which Nina Lindsay has covered in detail, is that, although Bomb is seriously well-researched, it's also awkwardly footnoted, and contains details that make one wonder whether they were actually present in the source material. The second is that, after reading it, I'm unsure as to how well it really fits into the Newbery age range. At best, it's for the very upper end of that range, but I think it probably slots more comfortably into the YA section. It's worth noting that Sheinkin's previous book, The Notorious Benedict Arnold, won the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults, and I think that the discussions for that award -- or even for the Printz -- might be a more appropriate place for Bomb to be considered.

Regardless, however, Bomb is an excellent book, and well worth reading. I'm curious to see if the Newbery committee decides to give it some love.


Published in September by Flash Point / Roaring Brook

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

We've Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children's March does an excellent job of capturing a critical time and place in American history. It does this by choosing to focus on four individual children who participated in the marches, intercutting their stories with the larger narrative of the Civil Rights movement in general, and the city of Birmingham's struggles in particular.

Cynthia Levinson is a respected author of nonfiction articles, but this is her first book. Add her to the list of new authors to watch -- her organizational ability is superb, and her prose is clean and vigorous. Based on We've Got a Job, she has a real talent for showing how the past impacts the present, which is one of the hardest challenges of writing nonfiction.

As we've mentioned previously in this space, this year has seen the publication of a lot of Civil Rights-themed books. Of the nonfiction titles, We've Got a Job is probably the best -- I'd place it above Little Rock Girl 1957, as well as Abraham Lincoln & Frederick Douglass, which are the two others that have seen the most discussion. It does the best job, not just of telling its story, but of explaining why the story matters to children in 2012 and beyond.

Is it the best nonfiction title of the year? I wouldn't go that far, I don't think. I still feel that Moonbird is the one that I'd pick for that honor, and given the competition, I don't quite feel the need to insert We've Got a Job into the semi-final reading list for our blog. But this is a book every library should own, and a valuable contribution to children's history.


Published in February by Peachtree Publishers

2013 Contenders: Crow, by Barbara Wright

The Wilmington Insurrection of 1898 is one of the lowest points in American history. It remains the only successful coup d'etat in the United States, as a group of white supremacists overthrew the democratically elected mayor and town council and installed their own local government. The local black-owned printing press was destroyed by a mob, many blacks were killed, and thousands more were driven from town. Appeals to President William McKinley and the federal government for justice were met with stone-cold silence. It would be sixty years -- sixty years! -- before anything like a restoration of black civil rights took place.

Crow follows Moses Thomas, a black youth on the cusp of adolescence, through this time period. Moses' father is an employee of the Daily Record, and a prominent leader in the community, while his mother works as a housemaid for a white family, and his grandmother takes in wash and ironing. As the Insurrection unfolds, Moses' world begins to unravel, and he learns firsthand how cruel life can be -- as well as the reality of bright spots amidst the gloom.

This is not a happy novel. Everything is not magically made right at the end -- understandably, since it spans less than two years, rather than the better part of a century. But the prose soars, and Moses emerges as an indomitable character, one who understands that ideas of justice and truth will prevail, in his own personal life, if not always in the larger community. It's a hard book, but somehow a beautiful one.

I've read a lot of books this year that touch on themes of Civil Rights and race relations, including No Crystal Stair, Abraham Lincoln & Frederick Douglass, Glory Be, and Little Rock Girl 1957. But of them, I think Crow is the best. It's beautifully-written and harrowing, a novel that doesn't shy away from the reality of evil, but at the same time provides characters with warmth, depth, and even joy, no matter how bleak the circumstances become. I highly, highly recommend this book, and I imagine we'll be discussing it further as we start to focus in on our shortlist.


Published in January by Random House.

2013 Contenders: Titanic: Voices from the Disaster, by Deborah Hopkinson

I don't have any particular interest in the Titanic disaster, but I found this book riveting. It reminds me of last year's Amelia Lost, in that you know perfectly well how it's going to end, but you're still on the edge of your seat. I really, really wanted them to find more lifeboats, you know?

Hopkinson achieves this effect through her masterful use of primary sources. As the title indicates, much of the text consists of eyewitness accounts from aboard the ill-fated ship. The structure is mainly chronological, with a short detour in the second chapter to describe the physical layout of the Titanic. At each phase of the journey, we follow the viewpoints of a set of passengers and crew members that includes emigrant families, socialites, children, officers, a stewardess, and a radio operator. As the mishaps and poor decisions start to mount, the reader observes their effects from every angle. At the moment of impact, we are privy to both the lighthearted joking in the first class smoking room and the panic of third class passengers as seawater begins to seep into their cabins. All of this is presented in crisp, clear third-person prose that never turns melodramatic or maudlin.

Well-placed photographs enhance the reading experience, as do telegrams, maps, and ephemera such as a first class dining menu. Sidebars are also judicially placed, adding depth to the account without interrupting the flow of the text. The back matter is truly impressive, comprising everything from a compendium of survivor letters to a table that reexamines the lifeboat launch sequence.

I have only one real complaint. The book's great strength is also its weakness: with so many characters, I kept forgetting who was who and having to flip back to the first couple of chapters. Their individual fates are recounted in a "People in this Book" section in the back, but a brief list of dramatis personae near the table of contents would have been handy.

Where does it fall in terms of Newbery criteria? In the area of presentation of information, it beats anything I've read this year, though I haven't read widely in nonfiction. I think it also excels in plot and character, and possibly style too. Another excellent 2012 title to add to the pile!

Published in April through Scholastic Press 

2013 Contenders: What Came From the Stars, by Gary D. Schmidt

What Came From the Stars opens in the middle of an epic fantasy conflict, dropping the reader square into an alien, unfamiliar world with zero explanation. It's not particularly easy to follow, but it's clear that there is a group of people called the Valorim, that they're under siege, and that they're losing badly. Before their loss is complete, one of them forges a chain, and imbues it with the Art of the Valorim before sending it off on a journey through space. As it happens, the chain finally alights in the lunchbox of one Tommy Pepper, a sixth-grader in Plymouth, Massachussets.

Tommy is having a lot of problems. His mother has recently died in a car accident, a tragedy for which Tommy blames himself. A greedy real estate developer is angling for his family's home. And his younger sister, Patty, has stopped speaking entirely, communicating only in looks and gestures.

Once Tommy puts the chain on, strange things begin happening. Immediately, he has magical artistic talents. He says words in an unknown language, and begins to confuse his own life and world with that of the Valorim. Bizarre events begin taking place around him, starting relatively benign, but becoming increasingly malevolent. It becomes clear that someone from the other world is very interested in getting the Art back, and they're willing to do anything to obtain it.

As a plot summary, it sounds like it could be interesting indeed. But the execution is terribly muddled, and it simply doesn't cohere in a way that would make the book successful.

Two of the biggest problems were the same ones that bothered me so much about Okay for Now, Schmidt's much-discussed book from last year. One is that the central idea, that art is tremendously powerful, is compressed into a crashingly obvious metaphor -- the MacGuffin is called "the Art," and the discussions about it between the characters read more like philosophical conversations than actual dialogue. The second is that the book is jam-packed with subplot after subplot, only some of which are given adequate time, but all of which are resolved in an unsettlingly upbeat ending.

There are other issues, which I can't discuss without spoilers, so don't read on if you're averse to such things. The structure of the book is confusing to the point of completely frustrating the reader. Although the epilogue(s) help somewhat, it's terribly difficult to figure out what exactly is going on in the fantasy-world sections. It's a deliberate technique, one that does perhaps give the reader a feel for what Tommy may be experiencing, but it errs on the side of being too obtuse. This is especially true once the plot crosses over into the real world. There's a weapon, for instance, called an orlu. Tommy fights with it at one point, and several other people are around to see it. Yet it's never described, other than a statement that it's worn at the shoulder, and I still don't have any idea what it might be.

I also don't understand what's motivating Tommy at times. The plot requires the presence of a creature from the other world, an O'Mondim (which, as these things go, sounds to me less like a monster, and more like a particularly stout brand of Irish ale). Tommy makes one out of sand and more or less accidentally brings it to life, but there seems to be no reason, conscious or otherwise, for him to do it. It has to do with the Art, but how exactly the Art functions seems unclear as well. Why does Tommy forget nearly everything that's happened after the Art returns to the other world? And why, for that matter, does everyone else? And if everyone else has forgotten what's happened, how does Alice Winslow recall enough to write the glossary at the end?

Honestly, I kind of wanted the whole book to turn out to be a sort of poltergeist thing, in which the stress and trauma that Tommy has experienced start manifesting themselves in unusual and unpleasant ways. However, the book doesn't really give the reader the option of reading it that way, as there are physical artifacts from the other world that remain through the ending. You could read it as a metaphor, I guess, but I don't think it holds together enough to really make that practical.

As you may have guessed, I'm not among them, but Gary D. Schmidt has an intensely loyal and devoted following. I don't think even they are going to get behind What Came From the Stars enough to push it to any of the ALA awards, however. It's an interesting idea, but unfortunately, the novel itself is fatally flawed.


Published by Clarion / Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and out now.

2013 Contenders: Breathing Room, by Marsha Hayles

Until 1946, when trials with streptomycin began, there was no effective treatment for tuberculosis. None. If you came down with the disease, the best you could do was go to a sanatorium and hope that fresh air and bed rest would improve your symptoms. It wasn't much of a hope -- some records show that half of all patients who entered a sanatorium were dead in five years -- but it was the only hope available.

Adults came seeking a cure, but children came too -- children like thirteen-year-old Evvy Hoffmeister, the narrator of Breathing Room. Separated from her (uninfected) twin brother and the rest of her family, struggling for her health, and subject to the mind-numbing tedium of the Loon Lake Sanatorium's daily routine, Evvy has to try and be brave in deeply dispiriting circumstances.

The novel infuses small scenes and brief moments with pathos and significance. Because so much of what Evvy and the other girls at Loon Lake have to endure is unbearably banal -- lying motionless in bed, not being allowed to talk, having no distractions at all from the white walls and the thoughts in one's head -- even the slightest change is exciting and meaningful. The way that the relationships between Evvy and her roommates grow and develop is beautifully handled with almost no excess words.

Breathing Room is not an easy book. It's unsparing in its depictions of the disease, indignity, and death that take place inside the sanatorium. It has precious little action, and a plot that doesn't lend itself neatly to a summary. When one of the characters dies, the others try to figure out why it happened, but their awkward, overdramatic explanations simply point out that the disease does whatever it wants, inscrutably and unstoppably. It's a quiet book, but a challenging one.

But it rewards those challenges. It's of high literary quality, particularly when it comes to its characters, its setting, and its themes. It's a masterful meditation on a time, a place, and a group of people that history has largely forgotten -- one that both captures their lives and universalizes their experiences, in the tradition of Willa Cather or Scott O'Dell.

With the possible exception of Wooden Bones, Breathing Room is my favorite book of the year. I've heard little buzz about it, and I wouldn't dare predict it as the Newbery winner. But I do predict that I will be talking it up to anyone who will listen.


Published by Henry Holt / Macmillan, and out now.

2013 Contenders: Freaky Fast Frankie Joe, by Lutricia Clifton

When Frankie Joe's mother is sent to jail, he has to leave behind his friends at the trailer park in Laredo, Texas, and move to northern Illinois with a father, stepmother, and four half-brothers that he's never met. This doesn't sit well with Frankie Joe, and he immediately begins making plans for his escape -- plans that come to include earning money through his own business, Freaky Fast Frankie Joe's Delivery Service.

I tend to expect "new kid comes to a small, quirky town" books to have a female protagonist, so Frankie Joe was something of a breath of fresh air to me. His voice, that of a twelve-year-old who's been entirely uprooted, was my favorite thing about the book. He's a living, three-dimensional character, one whose struggles and challenges became real as I turned the pages.

The ending is the book's weak point -- it's brief and somewhat rushed, and didn't seem to me to fully address the issues that had been present only three pages earlier. Indeed, the writing as a whole was broader and less nuanced than I tend to prefer, with the dialogue being a bit exaggerated and the plot turns being overly telegraphed, though some of that can be explained by the age and personality of the narrator. It still had a bit too much of a storyboard feel to me though.

Freaky Fast Frankie Joe is Lutricia Clifton's first novel, and I think her career bears watching. Between this book, Neversink, Glory Be, and Wonder, it's been a banner year for first-time authors, which is cause for celebration. Freaky Fast Frankie Joe isn't sufficiently distinguished in the Newbery categories to place in this year's awards, but it's certainly a good start.


Published by Holiday House, and out now.

2013 Contenders: Hope and Tears: Ellis Island Voices, by Gwenyth Swain

Even though I'm not sure it was the best Newbery contender of its year, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! was an excellent book. Its use of fictional monologues and dialogues to bring to life a historical place and time was effective, and gave encouragement to anyone else who wanted to use drama to talk about history.

I don't know if Gwenyth Swain drew specific inspiration from GM!SL!, but her book, Hope and Tears: Ellis Island Voices, uses a nearly identical format to illuminate the story of America's most famous immigration station. The thirty-odd brief dramatic pieces are told by characters that span the whole recorded history of the island, from a 16th-century Lenni Lenape boy gathering oysters, to a National Park Service worker in the present day. There are also periodic sections of a page or two that provide background information about the island and its story.

I found Hope and Tears to be very good at what it does. In the voices of immigrants, station officials, aid workers, doctors, construction workers, students, and more, it provides a well-rounded picture of the complex history of Ellis Island. And, although it's not a criterion for the Newbery, it should be noted that the book is brilliantly illustrated with a wide variety of historical photographs, which add depth and life to the pages. It's a beautiful book to look at; the designers and the publisher should be proud.

I don't see another GM!SL!-style upset sweeping Hope and Tears to the Newbery this year; I know I've said it before, but there are just too many other amazing books that are competing, and that are equally, or even more distinguished. I do wonder if the Sibert committee will find it of interest. Given the fictionalized voices that make up the bulk of the book, it's not textbook nonfiction, but seeing as how the Sibert has already been awarded to, for instance, We Are the Ship, that may not be an issue. Whatever happens, I hope Hope and Tears finds readers, because it certainly deserves them.


Published by Calkins Creek / Boyds Mills Press, and out now.