(Available: 25 January 2000, http://slj.com/articles/articles/P7068.asp)
I'm sure I've read this, not at PGN when I was growing up, but later--since it was only published later.
I didn't read the Prydain Cycle until 1989. As a child, when The Book of Three was placed in my hands, it burned them, just like the real Book of Three burned Taran. But I learned. Also I had just taken a class in Arthurian legend and was all primed by reading The Mabinogion.
I've probably read this, because I've read most of Avi, but I don't remember
it.
(Nope, I hadn't. 17 June 200.)
I think I've read some Natalie Babbitt, but I know I didn't read this one until HAO found it for me at the Decker library one afternoon. There are a few treatments of immortality in children's literature, and most--like Two Against the Tide--suck. This is gentle, like The Grass Harp, and thoroughly good.
A girl with an attitude. A girl up to no good. In other words, for 'bad' read 'interesting.' That's a paraphrase of a blurb describing Cynthia Voigt's Bad Girls, but Madeline, malicious or not, was a grrl before anyone knew what a grrl might be.
A favorite picture book.
Unfortunately, Then Again, Maybe I Won't can't have rocked boys' worlds as this did girls' worlds, but rock mine it did. Here I first learned that periods aren't always punctuation. I wonder, what with the belts instead of pads--or even tampons for girls these days--if this book's obsolete technology renders it no longer useful. I hope not.
Paddington I liked, but I preferred Michael Bond's less-known star, Olga de Polga the guinea pig. I still quote from Olga de Polga, things about bottomless milk bowls and how guinea pigs got rosettes in their fur and lost their tails, but I seldom utter even Paddington's most famous line, "Please look after this bear."
The best, the very best, of simple picture books (and I can say that because
Where the Wild Things Are isn't so simple, since it has a plot).
"And goodnight to the old lady whispering 'hush'
Goodnight stars
Goodnight air
Goodnight noises everywhere."
I'll need to find this, which is about the riots in L.A. in 1993 after the first Rodney King trial.
A lot more my scene than urban riots, or at least that was the impression I grew up with. For that I am thankful. Plus The Secret Garden got me trying to speak broad Yorkshire. I'm glad I discovered this before either The Little Princess (soppy) or Little Lord Fauntleroy (saccharine and ever more of a fairy tale).
This is one of the books I turn to when I want a happy cry. When Bodger arrives, late but living, and Peter is overcome and in a tangle with him, and when Tao, cat though he be, returns to the dog so they can finish their journey together, I totally dissolve.
I'm with Ramona. How'd he go to the bathroom? Besides, John Henry proved that a man was stronger than a machine. There's no John Henry book on this list.
When I printed the full article to show it to a coworker, she noticed from the short descriptions that several of the choices were perhaps more politically correct than truly influential. Political correctness might be why SLJ chose this instead of any other Byars, like maybe The Pinballs. Except this won a Newbery medal and The Pinballs did not. I myself always found Byars really depressing. She was no Judy Blume.
Great.
I was the younger of two sisters, the louder brattier one to the more studious Good Daughter. The main difference between me and Ramona was that when I was her age, I had the pipe curls she so envies on Susan.
14 June 2000: Most significant? No. One of the few that exposes how little children can rely on adults? Yes. Quite good.
All the Magic School Bus books look like they're based on a television show, but in fact they sparked their own show. Anyway I didn't like the look of them at first, but I think Cole does a really good job integrating learning with fun.
Cooper's no L'Engle, LeGuin, or Lewis, but this'll do. My favorite of this series of five is Over Sea, Under Stone, but that might be because it has the Holy Grail in it and I'm kind of a freak about things Arthurian.
The Lord of the Flies, except with grown-ups. And scarier because the grown-ups should notice what they cannot notice in their absence from Golding's island. That scene with the one black marble is one of the tensest in literature.
I am very ashamed. My children's librarian--the second one--tried to get me to read the Bagthorpe books, said they were great. I never could. I'll have to try again.
I might be diligent about keeping up with the Newberys, but keep up with the Caldecotts I do not.
Better known than Danny, Champion of the World or James and the Giant Peach, and thus the more influential. And perhaps better known because better overall. But I don't think so.
As much a part of my mythology (firmly grounded in Britain and Germany with bits of Scandinavia for good measure) as Grimm and Andersen.
Another of the several books my lost-long fourth-grade best friend Elizabeth introduced me to. I credit her for this, for Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, and The Phantom Tollbooth. I wish I could remember more that were Elizabeth's particular recommendation.
I picked this up only because it's a Newbery, and I don't think I got as much out of it reading it silently to myself as I might have if I'd shared it aloud with a child, but still the sounds in my head were great fun, rhythmic and perfect and all about bugs. Children should be exposed to more poetry.
I've read The Slave Dancer.
Another I read only as an adult. And I was listening to it instead of reading pages, so when the narrative broke off abruptly, I had had no warning more immediate than being on the last tape. For me it broke off, just like that with no warning. A good parallel, though obviously less perilous, to how the diary ended for Anne.
It's rare that a non-fiction book wins a Newbery, and when I read the title of the Medallist I thought there must not have been any good fiction that year. I was wrong. It didn't win because there was no good fiction, it won because there was no better fiction. SLJ says it was a "forerunner for the many visually enticing informational books...being published today" and that is so.
I loved biographies of children's heroes. Paul Revere, Florence Nightingale, Helen Keller, Clara Barton, Harriet Tubman. This was a particularly fun one, told much more as a story.
This won a Newbery Medal? When was the Caldecott invented? Anyway, a superb early picture book that hasn't lost its appeal.
I don't remember why I picked this up other than it was on PGN's limited YA shelf. It looks pretty innocuous, and I hope it's still there despite its subject matter. Its only flaw is the same as Forever's. In Forever, when Katherine grows apart from Michael, she dreams about someone else, "doing things to him I'd only read about." Judy Blume might have wanted to portray first love realistically, but in that case she shouldn't've been squeamish about oral sex. The same in Annie on My Mind. A classmate taunts the protagonist, wanting to know exactly what two girls can do together in bed. As if this homophobe, no virgin herself, had never heard of oral sex. Or all the other stuff that het virgins do instead of intercourse, penis or not.
I tried to communicate with my dog in the language of postures and growls and gestures that Julie learns from her wolves, but I think JPS had lived too long with humans to remember any of that.
I think I did not read this until 1988. I was living with DEDBG in our rented MIT Sigma Chi room, and reading a lot, and she bought me a Picasso print, Pan, because of it.
My excuse for not reading Hamilton is a poor one: I grew up white in a very white town and her books seemed very alien to me. I have no excuse for not reading her as an adult.
I've never heard of this.
Absolutely stellar, painful story set in the Dust Bowl. The telling is sparse and matches the spare prose poetry. I read another recent Newbery winner, Walk Two Moons, soon after this, and was pleased that though they share a vital, pivotal scenario, the two authors treat their two scenarios [spoiler: the two ~10-year-old girl protagonists' two mothers have two stillbirths and the girls have reason to feel responsible for them] completely independently, individually, and rightly.
I can't say it better than SLJ: this book pioneered a new realism and helped establish a literature aimed specifically at young adults. There still isn't much, and this is still easily one of the top three.
A picture book. I'm sure I came across it sometime.
Did the author's parents hate him? Published in 1941, this book is old enough really to be influential and not chosen because its Native American character makes for a nice P.C. choice.
This, Whistle for Willy by the same author, and Corduroy by Don Freeman are the only picture books I remember with black characters. I just gave A Snowy Day to a nephew for Christmas. So very very late (1962) to be what it is: "the first picture book in which the protagonist was a black child...and whose race was incidental to the story."
I read a bunch of M.E. Kerr; Gentlehands and Is That You, Miss Blue? spring immediately to mind, but this one's title put me off. I couldn't parse it. I only knew of "shoot" as in "gun" and I thought "smack" was another character's name. I was a sheltered child.
Of course, Riki-tiki-tavi was my favorite Kipling character. But I liked knowing how the leopard got its spots.
A perfect book. Konigsburg has a really good sense of how to narrate a tale, and though Mrs. Frankweiler intrudes on her own tale, she does so as a minor character and doesn't get in Claudia's and Jamie's way. I first went to the Met in 7th or 8th grade and I wanted to find Michelangelo's angel.
Nope. I really don't keep up on children's non-fiction.
I remember only what I think is the last line, "There is enough for all," and that the humans didn't mind the mole tunnels all over their yard the way my parents minded our moles. I guess I didn't fall very very much in love with it, or I'd've read it enough times to remember it.
I never could figure why The Tombs of Atuan and not this or The Farthest Shore won a Newbery.
I hope all the publishing companies that rejected this book feel properly stupid now, nearly 40 years later. SLJ says it legitimized writing and reading sf, and I guess that's true. SLJ also calls it a coming-of-age novel, and I guess it is that. In ninth grade after we read The Odyssey and a mess of Greek mythology, Mrs. Burbank had us each read an sf novel and find the Greek mythological theme in it. (Burbank averred that sf, being genre, wasn't good fiction, was lazy and derivative, and since the Greeks had already invented every possible plot, every sf book could be presumed written along an extant Greek plot.) Having already cranked that semester, since I had known Greek mythology inside and out since fifth grade, I decided to coast on this assignment and do Wrinkle. She told me the three children were Telemachus. If I'd read The Tempest, I might have been able to argue that point, but I hadn't.
And ha! SLJ calls this the first one, no matter what stupid renumbering
scheme the publisher marketing department came up with.
The other half-->
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