Newbery Wayback Machine: The Higher Power of Lucky (2007)

 

January 2007. After two years of study, I received my shiny new Master of Library Science degree, and interviewed for what would become my first "professional" library job, at the Amargosa Valley Library in rural Nevada. 

It was also the month that The Higher Power of Lucky, by Susan Patron, won the Newbery. Patron wasn't exactly an unknown in the publishing world -- she'd written the text for several picture books, as well as a middle-grade novel called Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe -- but all of those titles dated back to the early 1990s. Lucky, however, served as a reintroduction for Patron, and she would later follow it with a pair of sequels. 

Those two events are connected in my head. Partly, this is because the first "library scandal" I can remember centered around Lucky's use of the word "scrotum," which had the kinds of people who clutch pearls about children's books clutching some serious pearls. And partly it's because Amargosa Valley is just over the Nevada border from Lucky's California desert setting; the book's descriptions of massive dust storms, creosote bushes, and hard-baked dirt always bring me back to that time in my life. 

In terms of plot, Lucky hits a lot of the Archetypal Newbery Book points. The protagonist, Lucky Trimble, is a motherless girl (check), with an absent father (check). She lives in a small town (check), which is populated by a cast of quirky characters (check). As she stands at the edge of adolescence (check) events occur that will help her to process her long-standing trauma (check). This is a familiar template; the question is, how well does Lucky execute the prescribed twists and turns of the narrative?

The answer is...pretty well! I wouldn't say that it's the best of its type on the Newbery rolls -- it doesn't quite have the emotional heft of, say, Missing May -- but it's a solid effort. Lucky's main concern, that her guardian, Brigitte, will leave her and return to France, feels genuine, and the novel does a good job of weaving together its themes and imagery. This is true even though some of them, such as Lucky's interest in the language and affirmations of 12-step programs, are unusual for a middle-grade book.

If you're not inclined to like this kind of novel, The Higher Power of Lucky may not be the one that changes your mind -- the quirky characters aren't quite The Lost Boy's Gift-level caricatures, but some of them are painted with broad strokes, and the ending is a theatrical set piece that realism-minded readers may struggle with. But, both when I read Lucky shortly after it won the Newbery, and when I reread it again a decade and a half later, I felt like it succeeds at the task it lays out for itself.

I don't know that The Higher Power of Lucky would win again if we re-selected the 2007 Newbery. Any of the three Honor books could easily have won (Penny from Heaven, by Jennifer L. Holm, Hattie Big Sky, by Kirby Larson, and Rules, by Cynthia Lord), and the committee didn't even have space for Sara Pennypacker's Clementine or Laura Amy Schlitz's A Drowned Maiden's Hair. It was a competitive year. But I think Lucky was perfectly reasonable choice, even if its appeal is somewhat narrow.

Newbery Wayback Machine: The Whipping Boy, by Sid Fleischman (1987)

 

The prince's real name may be Horace, but everyone thinks of him as Prince Brat. He is constantly pulling pranks and causing trouble, secure in the knowledge that he will never be punished. Rather, punishment is reserved for Jemmy, his Whipping Boy -- every time Prince Brat is in trouble, Jemmy must endure whatever corporal punishment is deemed sufficient for the offense.

Jemmy dreams of leaving the castle and returning to his previous life in the streets. What he does not expect, however, is for Prince Brat to show up in his room one night, insisting that Jemmy accompany him in running away. This sounds like a terrible idea to Jemmy, but when the prince gives an order, what is he supposed to do but obey? The unlikely pair quickly run into a whole host of complications -- greedy criminals, a bear, and royal soldiers among them -- leading to a final set piece in the sewers deep beneath the city.

All of this happens at an almost absurdly breakneck pace. The Whipping Boy is, at least in the edition that I read, a mere 90 pages. The plot is constantly in motion, with essentially no downtime. Kids who like a lot of action in their stories may find a lot to like here.

The book does strike me as an unusual Newbery choice, however. I didn't find the characters particularly compelling or well-developed, the setting is off-the-shelf quasi-medieval, and the prose is serviceable, but not more than that. That's not to say that I can't understand why The Whipping Boy was popular; words that Kirkus Reviews used to positively describe it at the time included "rollicking" and "melodrama," and both of those seem fair to me. If that's what the reader is looking for, they'll find it in this story, executed both briskly and well. But I'm still unconvinced that The Whipping Boy has many markers of the kind of literary excellence that the Newbery is supposed to recognize.

Possibly, it just wasn't considered a strong year. The three Honor books were A Fine White Dust, by Cynthia Rylant; On My Honor, by Marion Dane Bauer; and Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens, by Patricia Lauber. I know some elementary school kids end up reading On My Honor, but I don't think any of those books are considered upper-tier entries in the kidlit canon. The most highly-regarded books of the year all seemed to come from authors outside the USA -- Brian Jacques (Redwall), Diana Wynne Jones (Howl's Moving Castle), Philip Pullman (The Shadow in the North). 

Sid Fleischman was a man with a fascinating life -- he worked as a professional magician, served in World War II, wrote screenplays, and published adult novels, in addition to his work for children. Though he won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award in 1979 for Humbug Mountain, The Whipping Boy represented his only appearance on the Newbery rolls. His son, Paul Fleischman, would win the Newbery two years later for Joyful Noise, making them the only parent-child combo to ever take home the gold medal. 

Newbery Wayback Machine: Daniel Boone, by James Daugherty (1940)

 

Hooooooo boy.

I don't know how well it comes across, but I've tried to be fair to these early Newbery winners. While not glossing over their flaws, I've tried to show how each one fits into the emerging story of American children's literature, note the things that each one does well, and place the books in the context of their time.

My friends, all of that fails me when I come to Daniel Boone, James Daugherty's 1940 winner. It's a self-satisfied hymn to racism and Manifest Destiny, accompanied by hideously ugly (and somehow even more racist) artwork by the author. The pacing is terrible, and the prose confuses overuse of adjectives for inspiring writing. It doesn't even work very well as a biography -- it doesn't have a timeline, assumes far too much background knowledge on the part of its readers, and sometimes fails to even refer to its many poorly described characters by their full names. 

No libraries in my consortium own Daniel Boone; I had to use the statewide interlibrary loan system to even find a copy to read. It's completely out of print, a distinction that might make it unique in the Newbery canon. Even the most deeply problematic Newbery winners stay in print -- Shen of the Sea, Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, The Matchlock Gun, all are still easily available, straight from the presses. But if, for whatever reason, you want a copy of Daniel Boone, you're going to have to find it on the secondhand market, at prices that are often north of $100. 

Part of the problem is that the racism (mostly directed at Native Americans, but with jabs at African Americans as well) so thoroughly permeates the book that it would be impossible to produce an edited version, as was done for The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle and Rabbit Hill, and have more than a pamphlet left. I'm reminded of Roger Ebert, who, when speaking about software designed to remove offensive passages from DVDs, opined, "Theoretically there could be a version of Fight Club suitable for grade-schoolers, although it would be very short."

Daniel Boone himself is a complicated historical figure, and certainly one about whom a fascinating biography could be written. It's hard to get a sense of the man from Daniel Boone, however -- his personality is flattened into a caricature of a frontiersman. I don't feel like I know him much better after finishing the book than I did before I began. 

James Daugherty was well-regarded in his day, both as an author and as an illustrator -- he picked up two Caldecott Honors as well, for Andy and the Lion (1939) and Gillespie and the Guards (1957). I haven't read either of those, though I do note that Andy and the Lion at least is still in print. I can say that, at this remove, Daugherty is not a major figure in the history of children's literature. If Daniel Boone is representative of his work, it's easy for me to understand why.

The only remaining question I have is this: is Daniel Boone the worst Newbery winner ever? I think it depends on what criteria you want to use. The other real contender, in my personal view, is Smoky, the Cowhorse. Smoky is probably three times the length of Daniel Boone, and might be the single least interesting book I've ever read; from a purely technical perspective, I'd argue that it's worse than Daniel Boone. But if there's a more nauseatingly racist book among the Newberys, I certainly can't tell you what it might be; I'm unable to come up with a good ethical defense of Daniel Boone, and from that perspective, it might represent the actual bottom of the Newbery barrel. 

The White Stag, by Kate Seredy (1938)

It occurred to me while reading The White Stag that it's possible to divide those early Newbery winners into two categories. On the one hand are books that, while they'd no doubt be written differently today (and, in most cases, with a greater eye toward sensitivity on racial matters), could, on a conceptual level, pass muster with modern editors, publishers, and readers. It requires no great leap of imagination to imagine a 2021 debut, for instance, for a The Story of Mankind-style overview of world history, or a book like The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle that featured a child's adventures with a doctor who could talk to animals, or a Thimble Summer sort of novel about a child growing up in Wisconsin during the Great Depression.

On the other hand, there are books that I can't imagine a present-day author even attempting, or a publishing house in 2021 trying to put out. Who would try their hand at a piece of squirmily Orientalized glurge like The Cat Who Went to Heaven these days, or dare to make up a bunch of "Chinese folktales" like the ones that fill the pages of Shen of the Sea?

The White Stag, Kate Seredy's 1938 winner, seems to me to fall firmly into the second camp. The book is a retelling of the legend of the Huns, as they sweep inexorably across Asia and eastern Europe, on their way toward claiming their Promised Land of Hungary. They wait expectantly for the arrival of their own Joshua figure, Attila, and experience both the rewards and the wrath of their deity, Hadur (generally speaking -- the theology of the book is honestly kind of confused). All of this requires them to battle and destroy any number of other people, whose crime is essentially Being In The Way. Seredy clucks her tongue in the direction of the Huns for this, but with a level of indignation more suited to disputing a parking ticket  -- she generally seems to regard the whole affair as just One of Those Things.

Maybe I'm wrong -- maybe there's a way to retell a myth like this so that modern children could find a path into the story. There are, of course, still volumes that retell Greek and Roman mythology for children, and those stories are also remote and violent. I think it would require a totally different approach than the one The White Stag takes, however -- one that doesn't frame the events as an adventure story designed "to pay homage to a race of brave men, men whose faith in their own destiny had led them to a land they still call their own."

Honestly, it's not that great of an adventure story either -- the characters are completely flat, the setting is underutilized, and the overall plot arc doesn't have the slightest hint of suspense. Seredy does have a feel for the heightened language of myth, and the sentence-level prose is easily the best thing about the book. That language is doubly impressive when one realizes that Seredy, a native of Hungary, didn't even speak English until she was an adult -- and thought of herself more as an illustrator than an author (she would win a Caldecott Honor in 1945 for her illustrations for The Christmas Anna Angel). If I had to guess, I'd bet that it was the sparkling wordsmithing that attracted the attention of the Newbery Committee. 

A lack of competition may also have helped. The committee named three honor books, the best known of which is On the Banks of Plum Creek, number four in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series. Otherwise, the most famous American book of the year is probably And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, Dr. Seuss's first children's book (and one of the ones that the publisher just withdrew for containing offensive imagery). J.R.R. Tolkein's The Hobbit looms the largest of the children's books that came out in 1937, but it of course wasn't eligible for the Newbery. And so, The White Stag took the gold medal, though even among winners of the 1930s, it remains one of the more obscure choices.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Tales from Silver Lands, by Charles Finger (1925)

 

The Newbery Terms and Criteria loudly proclaim, "there are no limitations as to the character of the book considered except that it be original work." And indeed, over the past ninety-odd years, we've had winners representing novels, poetry, nonfiction, picture books, graphic novels, biographies, and verse novels; nearly every form has taken home the gold medal at one point or another. This includes folktale-style short stories, which have won twice -- once for Arthur Bowie Chrisman's fakelore stylings in Shen of the Sea (1926), and the year before that, when Charles Finger's Tales from Silver Lands was named the winner.

The titular "Silver Lands" are Central and South America. Unlike Chrisman's "China" tales, Finger's have at least some authenticity to them. He lived and traveled extensively in those areas during his twenties, and this book comes across as having its genesis in those times. Though Finger doesn't provide the kind of source notes we'd hope for in a book of folktales today, he does at least provide the names of his informants and the place where he learned the stories for some of the tales. (Others are given no introduction at all, and the place and culture to which they belong remains opaque.) Finger does freely admit to having heavily edited some of the stories he was told in order to make them more readable; more than once, he interrupts himself in order to complain about the discursive, meandering manner in which his informants told the tales.

Questions about authenticity aside, the stories in Tales from Silver Lands certainly have the feel of folktale collections like those of the Brothers Grimm -- eerie characters, symbolism that would make Jung proud, and a general feeling that they proceed from that state between waking and dreaming. Highlights include the Sorcerer's Apprentice-style "The Tale of the Lazy People," the trio of tales involving a pair of brothers ridding the land of three destructive giants, and the closing story, "The Cat and the Dream Man," which features the most unsettling of the villains in the book, the Fox-Faced Man, as well as an ending reminiscent of Grimm 187, "The Hare and the Hedgehog."

Two Honor books were named in 1925, Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, by Annie Carroll Moore, and The Dream Coach, by Anne & Dillwyn Parrish. Left off the list was the book that would become the most enduring American classic of the year, Gertrude Chandler Warner's The Boxcar Children. There was probably no chance that The Boxcar Children could have won, given that "children having adventures without an adult" was actually sort of controversial at the time, and the Newbery was in its Tales From Far-Off Lands period -- the only winner from 1923 to 1933 that didn't spend at least part of its plot in some exotic locale was Smoky, the Cowhorse. However, Tales from Silver Lands is certainly better than some of the other early winners, even if it hasn't become part of the kidlit canon.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Dobry, by Monica Shannon (1935)

 

Dobry is a Bulgarian boy, who lives in a Bulgarian village high in the Bulgarian mountains. He and his Bulgarian mother and grandfather tend their Bulgarian fields, raising a bountiful harvest of Bulgarian crops. Dobry has his eye on Neda, a Bulgarian girl, and makes some Bulgarian sculptures for her, as he dreams of attending Bulgarian art school. We learn about some colorful Bulgarian customs, Bulgarian folk songs, and Bulgarian stories, in this tale that positively brims with Bulgarian descriptions of Bulgarian folkways. Bulgaria!

That's not even a particularly exaggerated description of Dobry, the Monica Shannon book that took home the 1935 Newbery Medal. The book has almost nothing in the way of plot or conflict; the closest it really gets is a two-page discussion between Dobry's mom and his grandfather about whether or not Dobry should grow up to become an artist. Mom doesn't think so, Grandfather argues in favor of it, and mom resolves not to worry about it anymore, and doesn't. End scene. Back to descriptions of Bulgaria.

Dobry's nameless village is populated by characters who are more or less colorful, but none of them are villains, or even real annoyances. Indeed, the only really frightening thing involves reading about what the villagers do for fun. As the book opens, everyone is looking forward to the arrival of the "gypsy bear," who gives massages. I assumed this was just some big, strong, hairy guy -- but no, when the Romani show up a few chapters later, they have an actual bear in tow, which they've trained to walk on people's backs and give massages. Later, Grandfather is excited to try and win the Snow-Melting Games. I don't know what I expected those to be, but I did not figure that they would simply involve lying down in the snow to see whose body heat would melt the snow the fastest. And near the very end, Dobry wins the village's equivalent of a scholarship by diving into the frozen river to retrieve a golden crucifix that the priest has thrown in there, because this is a contest they hold every feast day of St. John the Baptist (Feb. 7). I'm just saying -- if these were my entertainment options, I'd probably be excited to go to art school too.

The book was apparently partly based on the early life of its illustrator, Atanas Katchamakoff. It took the Newbery ahead of three Honor books: Pageant of Chinese History, Davy Crockett, and A Day on Skates. The most famous children's books of the year were by non-US authors -- P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins and Kenji Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad -- and so weren't eligible. Even if I can't think of a single modern child I'd recommend Dobry to, it's certainly evocative of its place, and that may be enough to justify its award. 

Newbery Wayback Machine: The Summer of the Swans, by Betsy Byars (1971)

 

Fourteen-year-old Sara Godfrey is having a difficult time, in a way that I think a lot of people her age -- or who have ever been her age -- would understand. She's hyper-conscious of what she considers to be her plain looks and unpopularity at school; her emotions are swinging wildly; and she's struggling in her relationships with her family. This family is a fragile unit -- Sara's mom is dead, and her beaten-down father works out of town, and only sees them on the weekends. The primary adult in Sara's life is her Aunt Willie, who loves her, but can be abrasive and difficult. Then there are her siblings, her attractive and popular older sister, Wanda, and her little brother, Charlie, who does not speak, and has some sort of intellectual disability -- his precise diagnosis, if he's ever been given one, is never stated in the book, but his symptoms as described might place him on the autism spectrum. 

All of this makes Sara self-centered, in a manner that nearly every teenager experiences at one point or another. But one morning, Charlie is missing, and Sara begins searching for him; in the process, she begins to challenge her assumptions about herself, her family, and the other people around her.

For a book whose main plot is "the race to find a missing child," The Summer of the Swans is strangely subdued. It's a character study, rather than a thriller, and the plot elements exist largely to bring out different facets of Sara and the people around her. I think the book succeeds wildly on those terms -- I felt like each person in the book was someone who might well exist. The change in Sara's character also felt plausible and right to me. It's the perfect blend of "enough, but not too much," especially given the book's compressed timeframe. (It's really more like The Forty-Eight Hours of the Swans.)

I also loved the lyricism of the language. The descriptions of the swans themselves, both on the pond near the book's beginning, and in flight near the end, are lushly poetic without becoming highfalutin. I was also struck by the passage near the end, in which Sara compares life to a series of steps, which are different for each person, and on which each person is making different progress. I wish I'd written it, which is the best compliment I know how to pay.

The Summer of the Swans is almost fifty years old now, and there are a handful of passing cultural references of questionable sensitivity, which it might be worth mentioning to a child reader before giving them the book. It's a beautiful jewel of a novel, though, one which may not be a huge crowd-pleaser, but which rewards a thoughtful, introspective reader. The 1971 awards drew from a crowded field (including not only the three Honor books, Knee-Knock Rise, Enchantress from the Stars, and Sing Down the Moon, but also Frog and Toad Are Friends, Runaway Ralph, and The Trumpet of the Swans). I think The Summer of the Swans was a perfectly good choice for the Newbery even in that company, which is high praise indeed.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Gay-Neck, The Story of a Pigeon, by Dhan Gopal Mukerji (1928)

 

Gay-Neck, The Story of a Pigeon begins, at least in my copy, with a brief dedicatory letter from the author to one Suresh Chandra Banerji, Esq. A portion of this letter reads:

"For a pigeon, life is a repetition of two incidents: namely, quest of food and avoidance of attacks by its enemies. If the hero of the present book repeats his escapes from attacks by hawks, it is because that is the sort of mishap that becomes chronic in the case of pigeons."

This is what I believe is called "giving away the game." The plot, such as it is, is mostly Gay-Neck (so named for the patch of iridescent feathers on his throat) flying, being attacked by something, and then escaping. To be fair, Mukerji does switch it up more than his note lets on -- for variety, Gay-Neck not only escapes from hawks, but also owls, a buzzard-hawk called a Baz, and WWI airplanes trying to shoot him down.

There is a sort of larger story, in which Mukerji, who tells this story as if it's autobiographical, hatches Gay-Neck from an egg, trains him in homing, rehabilitates him from injury, and finally sends him off from India to the European front in WWI to work as a carrier pigeon. This last part traumatizes Gay-Neck so that, after a particularly harrowing mission, he refuses to fly anymore, and is invalided back home, until he's cured of his fear at a Buddhist(?) monastery. 

The most interesting parts, though, have to do with Mukerji himself. His parents live in Calcutta, but spend part of the year in the Himalayan village of Dentam. Mukerji goes up there with them, but spends all of his time out in the jungle with a hunter named Ghond -- whose connection to Mukerji is never explained -- who teaches him to do things like hunt enraged water buffalo, hide from crazed elephants, and climb up to eagles' nests. Why is he learning to do this? Who knows! What do his parents think? They don't seem to think anything, until the very end when Gay-Neck comes back ahead of Mukjeri, and his parents worry that their son might be dead. I read the entire book, and I still have no idea why this city kid and pigeon fancier is spending all of his free time reenacting Kipling with this guy. 

Gay-Neck wasn't Mukerji's first book, and since one of the earlier titles is called Ghond, the Hunter, it's possible that this gets explained there. But in the form that Gay-Neck was published in...let's just say that I've read The Grey King, The High King, and Dicey's Song, and this might still be the Newbery that "stands alone" the least. 

Be that as it may, Gay-Neck was also a milestone in this history of the Newbery Medal. Dhan Gopal Mukerji, who had emigrated the US as a young man, would become the first person of color to win the award. (He would, alas, also be the only one to win the award until Virginia Hamilton in 1975(!); it's an unfortunate truth that sometimes progress happens slowly.) The one classic from the year, A.A. Milne's Now We Are Six, wasn't eligible, so Gay-Neck was probably a fair choice, as odd a book as it is.

Also, this is just a guess, but I think it's safe money that Gay-Neck is Bert's favorite Newbery winner.

"If you tell me more about this Ghond fellow, I'll show you my paper clip collection."

Newbery Wayback Machine: Miss Hickory, by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey (1947)

Rachael warned me before I started Miss Hickory that it was a "weird book," in a tone somewhere between amusement and caution. My friends, let me tell you -- she knew what she was talking about. My journey through the Newbery winners has led me through a society of superintelligent rats, onto a planet ruled by an Orwellian disembodied brain, past what might be the most surreal version of Kentucky possible, and right to the gates of a cemetery where a child is being raised by the dead -- and I'm not sure anything I've encountered has been half as bizarre as Carolyn Sherwin Bailey's 1947 medalist. 
 

Let me try to explain what goes on in this one. The titular Miss Hickory is, for the second time in Newbery history, a protagonist who's a sentient doll. But, where Hitty was just a normal doll, albeit one that possessed consciousness, Miss Hickory is perfectly capable of walking around, eating and drinking, and carrying on conversations. As the book opens, Miss Hickory's owner, a girl named Ann, has left for the winter with her family and abandoned Miss Hickory, meaning that our heroine is going to have to fend for herself. A crow friend of hers finds Miss Hickory an abandoned robin's nest to stay in, and from there, the novel proceeds episodically. Miss Hickory helps some hen-pheasants form a Ladies' Aid Society; rescues a frog who's stuck in the ice; and, after some dithering, joins animals from near and very, very far, living and dead, for a procession to the barn, where the kind of Christmas Miracle that your aunt might share a story about on Facebook is taking place. There's also an entire chapter in which Miss Hickory doesn't appear at all, in which Doe and Fawn do their best to reenact the first five minutes of Bambi. 

Up until about three quarters of the way through Miss Hickory, it's weird and not all that exciting -- but not much weirder or less exciting than, say, Rabbit Hill. The book keeps insisting that Miss Hickory is stubborn and hardheaded, but I didn't think the evidence was that persuasive -- at one point, she refuses to go with the barn cat to see the great entertainment of a cow being given medicine, and, because she doesn't think anything is going to happen until she sees the procession of the animals, she makes it into the barn, but doesn't get to actually see the Christmas Miracle. But then, just as winter is ending, she runs into a squirrel who's done a bad job storing enough nuts to make it through the winter.

At this point, reader, the squirrel, crazed with hunger, RIPS OFF MISS HICKORY'S HEAD AND EATS IT. As he chews, the decapitated head gives a soliloquy to her body, telling her body how selfish and stubborn she's been for her whole life. Once the head has been fully devoured, Miss Hickory's body, now free of all care, climbs up to the top of an apple tree, sticks her neck into a crack in a branch, and becomes fully grafted into said tree. Later, Ann comes back, and finds that Miss Hickory's body, now fused to the tree, has made it so this previously unfruitful apple tree is now flowering and growing again. Miss Hickory's body, which is also in full flower, resolves to grow an apple just for Ann. End scene.

I have no idea what prompted this mescaline-infused fever dream of a conclusion. I have even less of an idea why Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, her editor, or the Newbery committee thought it was a good idea. The committee named five Honor books, so it seems to me that the 1947 field wasn't considered a weak one, although I'm unfamiliar with all five, and none of them are considered "classics." The best-known eligible books from the year are probably a pair of picture books, Scuffy the Tugboat and The Little Fur Family, and The Littlest Angel, which is the kind of book that never makes any lists of critics' favorites, but which, according to Publishers Weekly, was the 15th-best-selling children's book of the entire 20th century.

I honestly don't know what to think of Miss Hickory. I don't think it's particularly good, or that it works in any meaningful sense -- but I'll be danged if it isn't memorable, a book that I'll have a much harder time forgetting than most of its peers. And I suppose that's its own kind of accomplishment.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Invincible Louisa, by Cornelia Meigs (1934)

 

An interesting facet of the experience of reading some of the older Newbery winners is the difference between their reception at the time of their publication and the way they come across now. When Invincible Louisa, Cornelia Meigs' 1934 winner was published, Children's Literature raved that it was a "graceful, well-written account," adding that Meigs "weaves in many evocative descriptions of Louisa's environment and feelings, thus creating a biography that seems more interesting and appealing than a more factual, unadorned work."

Reading Invincible Louisa in 2020, I found it a dull grind of a book. The tone, full of mawkish sentimentality and unconcealed hero worship, was off-putting and strange. In order to enjoy Invincible Louisa at all, one has to fully sign on to the theory that Louisa May Alcott was not only one of The Greatest Writers Ever, but that both she and every member of her family were some of the finest specimens of humanity that America has ever produced, worthy of the most profound respect and admiration. The hagiographic tone sits uneasily with me, and starts to feel downright defensive in places -- most notably when discussing Louisa's father, Bronson Alcott, the least practical of the New England Transcendentalists, and a man who, let's be honest, failed out of a lot of the things he tried to do. 

It also helps -- a lot -- if the reader already possesses a wealth of background knowledge on its subject. Invincible Louisa assumes that its audience has already read and is intimately familiar with the details of Alcott's most famous work, Little Women. Now, that book remains a classic, and there are still plenty of modern children who are familiar with the story -- if not from the novel, then perhaps from one of the four classic film adaptations of it. However, my guess is that the number of children who require no explanation as to the identities and importance of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau is miniscule, as are those who can tell you the entire plot and theme of Pilgrim's Progress -- which are additional things that Invincible Louisa takes for granted. Given all of this, it's hard for me to picture many children who would make much headway with the book, assuming they even picked it up.

Speaking of children picking Invincible Louisa up, I'm not sure I've ever seen a book issued with so many different covers with such little appeal. The image at the top of this article is the edition I read, which, with its severe black and white shot of Alcott in profile on a faded gold background, is almost confrontationally off-putting. But there's a whole wealth of other choices:

There's the original 1933 edition, where Louisa seems to be in the process of turning into a giraffe

A 1975 printing, in which Louisa is a knockoff Paul Klee drawing, and her soul is trying to escape from her puckered eyeballs.

The 1968 printing, with near-unreadable text on the blue cover, and an "insert image here" silhouette of Louisa

The "I did this in five minutes using royalty-free images and fonts" Kindle cover

The 1991 cover, which depicts the time that Louisa spent attending Sweet Valley High

And the 1995 "designed by grandma" cover, which, bizarrely, seems to still be the one the publisher is using.

Poor Louisa. An iconic writer deserves better than this.

Eight Honor books were named in 1934, which is tied with 1931 for the all-time high. The best known of them is Wanda Gág's The ABC Bunny, which is the book I would have chose for the Newbery, but which, as a picture book, probably didn't stand a chance of taking the top honor that year. At any rate, we still have Invincible Louisa, though it's clad in some of the worst packaging imaginable.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Thimble Summer, by Elizabeth Enright (1939)

Thimble Summer opens in the middle of a horrible hot and dry spell in rural Wisconsin. Nine-year-old Garnet Linden has gone swimming with her brother Jay in what's left of the nearby river. As she explores the exposed riverbed, she finds a silver thimble. That very night, the rains finally come, in a joyous, chaotic storm.

So begins Garnet's "thimble summer," full of joyous and exciting memories. They're memories fully grounded in the time and place of the Depression-era Midwest -- accidentally getting locked in the library with her best friend Citronella, taking in a starving teenaged orphan, winning a blue ribbon at the fair for a prize pig. All of this is described in sparkling, incisive prose, which is a delight to read. 

This is an episodic, low-stakes novel, but one that excels in its ability to conjure up a time and a place. The characters are also brilliantly executed -- I especially appreciated Garnet's quickly shifting moods, where sadness easily gives way to happiness, and vice versa. It felt grounded in the reality of being a child, in the way that the best children's literature does.

And, in all honesty, Thimble Summer may be my favorite of the '20s/'30s Newbery books that I've read. It's not perfect -- for example, contemporary readers will notice the book's handful of passages about Native Americans and may question the sensitivity of some of them (though, to be clear, as these things go, this isn't Caddie Woodlawn or Hitty). It does hold up better than most American children's novels of that vintage, and it seemed to me to be a particularly honest novel, both in its descriptions of setting, and in its emotional tenor.

Elizabeth Enright's storied career would, in addition to her 1939 Newbery win, net her an Honor in 1958 for Gone-Away Lake, the title she's probably most famous for now. That one was ranked #42 in School Library Journal's 2012 survey of children's novels, with two of her other books also showing up: The Saturdays (#75), and The Four-Story Mistake (#80). Five Newbery Honor books were named in 1939, the best-known of which is Richard & Florence Atwater's Mr. Popper's Penguins. It was a competitive year, which also featured Dr. Seuss's The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling, which didn't make the Newbery list, but did win the Pulitzer Prize. Even in this storied company, I think Thimble Summer holds its own, and I'm glad for the time I spent with it.

 

Newbery Wayback Machine: The Twenty-One Balloons, by William Pène du Bois (1948)

Professor William Waterman Sherman has taught math at a boys' school in San Francisco for forty years. Given that this is his background, his dream in retirement -- to spend an entire year living in blissful solitude on a carefully constructed hydrogen-filled balloon, without ever touching down -- is eminently understandable. 

It also, sadly for Professor Sherman, is a dream easily disrupted by a suitably uncooperative seagull. A hole in the balloon the size of said seagull leads him to come down on the island of Krakatoa. The island is supposedly uninhabited, but turns out to host a secret group of San Franciscan exiles, who have stumbled upon the diamond mine to end all diamond mines. 

Most of the remainder of the plot of The Twenty-One Balloons, which won William Pène du Bois the 1948 Newbery Medal, consists of the good Professor learning about the society of the Krakatoan residents. Their fabulous diamond-given wealth has allowed them to stealthily import materials for opulent houses, each in the style of a different country. We learn about their form of government (which is, somehow, based on restaurants), their unusual names (each family is assigned a letter of the alphabet, which leads to the book's best joke), and their futuristic inventions (the bedsheet roll works much better than the electrified bumper car-style furniture). However, readers can put the year in which the book is set (1883) together with the location of Krakatoa, and guess that this society may be running on borrowed time.

All of this is narrated by Professor Sherman himself, in a frame story that involves his rescue, and his ensuing lecture before the Western American Explorers' Club. The novel owes a huge debt to Jules Verne (who is name-checked in the book), and a fair amount to Hugh Lofting, Mary Norton, and other authors in the "fantastic adventure" genre that was popular in the first half of the 20th century. The way in which The Twenty-One Balloons stands out may be in the narrowness of its focus. Unlike most of the other books in this style, it's not episodic -- despite traveling around the world, the Professor only visits the one exotic locale. Most similar titles also include at least one child as a traveling companion for the adult adventurer, but Professor Sherman emphatically does not. Now that I think about it, I believe there are only two children in the book who even have speaking lines, and neither of them emerge as a distinct character.

If I'd read The Twenty-One Balloons as a child, I'm pretty sure I would have thrilled to it, in much the same way that I did to Pippi Longstocking and The Mysterious Flight to the Mushroom Planet. As an adult, I found it quaint, but -- except for a paragraph featuring a Native American chief, and a handful of the kind of offhand remarks about "natives" that are nearly impossible to avoid in books of this vintage -- generally inoffensive, and sometimes charming. 

Pène du Bois illustrated The Twenty-One Balloons, and was well-enough regarded as an illustrator to make him one of a handful of people to figure in both Newbery and Caldecott history -- he took two Caldecott Honors, for Bear Party in 1952, and Lion in 1957. His 1948 Newbery win came in a year that featured an embarrassment of riches. Five Honor books were named, including one that's likely better known these days, Misty of Chincoteague, by Marguerite Henry. Other well-known books from that year include Betty MacDonald's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, as well as a whole bevy of classic picture books: Goodnight Moon, It Looked Like Spilt Milk, Stone Soup, and White Snow, Bright Snow (which won the Caldecott). But, in its hydrogen-powered glory, The Twenty-One Balloons soared over all of them to take the gold medal.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, by Mildred D. Taylor (1977)

Cassie Logan lives with her family -- her parents, her three brothers, her grandmother, and a family friend, Mr. Morrison -- in rural Mississippi during the Great Depression. These are hard times and a hard place for a Black family, but the Logans have something that serves as their anchor -- four hundred acres of land, which they work and protect with fierceness and joy. However, neither the bonds of family nor the grounding of the land can save Cassie from a hard education in the racism of her surroundings. Incident after incident drives this point home, until a climatic summer night involving a robbery, a lynching attempt, and a fire that threatens everything the Logans have.

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry puts the reader so firmly in its setting that I could almost feel the red dust between my toes. This also extends to the characters, each of whom seemed three-dimensional and real. Each of Cassie's family members, all the way from Big Ma to her youngest brother, Little Man, have their own hopes and fears, dreams and desires. The secondary characters also come alive, with even the worst of them, such as the odious White storekeeper Kaleb Wallace, remaining rooted in reality. It's hard to overstate how well Mildred D. Taylor describes the place, time, and people in this novel.

As legendary children's literature critic Zena Sutherland once wrote (in a positive overview of the novel), "[Roll of Thunder] is not an unflawed book, but it is a memorable one." There are, indeed, some places where it's possible to quibble with the plotting; most notable to me is Little Man and Cassie's reaction to seeing their race written inside their school readers, which felt to me like it happens way too early in the book, given the way the overall plot arc involves the children coming to a realization of how permeated with racism the world around them is. But overall, the book works so well that my mind didn't linger on any plot difficulties or other blemishes.

1976 was a strong year for American children's literature. The 1977 Newbery Committee listed two honor books, Abel's Island, by William Steig, and A String in the Harp, by Nancy Bond; other well-regarded titles from the year include Frog and Toad All Year, by Arnold Lobel; The Missing Piece, by Shel Silverstein; and Summer of the Monkeys, by Wilson Rawls. Even in that company, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry stands as a worthy winner, and an enduring classic in the Newbery canon.

Newbery Wayback Machine: Ginger Pye, by Eleanor Estes (1952)

The title character of Ginger Pye is a fox terrier mix who belongs to ten-year-old Jerry Pye. The story covers the way they come together, and several of their ensuing adventures, until Ginger is abruptly dognapped halfway through the book. The remainder of the novel largely consists of the attempts of Jerry and his sister Rachel to locate Ginger, until the dénouement when they are reunited. 

The world of Ginger Pye is a relatively small one; the scene never leaves the environs of the Pyes' hometown of Cranbury (a thinly fictionalized version of West Haven, Connecticut). That world, however, is outlined with a keen eye. I could clearly visualize the places, events, and, especially, the characters. The supporting cast, in particular, is described in ways that feel true to the ideas children have of other people. From Sam Doody, the captain of the high school basketball team, whom the Pye children look up to with barely-disguised hero worship; to the children's Uncle Bennie, who is only three years old, but worthy of profound respect, simply because he's an uncle; to Mr. Tuttle, who is one of the tallest men in town when seated, but only of average height when standing, because his height is concentrated in his torso -- they all seemed, not only like recognizable people, but those people as they might be described by elementary school-aged children. 

This isn't a plot-driven novel, and the plot as it stands is probably the weakest element of Ginger Pye -- the confrontation between the Pye children and the dognapper seems like it's going to provide the climax of the book, but it never really happens. On the other hand, the plot isn't really the point; as in so many of these mid-century "family novels," the individual episodes are what the reader remembers after finishing the book.

As is often the case in books from the 1950s, there are some questionable racial attitudes in Ginger Pye. They're always mentioned more or less in passing -- I don't remember there being a single character of color on the book -- but they're there nonetheless, as when Rachel worries that that a whistle will bring a congregation of "Gypsies" around, or when she frets that a bee sting on her lip makes her "look like a Ubangi." It's the sort of thing one might want to discuss with a child reader before handing them the book.

Five Honor books were named in 1952: Americans Before Columbus, by Elizabeth Baity; Minn of the Mississippi, by Holling C. Holling; The Defender, by Nicholas Kalashnikoff; The Light at Tern Rock, by Julia Sauer; and The Apple and the Arrow, by Mary & Conrad Buff. I've never read any of them, so don't feel particularly able to talk about how they stack up to Ginger Pye, but I also note that none of them have become lasting classics. The best-known book that wasn't recognized by the Newbery committee is likely Ellen Tebbits, the second novel by Beverly Cleary. That one is well-regarded, but as far as I'm aware, isn't considered one of Cleary's top-tier titles. If parts of Ginger Pye perhaps haven't aged all that well, it was still one of the finest achievements in American children's literature for its year, and was a fine choice for the Newbery.

Newbery Wayback Machine: The Tale of Despereaux, by Kate DiCamillo (2004)

The Tale of Despereaux likely needs little introduction from me. It exists in the rarified air of A Wrinkle in Time, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, The Giver, and Holes -- Newbery winners that are eventually encountered by just about everyone who spends time with children's books. The last time that School Library Journal and Fuse #8 ran their Top 100 Children's Novels poll, Despereaux ranked #51, a placing that, if anything, undersells the book's popularity.

Kate DiCamillo is one of the most important American children's writers of the 21st century. She had already vaulted to prominence with her debut book, Because of Winn-Dixie, which had netted her a 2001 Newbery Honor, but Despereaux, her third novel, truly cemented her place in the firmament. Despereaux features all of her trademarks: an unlikely hero; a sweet relationship between a human and an animal; and moments of gentle humor mixed in with moments of deep tenderness. 

The novel's structure builds as several plot threads are introduced -- one in which the titular hero, a tiny, misfit mouse, meets and falls in love with a princess, and then is thrown into a dungeon; one in which a rat named Chiaroscuro, torn between his love of the light and the dark nature of ratly culture, accidentally causes a national catastrophe; and one in which a small girl named Miggery Sow is sold by her father into a life of hardship and abuse. All of these stories converge in the second half of the novel, culminating in an ending both thrilling and compassionate. 

Despereaux isn't a novel without flaws -- I may be in the minority, but I remain unenthused by the persistently intrusive narrator, and some of the descriptions of Miggery Sow start to shade uncomfortably into the physiognomic. However, they're minor flaws, and the book on the whole is a triumph. 

The 2003 publishing year featured an embarrassment of riches in American children's literature. In addition to Despereaux, the year included two highly-regarded books that would end up as Honor titles (Kevin Henkes' Olive's Ocean, and Jim Murphy's An American Plague), two classic picture books (Mo Willems' Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, and Mordecai Gerstein's The Man Who Walked Between the Towers), and Gregor the Overlander, the book that introduced a pre-Hunger Games Suzanne Collins to a wide audience. Even with that competition, however, Despereaux was and remains an uncontroversial choice for the gold medal. 

Newbery Wayback Machine: Miracles on Maple Hill, by Virginia Sorensen (1957)

I'll confess: it took me a long time to get through Miracles on Maple Hill, Virginia's Sorensen's 1957 Newbery winner. Much, much longer than it should have taken to finish a breezy, episodic novel that clocks in at well under 200 pages.

Admittedly, books about the Magical Restorative Power of Country Living are a hard sell for this city kid. In Miracles, Marly, her older brother Joe, and her parents move from Pittsburgh to rural Pennsylvania, where Marly's mother once lived. Over time, this heals her family, provides her with a sense of genuine wonder, and even seems to completely cure her father's PTSD (which stems from his experiences in a POW camp, though it's never really explained what exactly happened to him, or even whether he served in WWII or Korea).

To be fair, a handful of my all-time favorite children's books are at least in part paeans to rural life (Twelve Kinds of Ice, Sarah, Plain and Tall), or feature characters whose lives are changed for the better after moving to the country (The Story Girl). But Twelve Kinds of Ice contains some of the most arresting prose I've ever read in a children's book, while Sarah, Plain and Tall and The Story Girl could be used in a master class on characterization. On the other hand, the prose in Miracles certainly has moments, but isn't consistently brilliant, and the characters often seemed one-note or flat to me -- the interactions between Marly and Joe, in particular, begin with a real grain of truth, but often seem to deteriorate into "girls and boys sure are different, aren't they?"

This last point feels like crux of the matter, because these kinds of loosely-plotted mid-century family novels live and die by the strength of their characters. When it works, you get Ramona Quimby, or Homer Price, or the Pye family. When it doesn't, there's a limit to how memorable the book can be, and I think that's a huge part of my problem with Miracles. It's not bad, but the lack of dimension to the main characters keeps the book from sticking in the mind, and even the avuncular Mr. Chris and the strangely dignified Harry the Hermit don't have enough depth to compensate.

Certainly, Miracles isn't the book from its publishing year that's best remembered; Newbery-eligible favorites from 1956 include Fred Gipson's tearjerker Old Yeller, Edward Eager's magical Knight's Castle, and Gene Zion's playful Harry the Dirty Dog, while non-eligible classics include English author Dodie Smith's The Hundred and One Dalmatians, and Irish-Englishman C.S. Lewis' final Narnia novel, The Last Battle. I don't think the selection of Miracles was indefensible -- to some extent, I mistrust my opinion of a book for which I may just be the wrong reader -- but I also doubt that it would win if we were to give out the 1957 award again. 

Newbery Wayback Machine: Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, by Robert C. O'Brien (1972)

Mrs. Frisby is a mouse, raising her four children alone after the death of her husband. When her youngest, Timothy, takes ill, Mrs. Frisby tries to find a way to help him -- a task that will take her into places she didn't know existed, and eventually lead her to a group of superintelligent rats, who have mysterious ties to her husband's life.

This brief summary hardly does justice to one of the genuine classics of American children's literature. It's a treasure of a book, one that, its high concept aside, works because of the real, lived-in relationships between its characters. This holds true not only for the novel's central relationships (such as those between Mrs. Frisby and Nicodemus; Mrs. Frisby and her children; and Nicodemus and Jenner in the flashback section), but for those that are more subsidiary (Brutus and Justin; Mr. Ages and Nicodemus), and even for those that exist at the very periphery of the story (Jeremy and the Owl; Mr. Fitzgibbon and Paul).

To move one step further back, the relationships work because the characters are so carefully defined. Each figure in the story has real hopes, dreams, sorrows, and fears. The mice and rats who occupy most of the novel's space are as emotionally rich as any human character would be. It helps that they occupy a world that's open-ended -- though the plot comes to a satisfying end, many threads aren't fully tied off, and many mysteries remain.

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH also reads as a surprisingly, even defiantly feminist novel. Rachael has often referred to Mrs. Frisby herself as the greatest single mother in children's literature, and I think that's a more than fair opinion. Mrs. Frisby doesn't have the genetically engineered smarts of the rats and Mr. Ages, the ancient wisdom and intimidating presence of the Owl, or the overwhelming physical superiority of Mr. Fitzgibbon and the other humans. Yet, whether comforting her children, rescuing Jeremy the crow, or risking her life in putting sleeping powder in Dragon the cat's food (the same task that killed her husband!), Mrs. Frisby shows herself repeatedly to be the bravest, fiercest, most big-hearted character in the book. The rats may have the kind of patriarchal society in which "the females sometimes went to meetings and sometimes not," but without Mrs. Frisby, they'd all be dead by the end of the story. (Mrs. Frisby has only a handful of other female characters, but I'd also point to the shrew, who is willing to stand in the doorway of Mrs. Frisby's house to protect it from an entire group of much, much larger rats, although she's mistaken in their motivations, and the rats pose no danger.)

The literary career of Robert O'Brien (whose real name was Robert Conly) was an unfortunately curtailed one. Though a journalist by profession, working for such prestigious publications as Newsweek, the Washington Times-Herald, and National Geographic, he didn't begin writing novels until his mid-forties, when he developed glaucoma, and had to move closer to his office, freeing up for writing the time he had formerly used in commuting. He published three books during his lifetime, of which Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH was the second; a fourth, Z for Zachariah, was completed from his notes by his wife and daughter following his tragic death from a heart attack at 55. However, even though we have only a few pieces of fiction from O'Brien's pen, Mrs. Frisby alone would have been enough to secure his legacy.

Newbery Wayback Machine: A Year Down Yonder, by Richard Peck (2001)

It is 1937, and Mary Alice's father has lost his job and his apartment. While he and Mary Alice's mother move into a single room, and older brother Joey heads off to join the Civilian Conservation Corps, Mary Alice herself is shuttled away from Chicago, and down to Grandma Dowdel's home in rural Illinois. A Year Down Yonder does indeed cover nearly a year in Mary Alice's life, as she learns to navigate her new school, comes to understand the rhythms of small-town life, and bonds with her grandmother, an imposing woman whose gruff, threatening exterior conceals a caring heart.

In many ways, Richard Peck's novel, which won the 2001 Newbery Medal, was even at the time something of a throwback. Featuring a protagonist who is 15 at the book's outset, and consisting of a series of vignettes rather than a single, unified story, A Year Down Yonder reminded me of Anne of Avonlea (1909), It's Like This, Cat (1963), and similar episodic books that feature a teenage protagonist, but appeal to younger readers.

I'm unconvinced that Yonder is anything like as effective as the two novels that I mentioned, however -- although I'll also freely admit that what we may actually be looking at is my personal biases and tastes as a reader. It's a short book -- a mere 130 pages in my copy -- and I just don't feel like it has anything like enough room to develop the secondary characters sufficiently. This was especially true given the ending (spoiler alert!), in which an adult Mary Alice returns to her grandmother's house and marries Royce McNabb, who moves to town halfway through the book. But Royce has barely a dozen speaking lines in the novel, and I didn't feel like I knew him well enough for that ending to have any emotional heft.

From what I've read, a lot of the love for A Year Down Yonder (and its predecessor, A Long Way From Chicago, which Honored in 1999) comes from a love for the character of Grandma Dowdel, who is at the book's center. The thing is...I just didn't like her very much. She has a great deal of kindness towards the unfortunate and downtrodden, but she also has a streak of vindictiveness that was hard for me to deal with, and a tendency to kill mosquitoes with sledgehammers, metaphorically speaking. When the town boys are knocking down outhouses for their Halloween pranks, Grandma deals with this by...setting up a trip wire in her back yard, hiding, and then, once the lead boy has tripped on the wire and broken his nose on the concrete walk, throwing glue all over him. The whole story reminded me of nothing so much as this xkcd cartoon:

Similarly, later in the book, Grandma Dowdel's artist boarder has managed to sneak the local postmistress into the attic, and is painting her in the nude. The snake that lives in the attic falls on the postmistress, who runs screaming downstairs, and then begins to run back to her house, sans clothes. What does Grandma do? Why, she says, "That's too good a show to keep to ourselves," and goes outside and fires off her shotgun so that everyone in town will look outside to see what's happening and catch an eyeful of the postmistress. I think that's intended as comedic, but I gotta tell you, it just left me feeling icky.

A lot of people love this book, and so your take on it may be radically different from mine. But I'm not a fan, and would have preferred the Newbery to go to a different title that year -- perhaps one of the four Honor books, which included Because of Winn-Dixie and Joey Pigza Loses Control.

The Winner’s Circle: Hello, Universe (2018)

Sometimes, when you get Sam, Rachael, and Tess together in the same [virtual] space, it's hard to get them to focus. They might want to spitball ideas for a Newbery tribute band. (Mos' Distinguished? Newbery Kids on the Block? Newbery Manilow?) Or they might want speculate what a Garfield/Warriors crossover fanfic would entail. (Would Garfield eat those warrior cats alive, or the other way around? Or would they all just have a lasagna party and then murder Odie?) But we finally got it together long enough to collect our thoughts about this year's Newbery winner, Hello, Universe by Erin Entrada Kelly. Like for last year's winner, we came up with a few burning questions each and answered them via online chat, and awaaaay we goooo!

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

Tess: It’s just your basic boy meets girl, boy gets trapped down well, girl consults psychic medium, girl rescues boy with jump rope, boy texts girl “hello” love story for kids.

Sam: “What’s that, stray dog whose name is totally Sacred, not Lassie? Little Virgil’s fallen down the old well? Quick, let’s get the psychic medium, her sister, and Virgil’s secret crush!”

Rachael: A misunderstood boy who doesn’t know how to take proper care of his guinea pig gets brave and makes some friends. Hopefully, they can teach him about responsible pet ownership.

Which character did you most relate to?

Tess: Probably Kaori Tanaka. I’m secretly interested in “new age” topics like astrology and crystal healing. And I have the tendency to get very enthusiastic about stuff and then rook my friends into it. I could see a young Tess making a young Sam and Rachael start a psychic detective agency with her (the way grown up Tess made her friend Eric start a Twin Peaks podcast with her LOL)

Sam: I would totally have started the psychic detective agency with Rachael and Young Tesserana Jones! As for me, definitely Smaug. If someone poked me with a stick, I might well bite them too.

Rachael: I probably related most to Valencia - the quiet girl who’s a lot snarkier on the inside than people expect her to be. I aspire to be Virgil’s Lola, though, for she is a Giver of No F*cks.

Do you think it’s believable that a sensitive, intelligent kid like Virgil would not have researched guinea pigs and found out that they are social animals who need cage mates? 

Tess: Speaking as a children’s librarian, in my professional experience, the vast majority of young people research THE CRAP out of a potential pet WAY before their parent or guardian even CONSIDERS getting them such an animal, so yes, this was a bit of a plot hole. (Unless Virgil was gifted the guinea pig, or adopted it suddenly, and had to do research afterwards.)

Sam: That seemed sort of odd to me, frankly. But Virgil clearly isn’t getting much help at home with things like “what does my guinea pig need?” so I was willing to let it slide.

Rachael: I’m glad you guys thought that was weird too. I didn’t know if I was just living in a bubble of Super Well Informed Pet Owning Kids.

How do you feel about the use of the word “retarded” in context in this book? 

Tess: I feel the context is very important. No one likes the word “retarded.” But I think it was clearly portrayed as something unsavory said by an unsavory individual. It’s not presented as an appropriate thing to say. It’s vile, and Chet is vile for saying it, that was the takeaway for me.

Sam: I pretty much felt the same way. Language can be really powerful, and the slap in the face that that word carries felt like a considered, careful way to advance the author’s point. What matters is how the word is deployed by the author, and I think carries the impact Kelly intended.

Rachael: Again, same. I think it’s timely too - “retarded” is one of those words that’s just on the edge of fading out of social acceptability. People have a vague sense that it’s offensive, but, especially if it’s not being used to describe a specific person, they won’t shut it down as quickly as some other slurs.

What do you think of the mid-novel introduction of the voice of Ruby?

Tess: I don't remember Ruby. I didn't even read this that long ago! Jog my memory?

Sam: Ruby is the voice of the character from Lola's story who starts having conversations with Virgil when he's in the well.

Tess: Oooh okay. Yes, of course, now I remember. When you said "voice," I thought it was another character who chapters were focused on, and I didn't remember a Ruby!

Rachael: Me too, Tess.

Sam: It bothered me, and I’m having trouble putting my finger on exactly why. I think it might have to do with my uncertainty as to how to handle it. Is the voice actually Ruby? If so, it’s the only unambiguously supernatural event of the book, and it doesn’t come until halfway through. Is it meant to be a well-induced hallucination? Or is it supposed to be an open question as to whether or not it’s real? If it’s either of the last two, then I think it’s underwritten. I guess I didn’t feel like I knew how Kelly wanted us to interpret the voice, and that made it hard for me to enjoy those passages.

Rachael: I think it’s the weakest part of the book, or at least it stood out to me as such on my first reading. Like Sam, I wasn’t sure how to take it. Real? Symbolic? It’s the only element of magical realism in the book (aside from the overarching theme of destiny). Of course, I’m always aware that the Newbery Committee has read these books several times, and maybe it fits in better on subsequent readings. I have misgivings about that too, though: isn’t a book that takes several readings to appreciate different from a book that stands out as excellent on your first reading? How many kids are likely to read the book more than once and pick up on these things? (I almost never read books more than once, which is part of the reason I don’t want to be on the Newbery Committee. I would balk at that stuff.)

Tess: I felt indifferent to it, I guess. I saw it as a coping mechanism. If I was trapped, I might start talking to myself, or talking to characters from myths my grandmother told me, as a way to panic less, and that’s how I interpreted those parts of the book. I felt like there were actually a lot of things in the book that you could go back and forth on whether they’re “really” happening or not. For instance, when Lola had a dream about a boy swallowed by a rock, was that a premonition of Virgil becoming trapped in a stone well, or just a weird coincidence? Are Ruby or Pah “really” in that well? The book’s not clear about it, but I was okay with it.

How much do you hate Chet?

Sam: I don’t. He’s just a Philip Larkin poem in action.
“Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.”
He doesn’t have a future, and he’s awful, but I understand how he got that way. He’s a pitiful figure rather than a contemptible one to me.

Tess: You make an excellent point, Sam. I guess I don’t really hate Chet. He’s a jerk, but he’s just a kid. I really hate his dad.

Rachael: I feel a deep compassion for him conceptually that would not stop me from wanting to punch him in the face if I ever met him.

Why do you think Chet gets a series of chapters told from his perspective?

Tess: I guess because “be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle?” Because bullies often abuse because they themselves have been abused, and they often put others down because it’s the only way they can prop themselves up, because they’re that emotionally insecure, and really we should feel sorry for them. Because Chet’s a human too. But his chapters were my least favorite chapters. Because when you’re being bullied, it doesn’t really help to know your bully is hurting too, you just want them to stop hurting you. Incidentally, R.J. Palacio did not give Julian, Auggie’s bully in Wonder, his own series of chapters, which was the subject of some controversy when that book came out. Palacio claimed she didn’t want Julian’s negative backstory to hijack Auggie’s story, but later published an ebook, The Julian Chapter, where we get his perspective, which includes the character having a redemptive epiphany. As much as I would love for it to occur to Chet break the cycle of toxic masculinity and not be mean to Virgil, or anyone else, that wouldn’t be realistic, and I guess I’m glad Kelly didn’t include it.

Sam: I couldn’t help but think of The Julian Chapter too, especially since I complained about the lack of Julian’s perspective a lot when I first wrote about Wonder as well. I don’t know how I feel about this in Hello, Universe though. We get to see that Chet is awful essentially because his father is a Terrible Person, whose approval Chet craves and can’t obtain... but we never get a redemption arc, or even a hint of self-awareness. That the character with the worst backstory (and make no mistake, Chet’s home life is an order of magnitude worse than Virgil’s, for all the time that the book spends hammering home the point that Virgil doesn’t fit in with his family) ends up with the worst prospects for the future made me deeply uncomfortable, especially given how much time the book spends on the notion of “Fate.” It’s not quite “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Universe,” but it walks right up to that line.

Rachael: Remember, though, that the entire book takes place in the span of a single weekend. I don’t think the fact that Chet doesn’t have a revelation during that time period necessarily means that Kelly is casting him into the fiery pit of her disapproval. I think, in addition to showing the inner landscape of a bully, the Chet chapters serve to show how everyone is at a different point in their own personal development and willingness to confront their own demons. That’s a major theme of the book - it’s all kind of the story of Virgil reaching a turning point in his own story. This isn’t Chet’s story, and Chet is in a different place.

I was really expecting a redemption arc for Chet. How do you feel about the fact that he doesn’t get one? Do you think the seeds of redemption were sown, like, at all? 

Tess: I was also expecting a redemption arc, like maybe that he would be consumed by guilt, team up with Kaori and company to find Virgil, and end up becoming friends with them. I’m torn about the fact he doesn’t get one. Having some real life long term experience with bullies who have not changed, despite numerous opportunities to do so, it’s realistic that Chet wouldn’t change. If there are any seeds sewn at all, they might be in his beginning to question his father’s expectations of him. He talks about attempting various sports, and not being very good at them, despite desperately wanting to excel athletically, in order to win his father’s approval. If he really digs deep and thinks about why he must struggle so hard to please his father, he may start to wonder if his father is worth pleasing, and since his father is his main role model for bullying behavior, that may then be called into question. The seeds may also be sewn in the way he’s intimidated by Valencia. I think he’s interpreting it as fear of her difference, but I think it’s more likely awe of her confidence. If he can figure out that it’s the Valencias of the world that have it going on, not the Chet’s Dads of the world, there may be hope for him yet.

Sam: I found the lack of a redemption arc distracting, frankly. It wouldn’t have to be a complete arc -- and it’s possible that you’re right in the way the tentative beginnings of such an arc are there, Tess -- but we’ve spent so much time in Chet’s head that I think the incipient arc isn’t obvious enough. Again, part of the reason that this bothers me is that, for all the time the novel spends on how Virgil’s family doesn’t get him, and on how Valencia navigates her disability, Chet seemed to me like the character coming from the most impressively awful (and emotionally abusive) background. Virgil has his Lola, Kaori has Gen, and even Valencia has Sacred. Who or what does Chet have? If fate’s a real thing, it’s given Chet a pretty raw deal.

Rachael: I agree that Chet’s situation is disturbing, but this is one of the aspects of the book that emphasizes choice over fate. I agree with Tess that Chet has been given examples of strength outside of his household. It’s really going to be up to him whether he uses that as an opportunity to question his father’s messages, or doubles down on the bullying.

What did you think of the ending?

Rachael: Loved it, at the time. It made me cry, because I thought the author really communicated how much courage is required, sometimes, to reach out in the tiniest of ways. I also liked that Virgil took a while to get there, even after the big rescue. Sometimes experiences take a while to sink in, and sometimes you get a second (or third, or fourth) chance to be brave.

Tess: I liked it. I found it surprising because when I realized this was a story about a boy trapped in a well I presumed 1) that the ordeal would draw out over several days of searching for him and 2) adults would have to be involved at some point. I would have been disappointed if we got no exchange between Virgil and Valencia. When they climb up that ladder together and are finally face to face I was yelling into the book “SAY SOMETHING VIRGIL.” But I get that he needed more time, and was happy to see him communicate with her in the final moment of the book. I also liked that he stands up to Chet, tells his family how he feels about their affectionate but belittling nicknames, and adopts Sacred.

Sam: It reminded me of the end of Criss Cross, a bit, except that in that one, the deeper connection is missed, whereas here, we’re led to believe that Virgil and Valencia will likely become friends. It struck me when I was reading it as a bit sappy, but upon reflection, I think it’s just that I was in a grumpy place personally as a reader. It’s an effective ending in the context of the book.

Do you believe in fate now?

Tess: Kind of!

Rachael: No, but I believe that events sometimes line up a way that mimics it.

Sam: Not as much as I believe in observer bias.

Do you have any final thoughts about Hello, Universe? And please answer in song. 

Sam: 

Tess:

Rachael: