Newbery Wayback Machine: Last Stop on Market Street, by Matt de la Peña (2016)

I don't think anyone saw Last Stop on Market Street as the leading Newbery contender for 2016. If you, like me, think of A Visit to William Blake's Inn as a volume of poetry, then Last Stop on Market Street is the first traditional picture book ever to take home the Medal. Back in January, when its win was announced, Market Street seemed to me like a totally left-field Newbery choice.

As I read it again in preparation for this review, I found a lot to admire in the text. The interplay between CJ, the child protagonist, and his nana is beautifully written; I loved the way that nana challenges CJ's ways of looking at the world without coming across as argumentative or dismissive. The detailed urban setting and the interesting secondary characters (especially during the bus ride) are also points in the book's favor.

I still count myself among the unconverted to Last Stop on Market Street's Newbery win, however. It's a picture book, and as in most picture books, the interplay between the text and the illustrations is key. In at least two places, the text is something less than comprehensible without recourse to the illustrations; since the Newbery criteria clearly state that illustrations can only be considered if they "detract from the text," I continue to have questions about whether or not it makes sense to give the award to a book in which the text doesn't stand alone. It feels to me like stretching the intended purpose of the Newbery past the breaking point.

This is all only my opinion, and I should be upfront regarding how much of a traditionalist I am on this subject. Although I'm a fan of boundary-breaking books, I prefer to keep the Newbery as an award solely for merit that inheres in the text. I didn't like Flora & Ulysses winning the Newbery in 2014 because I thought too much of the book depended on the illustrations; I didn't like El Deafo being an Honor book in 2015 because naming a graphic novel didn't feel in keeping with the spirit of the award to me; and I still don't like Last Stop on Market Street as the 2016 winner. (For the record, I didn't like Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize win this year either, and I love me some Dylan.)

It's pretty clear that recent Newbery committees have been willing to push the boundaries of the Newbery, and I know more people who agree with their decisions than agree with me and my stick-in-the-mud complaints. Your personal mileage may vary. I would have rather seen the award go to some of the more "traditional" contenders (Circus Mirandus; The War That Saved My Life; Moonpenny Island; Echo). But if one considers Last Stop on Market Street as a whole, it's certainly a very fine picture book, and I'm glad that it's almost certainly going to get a wider readership.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2016 Contenders: What Pet Should I Get?, by Dr. Seuss

I find posthumously published works fascinating, and one of the interesting things about them is the varied states in which the original manuscripts had been left. At one end are books such as The Dark Frigate (the 1924 Newbery winner), where Charles Hawes had actually already delivered the final manuscript to his publisher before dying. At the other end would be something like Franz Kafka's Amerika, which has such an enormous unwritten hole in the middle that it's not even clear how the author intended to get the narrative to its conclusion.

What Pet Should I Get?, which finally reached publication almost two and a half decades after the death of its author, occupies a place somewhere in between those extremes. The manuscript, which was rediscovered a couple of years ago, contained 16 uncolored illustrations. The text was essentially complete, but Seuss's working method was to type the words, cut them up, and then affix them to the illustrations with tape, taping over the old words with new ones if he chose to make alterations. However, the tape had come loose, making it difficult to ascertain exactly which version of the text had been intended. (The New York Times article I linked to there is a fascinating read if you want more detail on how the book came to be.)

The reconstruction was supervised by Cathy Goldsmith, the last person left at Random House who had actually worked with Seuss, having done the design and art direction for his last handful of titles. This reconstituted version arrived on bookstore (and library!) shelves in July, providing a surprise coda to Seuss's career.

Maybe the first thing to take note of is that this isn't a late-period work that Seuss died before finishing up. Rather, it dates from sometime during his middle period, the era of The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958), Happy Birthday to You! (1959), and Green Eggs and Ham (1960). The design of the (unnamed) protagonists is almost identical to those of One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960), and one possible theory is that What Pet Should I Get? is some sort of embryonic version of or starting point for One Fish. (There are no surviving notes about what Seuss was trying to accomplish in this book -- or why he shelved it -- and so everything at this point is conjecture.)

I was excited to see What Pet Should I Get? come out, because I love Seuss's work so much, and it looms large in my formative reading experiences. However, I think that, once the publicity around the book dies down, we'll see it as an interesting footnote to his career, but no more. Seuss's loping, tongue-twisting meter is relatively easy to parody, but the final texts of his books were the result of near-inhuman levels of revision -- one reason that, although his style is often imitated, it's essentially never equaled. The rhymes and rhythms of What Pet Should I Get? felt noticeably rougher than those of the classic titles he produced during the late '50s and early '60s, and I'm not convinced he would have let the text stand as it is if he had chosen to prepare it for publication.

The ending of the book [spoiler alert!] is also somewhat odd. After running through a long list of possible pets, the siblings who serve as our protagonists make their selection -- but they don't tell us what pet they've chosen, and the final illustration simply shows the eyes of an unidentifiable shape peeking out of the basket that the children are taking home. Seuss wasn't above ending his books on a rhetorical question ("What would you do, if your mother asked you?" from The Cat in the Hat), or even a cliffhanger (the scene of the generals perched on the wall, deciding whether or not to drop their bombs on the last page of The Butter Battle Book, is about as tense of an ending as you'll see), but this ending just felt out of place to me. What Pet Should I Get? is a book written at a level more like that in Seuss's easy readers than that of his longer, more challenging works, and although you could make an argument that the ending is set up that way to allow kids to use their imaginations to finish the story, it still felt to me like running into a wall on the last page.

Although Dr. Seuss is one of the most important figures in the history of American children's literature, he didn't actually do as well in the ALSC awards as I might have thought -- three Caldecott Honors (for McElligot's Pool in 1948, Bartholomew and the Oobleck in 1950, and If I Ran the Zoo in 1951), but zero Caldecott wins, and zero mentions on the Newbery rolls. I'd love to see him win the Geisel award for this one, just for the neatness of having someone win an established award that's already named after them, but I don't think it's actually a good enough book for that to happen. The Newbery is out of the question, and given that the art had to be colorized by later editors, I doubt the Caldecott committee will go for it either. What Pet Should I Get? is a fascinating historical curiosity, but no more than that.


Published in July by Random House

 

2016 Contenders: Poet, by Don Tate

George Moses Horton was the first African-American poet to have a book published in the South (The Hope of Liberty, 1829). Amazingly, this occurred while he was still a slave. Though Horton's hope was that the money from the book would enable the purchase of his freedom, his master refused to sell him, and Horton's slavery continued until the end of the Civil War, some three and a half decades later. Through it all, Horton continued to write, producing another volume of poetry, many uncollected poems, and a brief autobiography.

Although Horton is still in print, and he retains a strong following in his home state of North Carolina, he remains much less known than other early African-American authors such as Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon. I completed an English degree at a southern university, and still never came across any of his work. I'm glad to say that Poet does an excellent job of discussing the man, his unusual life, and his writing, which may well make him a more familiar name to a younger generation.

The writing is spare, but clear. Tate made his name as an illustrator, but in his previous foray into writing (It Jes' Happened: When Bill Traylor Started to Draw, 2012), he certainly displayed a facility with words, and he continues to exhibit that talent in Poet. I really felt Horton's determination, his crushing defeat, and his indomitable will while turning the pages.

As good as the text is, it's not going to win the Newbery -- no picture book is going to break through and take the prize, not in a year with Circus Mirandus and Echo and Moonpenny Island and The Jumbies. Some of the other committees may appreciate it, however, and I do hope there's room for it on the Notables list.


Publication in September by Peachtree.

2015 Contenders: Brother Hugo and the Bear, by Katy Beebe

Brother Hugo has a problem. He's lost his library book, and even though he has one of the best excuses possible -- it was eaten by a bear! -- he still has to replace the volume. This being the Middle Ages, "replace" is used in its most literal sense: Brother Hugo has to go to another monastery, borrow their copy of the title, and then hand-copy it. However, the bear is still lurking about, and "once a bear has a taste of letters, his love of books grows much the more."

Katy Beebe's text is a joy to read. Its quasi-Chaucerian diction fits the setting without being overly difficult (especially given the glossary in the back). It also includes, as a natural part of the narrative, a clever introduction to medieval bookmaking. The story itself, which takes its inspiration from a brief passage in a letter written by Peter the Venerable, is winningly playful.

As a certified lit-nerd, I found Brother Hugo and the Bear impossible to resist. The Newbery committee may (and probably will) feel differently. We mentioned in last year's discussion of If You Want to See a Whale how hard it is for a picture book to gain Newbery recognition, and I don't think, alas, that Brother Hugo will cut through that resistance in this competitive publishing year.

The art, by S.D. Schindler, is a lovely pastiche of the illuminated manuscript tradition. It's possible that the Caldecott committee will take a liking to it. Whether or not that happens, I do hope that the folks handing out the two major awards for picture book text (the Golden Kite Award for Picture Book Text and the Charlotte Zolotow Award) take a good look at Brother Hugo. I think they'll like what they see.


Published in April by Eerdmans

2015 Contenders: The Pilot and the Little Prince, by Peter Sís

I really don't like writing reviews that involve me disliking something that everyone else loves. Not that that's stopped me from writing such reviews repeatedly, but I get nervous every time I have to do it. It requires me to marshal my facts, and to be extremely conscious of my biases as a reader -- and even then, I usually wind up wondering if I've just missed the point.

As you've probably guessed by now, that brings me to The Pilot and the Little Prince, the newest book by Peter Sís. It's nominally a biography of the French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, but I think my main failing as a reviewer is my insistence on reading it like a biography.

The book's layout is complicated and busy. The simple main text runs along the bottom of each page, with the vast majority of each leaf devoted to illustrations, timelines, maps, and further facts. The textual information in these larger sections is integrated into the pictures, and reading the words often requires rotating the book and carefully scanning the illustrations.

What this means is that reading The Pilot and the Little Prince like a traditional nonfiction book is almost impossible. There are no standard sidebars, no index, and no source notes. My ability to follow the text was constantly interrupted by my having to scrutinize the illustrations, and trying to go back and find a particular factoid was an exercise in frustration. "Presentation of Information!" I kept saying to myself. (Because yes, I'm the kind of person who recites the Newbery criteria in his private self-conversations.)

And yet, The Pilot and the Little Prince is getting excellent reviews, which I think can be ascribed to the greater willingness of many readers to appreciate it, not as a biography, but as a singular work of art. If you consider the book as an artistic tribute to Saint-Exupéry first, and as a biography a distant second, it starts to look a whole lot better. The detailed illustrations yield more and more surprises with each examination, and the whole thing comes across as a labor of deep, genuine love. If it didn't really "work" for me, that doesn't mean it wouldn't work for a reader more willing to spend that kind of time with it.

Does that make it a Newbery contender? I don't think so, no. It's too hard to separate the text from the illustrations, and I'm not sure the words are anywhere near as effective without the pictures in any case. I also don't think it's a good Sibert contender, especially given the complete lack of back matter. However, before you accept my opinion, I'd encourage you to look at The Pilot and the Little Prince for yourself.


Publication in May by Frances Foster Books / Farrar Straus Girous / Macmillan

2014 Contenders: Locomotive, by Brian Floca

Locomotive is another of our Morris Seminar books, and a very good one it is, too. It's by Brian Floca, who has already won two Sibert Honors as author and illustrator of Lightship (2008) and Moonshot (2010), as well as a third for his illustrations for Jan Greenberg and Sandra Johnson's Ballet for Martha (2011). His fascination with transportation continues here, in an evocative free-verse description of a trans-continental railway journey as it was in 1869.

As we've been mentioning in recent days, the strongest nonfiction of the year seems (in our collective opinion) to be concentrated in the picture book section. Locomotive is another title that deserves to be in the mix with Brave Girl, A Splash of Red, and On a Beam of Light. Interestingly, however, I think it's not as good a Newbery candidate as some of the others, because of the relationship between the text and the illustrations.

One of the ways that Floca creates continuity in Locomotive is by putting words that describe sounds in markedly different fonts from the rest of the text. This works beautifully in the context of the book as a whole, but it's a strategy that's more design than pure text. Much the same could be said of Floca's choice to put some of the lines uttered by the railway workers in speech bubbles. The line between text and illustrations gets very blurry in Locomotive, and although that's fine for the Sibert, it makes Newbery consideration highly problematic.

As a book, I like On a Beam of Light a little better than Locomotive, but I recognize that that's essentially an issue of personal taste -- I like science-y subjects, and I prefer Jennifer Berne's understated prose to Floca's whooshing, onomatopoetic poetry -- rather than any kind of pure critical judgement. However, I think On a Beam of Light does objectively fit the Newbery criteria better, mostly because there's simply more left once one removes the illustrations from consideration.

In reality, the Newbery is probably a pipe dream for both books. However, I'm starting to get really, really curious about this year's Sibert results, where Locomotive could easily carry the day.


Published in September by Atheneum.

2014 Contenders: If You Want to See a Whale, by Julie Fogliano

Every year, a picture book or two gets bandied about in the (online, publicly visible) Newbery discussions. Last year gave us Each Kindness and Step Gently Out. This year, we've had Africa Is My Home (assuming you take it as a picture book, rather than a heavily-illustrated work of short fiction); the other title that I've seen crop up in the most discussions is probably If You Want to See a Whale.

In a way, it's academic exercise, discussing these picture books. No "traditional" picture book has ever won the Newbery (though that's an assertion that assumes you agree with me on how to categorize A Visit to William Blake's Inn [1982 winner], which I think of as an illustrated collection of poetry rather than a picture book, and which is filed in the 811s in our local library system, but which did win a Caldecott Honor). The Honors list isn't much better -- aside from another poetry book, Dark Emperor (2011 Honor), the only picture books I can find are Wanda Gág's Millions of Cats (1929 Honor) and The ABC Bunny (1934 Honor), from the pre-Caldecott days. (If you can think of one I missed, leave a comment!)

And yet I feel like it's an important discussion to continue having. Even without the iconic illustrations, the texts of Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are and Horton Hears a Who are, I would argue, key parts of American children's literature. It's very hard to talk about picture books without considering the illustrations -- it feels kind of like trying to evaluate a symphony without ever mentioning the string section -- but the ones that fall within the Newbery range (which is the overwhelming majority of them) deserve our attention nonetheless.

With all that said, it seems to me that the text of If You Want to See a Whale does several things extremely well, and a few things maybe not as well. The sound of the book when read aloud is fantastic -- Julie Fogliano has a keen ear for alliteration and assonance, and lines such as the ones in which she describes clouds "in the sky that's spread out, side to side" are a joy just to say. The ending of the book in the text is also beautifully ambiguous, fading out on the lines "and wait... / and wait... / and wait..." The last of illustrator Erin E. Stead's pictures shows the whale quest coming to a successful end, but it does so wordlessly -- although she's given us a tidy ending, Fogliano as author has declined to do so.

The main thing that bothered me -- and maybe it's just from sitting through too many Creative Writing workshops back in college -- was the book's unwillingness to fully commit to its central conceit. I know that the book isn't really about whale-watching at all, but a metaphor is best when it works on both the literal and figurative levels. A window isn't helpful for watching for whales (or at least, nowhere near as helpful as being outside), and if you're on a beach or in a boat, roses and bugs aren't likely distractions. 

This doesn't mean that If You Want to See a Whale isn't a delight, but I do think it means that it's not Newbery material. When Rachael reviewed Each Kindness last year, she talked about the intense difficulty of writing a short text. One flawed line in a 300-page novel might pass by unnoticed; the same isn't true of a poem of 52 lines, several of which are only two or three words long. Surviving the scrutiny that such a short text invites is an incredibly high bar, and I'm unconvinced that Whale clears it.


Published in May by Roaring Book Press

2014 Contenders: Africa is My Home, by Monica Edinger

Full disclosure: the About to Mock ranch is very much a Monica Edinger fan club. We love her blog (if by some odd chance, you read us and not her, you should rectify that immediately), we eagerly devour her reviews in The Horn Book and The New York Times, and we're very grateful for her support in our own book discussion endeavors. We think she's awesome, and so I can't help but have that in my mind as I'm reading her work.

Africa is My Home is the fictionalized story of Sarah Margru Kinson, one of a handful of children who happened to be aboard the slave ship Amistad, of Supreme Court and Steven Spielberg fame. It follows her from her childhood in what is now Sierra Leone, through her experiences aboard the ship and in America, and on into her adult life. It's a fascinating read that sheds light on a little-known part of a famous story.

Indeed, though Africa is My Home is a short, heavily illustrated book with a single narrator, the book I was reminded of while reading it was No Crystal Stair. Both books discuss lesser-known figures involved in famous events, and interestingly, in both cases, the author attempted to write the book as straight nonfiction first before realizing that the paucity of firsthand data made that impossible.

I think Africa is the better of the two books, partly because it maintains its focus so well (which was my complaint about No Crystal Stair, though I was really the only one complaining, so take that for what it's worth). But Africa also breaks into poetry occasionally -- poetry that truly sings. Those passages are, in my opinion, the best part of the book, to the point that what I really want now is to read a book of Edinger's poetry. I'd put good money on it being awesome.

The one quibble I had with the book has to do with its being narrated in the first person by Sarah -- but a version of Sarah who is fully grown and looking back on the events of the narrative. This allows for the inclusion of facts and interpretations of events that a child wouldn't necessarily know or comprehend, but I felt like that temporal distance made the book lose some emotional immediacy. It's not a huge issue, but especially given that there's no such emotional gap in the poetic bits, it was something I noticed.

Although it can't be taken into account for Newbery purposes, this is also a truly beautiful-looking book. The illustrations are by Robert Byrd (Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, Electric Ben), who captures the feel of 19th-century broadsides and maps while still imparting his signature style. It's a great pairing with the text, and the editors of the book should be commended for that.

The Newbery committee historically is very unfriendly to "picture books" -- even comparatively long ones with lots of text -- and if Africa were somehow to win, I think it might be the shortest winner since maybe Sarah, Plain and Tall (1986). That doesn't feel likely to me this year, but if Africa doesn't make the notables list, you'll definitely be able to color me surprised.*


*As a side note, it's worth noting that, although Byrd has illustrated both a Newbery winner and a Prinz honor book, he's never received any Caldecott love. I'm categorically not a Caldecott expert, but I'd really like to see Byrd recognized there.


Published in October by Candlewick

2014 Contenders: Barbed Wire Baseball, by Marissa Moss

The mass internment of Japanese Americans (and others, including those of German, Italian, and Hungarian descent) during World War II is a low point in the history of the USA. One of the thousands sent to the internment camps was Kenichi Zenimura, a brilliant baseball player and manager whose career had included playing in and organizing barnstorming tours with the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Biz Mackey.

Barbed Wire Baseball spends a few pages on Zenimura's early life, but most of the book takes place during his internment. In the harsh desert landscape of the Gila River (Arizona) camp, Zenimura decided to help the other prisoners (who included his wife and two sons) in the way he knew best -- by building a baseball field. It wasn't just any field either, as the book goes to great lengths to show the care and love that Zenimura showered on the facility, which included a carefully manicured infield, grass landscaping, and bleachers for the spectators.

It's an inspiring story, no doubt about it, especially when you take into account some of the information in the appendix, which indicates that Zenimura was able to create a 32-team league within the camp, and also notes that both of Zenimura's sons went on to play professionally in Japan. (In a poetic touch, both played their careers for the team based in Hiroshima.)

The book's text makes some choices I'm not sure I agree with, however. Throughout, it only refers to Zenimura as "Zeni," to the point that it's only by reading the appendix that the reader can even find out the full name of the story's main character. I'm also not sure the decision to include so few details about Zenimura's pre-internment career -- and to confine all information about his life after the first game played on the field at Gila River to a couple pages in the appendix -- serves the subject particularly well. The man meant so much to his sport that he earned the nickname "The Father of Japanese American Baseball," and even if the picture book treatment necessitates brevity, the focus of Barbed Wire Baseball is so narrow that I'm not sure readers will come away understanding Zenimura's importance.

Barbed Wire Baseball is a joy to look at. I love Yuko Shimizu's illustrations, which, astoundingly, are the first she's ever done for a picture book -- I hope we see more from her in the coming years. The book fills a valuable niche, and, quibbles aside, will at least merit consideration from the Notables committee. I think it's clearly a lesser work than the similarly-structured You Never Heard of Willie Mays?!, however, and since I didn't posit any Newbery love for that one, I highly doubt we'll see any for Barbed Wire Baseball.


Published in April by Abrams.

2014 Contenders: You Never Heard of Willie Mays?!, by Jonah Winter

Aside from taking in a game on a beautiful afternoon, there's nothing that diehard baseball fans (a group of which I count myself a proud member) love more than making lists -- and there's no list more fun to make than that of the greatest players of all time. However, there's only a handful of names one can make a reasonable case for putting at the top of that list: Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner for sure, and maybe Ted Williams, Oscar Charleston, Mickey Mantle, and (depending on how you feel about steroid use and sports) Barry Bonds. Oh, and Willie Mays -- the Say Hey Kid, the pride of the Giants, one of the most spectacular hitters and fielders ever to roam the diamond, and maybe the greatest.

You Never Heard of Willie Mays?! is written in the second person, as a conversational introduction to the legendary center fielder. Jonah Winter emphasizes Mays' importance in his historical moment, when the major leagues were still in the process of integration (Mays actually played a few seasons in the Negro Leagues as a teenager). He skillfully portrays Mays not only as a preternaturally gifted athlete, but as a tireless worker and ambassador for the game.

Winter makes the interesting choice of ending his story after the 1954 World Series, in which the 23-year-old Mays' spectacular play led the Giants to victory.  This leaves out the remaining 18 years of Mays' career -- which included two more World Series appearances, a second MVP award, and four home run titles -- as well as his eventual induction into the Hall of Fame.  I recognize that the narrative Winter has chosen to tell comes to a natural conclusion there, but I'm not sure I agree with the decision to confine the rest of Mays' brilliant career to the appendix.

I doubt that this particular volume will graze the Newbery list -- the writing is very good, but that hasn't helped other relatively short, heavily illustrated books in recent years (see Each Kindness, Twelve Kinds of Ice, Balloons over Broadway). Winter's previous book in a similar vein, You Never Heard of Sandy Koufax?!, made the Notables list in 2010, however, and that seems like a more realistic projection for You Never Heard of Willie Mays?!


Published in January by Schwartz & Wade / Random House

2014 Contenders: Follow Follow, by Marilyn Singer

Good poetry is hard to write, and good formal poetry can be even harder. Follow Follow, Marilyn Singer's newest book, consists of poems in a fiendishly tricky form: the reverso, in which the poem tells a story one way, and then, when the lines are read in the reverse order, tells a different one. The only allowable changes are in punctuation and capitalization.

That this book works, and works marvelously, is a testament to Singer's skill with words. Each poem (except the first and last, which deal with the poet's craft) takes a classic fairytale or fable and looks at it from two angles. It's really stunning how different the same words can be when reversed.

My favorite example of this is "The Little Mermaid's Choice." The opening lines of the first part encourage the traditional plot of the tale: "For love, / give up your voice. / Don't / think twice." However, the same words form the cautionary closing of the second part: "Think twice! / Don't / give up your voice / for love." It's a perfect inversion, and a good sample of the craft evident in the rest of the book.

Although it's something that can't be taken into Newbery consideration, the formatting of the book is lovely. Each two-page spread features the poem, printed in two columns (one for each version), as well as a lavish full-page illustration by Josée Masse. It's beautifully done, and so much more child-friendly than many of the other poetry books for kids that I often see.

Follow Follow comes billed as a "companion to" Mirror Mirror, Singer's first book of reversos, which was a 2011 Notable. However, there's no reason that they need to be read together; it's definitely a stand-alone. Anyone who enjoyed Mirror Mirror, however, will find plenty to love here.

It's hard to judge exactly how good Follow Follow's Newbery chances are. Poetry rarely wins -- the last time it did was with Joyful Noise in 1989 -- but there have been recent honors for The Surrender Tree (2009) and Dark Emperor (2011), and at any rate, the committee is different every year. Regardless, however, I'm putting this book firmly on my "keep this one in mind to return to later in the year" list.


Published in February by Dial / Penguin Young Readers

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: 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!)