2015 Contenders: Rotten Ralph's Rotten Family, by Jack Gantos

Being as Newbery-focused as we are around For Those About To Mock, we tend to think of Jack Gantos for Joey Pigza and the Norvelt books. However, Gantos started his career as a picture book author, and he's returned to Rotten Ralph time and time again for almost four decades now.

As is true of many popular picture book series, Ralph's later adventures have expanded to easy readers. In Rotten Ralph's Rotten Family, a suddenly introspective Ralph returns to his childhood home and family to try and discover the root of his rottenness. His memories of his younger years are decidedly rose-colored, but he quickly discovers that they may not be altogether accurate.

It's somehow fitting that, with Gantos at the helm, a lighthearted tale about a mischievous feline quickly takes a sharp turn into Cat Hands On Misery To Cat. The story has a moral, but that moral (essentially, "it's possible to rise above one's abusive childhood") is both highly unusual and abnormally dark in a genre that's pitched to six-year-olds. That it works at all is a testament to Gantos's dexterity and skill as a writer. Still, anyone who thought that the dream sequence in Penny and Her Marble was a bit bleak is probably going to be horrified by Rotten Ralph's Rotten Family.

What makes Gantos great, however, is his ability to blend the surreal and the all-too-real into a concoction that goes down smoothly despite lacking any excess sugar at all -- sort of like Roald Dahl if Dahl viewed humanity with affection instead of detestation. As such, Gantos fans will likely find Rotten Family right up their alley. I think it's too left-field to win the Geisel, much less the Newbery, but it's not as if Gantos needs any more awards for his books to find the readers that they deserve.


Published in March by Farrar Straus Giroux

2014 Contenders: Frog and Friends: Outdoor Surprises, by Eve Bunting

I picked this one up on a whim, since I haven't read very many of this year's easy readers that aren't a The Henk Production. Outdoor Surprises is an entry in a series that's been running since 2011, and contains three stories about Frog and the other animals who live near his pond. I liked the first one the best, in which Frog organizes a community concert, but must figure out what to do after a sore throat robs him of his singing voice on the eve of the concert.

The book is by Eve Bunting, who is now in the fifth decade of her writing career. Though she's never won any of the major ALA awards, she has picked up an Edgar (Coffin on a Case!, 1993 award) and a Golden Kite (One More Flight, 1977 award), and was the author of the text for Smoky Night, which won illustrator David Díaz the 1995 Caldecott. I have fond memories of reading The Mask and The Mirror Planet when I was a child. In other words, she's no slouch, and her books deserve to be taken seriously.

And yet, Outdoor Surprises is illustrative, because it serves to showcase that hard-to-define but real line between good and great. It's a fine book, one that I wouldn't mind reading to a child or recommending to a parent. But the characters in Outdoor Surprises seem flat, with many of the secondary characters becoming virtually indistinguishable. Easy readers rarely have a truly original plot, meaning that they often live and die by the characters and the small details associated with them. Indeed, some of the most iconic characters in children's literature come from easy readers: the Cat in the Hat, Frog and Toad, Elephant and Piggie, Little Bear. While we may someday think of Penny that way, I think it's highly unlikely that Frog and Friends will hit the mark.

This isn't to say that Outdoor Surprises is a disappointment -- it's winsome in its own way, and the illustrations (by Josée Masse, who also worked on this year's Follow Follow) are beautiful. But I doubt that this title, or the rest of the books in the series, will merit anything other than a minor mention in Eve Bunting's career summaries, and I wouldn't expect to see it in the Geisels, let alone on the Newbery list.


Published in April by Sleeping Bear Press.

2014 Contenders: Penny and Her Marble, by Kevin Henkes

Ah, Kevin Henkes and his Penny books. We spent some time with them last year, covering both Penny and Her Song and Penny and Her Doll in this space. It led to a discussion of whether or not an Easy Reader capable of winning the Newbery could possibly be written; my opinion was that the answer was probably not, not even if it was as excellent as the Penny books. And, save for my surprise when both titles were shut out of the Geisel awards, that was where I had planned on leaving the matter.

However, I was prompted to have a look at Henkes' most recent installment, because, according to at least one measure, it's the most acclaimed book of the year so far. As noted by Elizabeth Bluemle in her latest The Stars So Far, Penny and Her Marble is one of only two books this year to receive five starred reviews -- and the other, Marcus Sedgwick's Midwinterblood, is a) a YA title, and b) not eligible for any ALA awards, as it was originally published in 2011. Anything with that much buzz about it is probably worth further investigation.

In this book, Penny is taking a walk with her doll (the same one from Her Doll, in a nice bit of continuity), when she finds a marble on the neighbor's lawn. It's a beautiful marble, and so she picks it up and takes it home -- but that's when the nagging suspicion that maybe it's not really hers to take begins to eat at Penny and spoil her good mood.

It's a well-done book, certainly -- it's Kevin Henkes, who has both a Caldecott Medal (Kitten's First Full Moon, 2005) and a Newbery Honor (Olive's Ocean, 2004) to his name, and who I don't believe has ever put his name on anything that wasn't at a minimum above average. Like so much of his work, Penny and Her Marble takes a common childhood experience and invests it with poignancy, while treating a child's thoughts and concerns with profound respect. It's what the man does, and he does it as well as ever.

I'm not sure, however, why this entry in the series has gathered the most acclaim. I think the plot in Penny and Her Doll was more tightly constructed, and that Penny and Her Song did just as good a job of getting inside the head of a child dealing with a conflict. Penny and Her Marble has a more obvious moral than either of the other two, though I wouldn't by any means call it didactic -- but I'm from the school that thinks of a moral lesson as an attribute, rather than a virtue (to swipe a phrase from the late, great Roger Ebert). The other two books, wonderful as they were, weren't recognized by the Newbery committee, and it's hard for me to see how this one will be different.

Anyway, Penny and Her Marble is an awesome book, and maybe it'll be the one in this series to earn Henkes some kind of Geisel love; if it does, it will be well-earned. I don't, however, see it being a serious Newbery contender.


Published in February by Greenwillow / HarperCollins

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: 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