The writing irritated me, with constructions like "Subject predicate with an object and with another object" when a double object of a single preposition would have made more sense, and a few misspellings ("weasle"), and it might not have been the best story. But second only to art, its predominant theme is race inequality and slavery, and that made the book a fitting recipient of the Newbery in 1965.
I'm on page 12 and it's already annoying me. Partly it's insecurity: the author is three years younger than I. Mostly it's annoyance: the Seventeen of the author's youth peddled downmarket products? This was a Seventeen from an alternate universe, I believe. Alissa Quart is only in her early 30s, and she's already issuing jeremiad proclamations of how much worse everything's got in the past two decades?
I might have to say "Feh" and move along.
Jed Bartlett just asked a retiring English teacher if, when she taught Beowulf, she taught it in the original Middle English or in translation.
"The West Wing" is not "Northern Exposure." It's not even "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." But it is "West Wing." Or at least it was. Once the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff perpetuated the myth that the eagle's head on the Great Seal of the United States turns from the olive branch to the arrows in time of war. Once there was a representative who had taken the seat of his deceased wife. I don't mind when it changes the name of a newspaper (it got Denver's wrong), and I certainly don't mind when it spins Dot Org with an anachronism--that it mentions Dot Org at all is cool enough for me. "West Wing" certainly shouldn't get government information wrong, but Beowulf is common knowledge, damn it.