This haunting, evocative, wonderful novel in verse should be required reading for everyone in America. It’s a powerful story of childhood flight and refugee status. This is a wonderful rendition of the recurring story of refugees in America. Refugee kids are an essentially American story and while the country of origin may change, novels like this should make us all aware of the regular story cycle of these tiny heroes in our midst.

It’s a wonderfully complex novel just in its structure which works really well but would be an interesting conversation with a bookish kid who likes this stuff. It’s a novel in verse but it is also an epistletory novel that is tied tightly to one calendar year based on the Vietnamese New Year. There is just so much there to sink your teeth into before you even get going on the characters and story. The poetry does a wonderful job of telling an awful lot of story and doing it sparingly but vibrantly.

Who can go against

a mother

who has become gaunt like bark

from raising four children alone?

(p. 54)

This is the story of a ten year old girl who escapes Saigon with her mother and three brothers and makes a run across the ocean to finally settle in the United States right after the war in Vietnam. They wind up in Alabama and while there are some genuinely deep wells of kindness there, they also encounter a lot of pretty awful casual racism. Lai tells it all so well and so resonantly. There is horror and high stakes fleeing in a packed boat from the harbor in Saigon, there is also horror and high stakes making friends in fourth grade when you don’t speak the language.

No one would believe me

but at times

I would choose

wartime in Saigon

over

peacetime in Alabama

(p. 195)

Thanhha Lai has a great author’s note at the end of the book where she talks about how much of this book was her own fourth grade year. In the note she talks about wanting kids to know not just the history and the struggle of their heritage but also the smells and tastes. She has done a very genuinely extraordinary job of doing that here.

There is a natural cycle in America going back to before there was an America of people coming here to try and make a better life for them and their kids. These kids come here looking for the hope their parents talk about and they are lost and afraid and we should, as a society, see them more, we should be aware of them more. They are in your community right now, they are in the schools and on some playground in the poorer quarter of your closest city. These stories of quiet heroism are happening all around us whether we see them or not.

Our lives

will twist and twist

intermingling the old and the new

until it doesn’t matter

which is which

(p. 257)

This fictionalized biography of Nathanial Bowditch is American exceptionalism writ large. It would be an unbelievable story were it not true. Bowditch is an actual person who was born in Salem Massachusetts in 1773. He really taught himself Latin, Astronomy, Calculus, and French. He rewrote the standard manual on celestial navigation and his book, The American Practical Navigator is commonly referred to just by his name, Bowditch. A copy of it is on every ship in the US Navy per regulation to this day and is available all over the internet for free. It remains one of the most influential and important books in history and it was an instrumental part of maritime commerce and safety for hundreds of years. If you have a sextant and this book you can find your location anywhere in the world, if you are smart enough.

With that as a canvas Latham takes us on a hell of an adventure. There are hard times aplenty, Bowditch pulls himself up by his bootstraps plenty. The mortality rate of colonial America is no joke and there are plenty of sad moments but a lot of triumph too in this inspiring tribute to tenacity and hard work (and natural genius as well). Boyhood dreams of leadership come true and it is all set alternately on the high seas and in a town a half hour away from where I grew up.

Massachusetts fixates on intelligence, at least it felt like it did when I was growing up there in the 70s and 80s. It’s a place that takes a lot of its character from being smart with our prep schools and so many colleges in Boston that you can get across the city throwing a baseball from one to the other. When I was a kid and got a scholarship to a prep school then went overseas to college a lot of people in my small hometown seemed to know about it and I got a lot of praise about it from unexpected places. This book has a wonderfully egalitarian approach to intelligence and education.

There are some rough patches, not many, but a few. Where there are brave declarations against slavery from a ship owner, the actual ship’s cook, who is black, is still called a cabin boy despite being a grown man. He also has the hardest time with his lessons at the free schooling that Nat gives, although he does learn in the end, and Nat does teach him like everyone else, so that is something anyway. There is absolutely no real diversity in this book whatsoever and honestly, despite being written by a woman, the female characters are pretty flat and one dimensional. Jean Lee Latham wrote a bunch of these fictionalized biographies for kids, mostly of figures from Americana. She lived not far from me for a couple of years while she wrote and taught in Ithaca NY, and eventually settled down in early Miami which was very chic and very segregated at the time.

The adventure on the high seas on show here is very like the Hornblower books which preceded it by a few years and the Master and Commander books that are more recent. I’m a sucker for these tales of hearts of oak and the men before the mast and this one is as good as any, if geared to a younger set. I wish I had read it as a kid, I would have read it a dozen times over.

Set deep in Mayan culture at some time in the 20th century, maybe. It’s a timeless book that goes deep into family, and tradition, and necessity. This is a coming of age book, with a heroic journey, and the path of the hero is hard work. There is wonderful care in describing the traditional agriculture of the rainforest. The process of clearing, burning, planting, harvesting, then moving on makes the patchwork cycle of Tigre’s family and community.

Tigre is all of twelve years old when he needs to entirely shoulder the work of his family farm after his father is injured. This particular heroic journey is paved with intention and responsibility. His mother has another baby during this time and his immediate thought is that now there is another mouth to feed. His stakes are very high and the quest is very rooted in the Earth and in the traditional responsibilities of days in the sun, worrying about the crops, and desperately hard work.

I will admit that there were times when the language rubbed me the wrong way. I was ready for mid-century apologist perspective and we don’t get that really but there are times when the narrative tone is very grandmotherly to the Mayan people. When I looked up the author though she was a 61 year old dowager when the book was published so maybe the tone just came naturally to her. Rhoads was from Illinois originally, went to Wellsley, then moved to New Mexico where she and her sister spent a TON of time in Mexico over the years. She even had a Mayan goddaughter so I am not sure where I can find fault with the fact that she clearly understands the culture better than I ever will.

Rhoads wrote a lot for kids evidently but this is the biggest thing that she has to her name. That is one of the wonderful things about Newbery books, they will always have a place. Somewhere, on some shelf, in some kids’ room, in some public library, somebody has this in circulation right now.

The illustrations are lovely and have a whole other fascination for me. The illustrator, Jean Charlot (1898-1979) had his own fascinating intriguing life. He was a French-born American who ended up connected to the Mexican mural movement of the mid-twentieth century. He had close connections to Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco. He had a wild life, a crazy love life, married a woman of Aztec heritage, and eventually died in Hawaii. I love these wonderful intersections of fascinating, wild, unique lives discovered through the intersection of children’s literature.

This is a short but very deep look at Mayan culture. There is a wonderful intermixing of traditional folktales and mythology with a slight Catholic spin. It’s a timeless story, it feels mid 20th century but also feels a lot older than that. This is growing up by the sweat of your brow and being a hero by keeping your family together body and soul. It’s a fun, informative, inspiring read. You can read it in an hour, if you can find it.

This is an absolutely brutal but incredibly compelling read. It’s a full immersion into a life in American urban poverty that is very real, very powerful, and very hidden. Everything is stacked against our protagonist Jamal. His history, his surroundings, his school, it is all picture perfect to drive him into the gang. His family and best friend keep pulling him back but the gravity of that life is inescapable.

Jamal has a very loving Mama, she works a couple of jobs but they are just scraping by. His older brother has gone to jail for a murder he did indeed commit, and now Jamal is being forced into the gang life at his brother’s decree and the pressure of trying to come up with the money to hire a lawyer to get him an appeal. The fact that Jamal is 12 makes him very useful to the gang since he can’t do real time if he is arrested. It is so painful to see him skipping back and forth between childish concerns and very real very consequential violence.

Indeed, Jamal is surrounded by violence. It is New York City in the mid-80s, before the waves of gentrification and deep in the throes of the crack cocaine epidemic. The stage is set for us on the second page of the book when Jamal is looking out of his apartment window watching for his mother on her way home from visiting his brother in jail.

At the corner a thin man leaned against the lightpole. Jamal watched as the man leaned slowly toward the ground, then straightened up. Jamal knew that the addict would repeat his nodding until he fell asleep. (p. 4)

Real violence is always close at hand and can be triggered on the smallest offense or mistake. When it starts, it escalates quickly and mercilessly.

A short stocky man with a square head, dressed in a grey suit and a pink shirt, started into the store, then stopped and walked over to Jamal and Tito.

“Why you got to lean on my ‘chine?”

Jamal looked at the car then got off of it. Tito moved too. The man pushed Tito and almost made him fall.

“What you got to do that for?” Jamal said.

Jamal let his eyes move away from the man for a moment, then saw the big hand coming toward him and felt it smack across his face.

“Catch you on my ‘chine again, I’m gonna mess you up bad! You hear that?”

Jamal looked for something to hit the man with. One of the teenagers who had been in the store, the one with the beeper, came out and stood next to the man.

Tito had moved around the car and Jamal, the taste of blood in his mouth, backed away. (pp. 39-40)

Jamal has one real best friend, Tito. Tito is Puerto Rican and Meyers skillfully brings Spanish Harlem into play in the tale. Tito’s Abuela is a steady sad witness to everything that the boys go through together. Jamal’s Mama is a loving exhausted victim of every lost dream and broken promise that the city can offer. Together the two women are a point - counterpoint of maternal broken hearts, one flees and the other lacks that option, imprisoned in her life just as much as her son.

The kids around him are rough on Jamal as well. Heck his whole life is hard on him, it’s constant and relentless.

Dwayne made Jamal feel small inside. Even when the older boy turned away from him Jamal could still feel his grin. Lots of things made him feel the same way, small inside, and weak. The guy at the furniture store that had yelled at Mama had made him feel that way. Teachers who made him stand up in class when he made a mistake or didn’t have his homework. Big kids who laughed at him were the worst because there wasn’t anything he could do to stop them. Not by himself, not while he was small and not as tough as they were. (p. 22)

Jamal struggles in school which should be no surprise to anyone since he lives in a constant state of fear and disruption. He has so much staked so high that homework and tests seem trivial, until they aren’t. He’s a genuinely gifted artist, something that is evident to everyone who watches him draw, but there is really no room for him to develop as an artist and he is so far behind in everything else that he’s doomed to failure. It still feels like the adults around him, the system he is stuck in, is keeping him down and pushing him out and into trouble. His principal is particularly awful.

“I didn’t bring no gun to school!”

“I sure hope not,” Mr Davidson said. “Not for your sake, because I don’t think you’re going to change. But I think too much of this school to let you spoil it for the rest of the children.”

“What you want to see my mother for?”

I hope that maybe, just maybe, I can convince her to take you out of this school,” Mr Davidson said. “Maybe put you someplace that you’re not going to contaminate everybody else. Now get down to the lunchroom right now!”

Jamal went down to the first floor then into his homeroom. He went to the closet, got his coat, and left school. (p. 139)

It’s tough to read as a kid and it’s really tough to read as a parent. This is a “Dad Newbery” in that Jamal’s dad is just not around. He’s alive, he doesn’t beat Jamal, he’s just off on his own, living his life. He even lives in the neighborhood but he only visits once during the novel, and it is a really big deal to the family. It’s also hard for Jamal to process:

Jamal looked away. He felt his eyes stinging with tears. He hated it when his father came around and talked about “straightening him out”. It wasn’t like he was there all the time to talk to him or help or anything. (p. 93)

I have a double response to this book in my own life. It came out and was recognized by the Newbery committee at a time in my life when I was at my absolute most privileged. I was attending an elite New England prep school in 1988 when Scorpions was published. Sure, I had a summer job from the time I was 12 but it was for spending money, I never contributed to the household. I spent my school days gadding about on a picturesque campus isolated amidst miles of salt marshes in Northern Massachusetts. It was as far from Jamal’s NYC as you can get and like many kids of the time I was fascinated by the inner-city while being taught to be terrified of it.

Many many years later I found myself working as a public librarian in Eastern Queens. I specialized in Young Adults for a few years and saw a lot of kids like Jamal every day. I repeatedly warned about kids that I had a relationship with. “S is a legitimately dangerous young woman” and “you know he’s a hitter right?” stand out to me but they were always just kids I was helping in whatever way they would let me. Scorpions is a beautiful book for bringing these kids front and center and dropping us into their life while offering not the tiniest bit of candy coating.

Walter Dean Meyers spoke to a group of Youth Librarians when I worked at Queens Library. He is an incredibly tall, kind, and patient man. He talked about his work schedule which had him up and writing at 4AM while the City was still asleep. He remains a great inspiration to me to this day.

If you haven’t read Scorpions or if it has been a while, pick it up. It’s an incredibly fast read, super accessible, and exciting. Those kids are still out there, they are working the fent trade now but the guns, youth, and despair are still there. I have always found a lot of hope in these communities but I get to go home, Scorpions is what happens when the hope runs out.

I thought that there were large parts of this book that were brilliant, but ended up feeling pretty unfulfilled. It is wonderfully written with beautiful prose that crosses into poetry frequently and effortlessly. It works on the level of being smart, interesting, and unique sci-fi and I say this as a lifelong fan and consumer of the genre. I really really wanted to love this book even as I was reading it but in the end I felt alienated and sad.

This is wonderfully rendered Latin Futurism, there is some magical storytelling and we move in time and space with a lot of fluidity. The sci-fi storytelling is genuinely unique and interesting. The classic “long sleep” of interstellar travel is used in genuinely innovative and fascinating ways, ways that often seem to come to tragic ends. The power of story is really strong and that story is tied to family in really powerful ways. There are hints and metaphors for human trafficking, hopeful journeys tainted by ill-intentioned guides, and the very genuine horrors of family separation. The oppressor cast is so fair that they can’t stand the light of the sun and whiteness is taken to the point of monstrosity.

It was sad in the way that so many great Newbery winners are and in the same way that so many Oscar winners are. Death is used as a narrative element, a really strong one, and used in ways that move an extraordinary story forward. My daughter who is 12 and reads a lot read this as part of a book club at school and she had a really powerfully negative response to it as did a lot of her classmates. She was deeply engaged in it, talked to her mother about it a lot while she was reading it, and could remember details from it more than a month after she read it, but she railed at me whenever she saw it in my hand at how sad it was. Obviously it made an impact on her, and it clearly engaged her as a novel so, huge win there, but it really pushed her buttons and she went on to push mine when I was reading it in the house. We had a lot of conversations about it, perhaps we just don’t favor the tragic.

This is a really complex and engaging novel.

This is a dad Newbery, it’s a broken dad Newbery. Our avatar and main character is a young girl and this is really her story, hers and her family’s. The first couple of pages are chattering and cute with conflict with a big brother and nerves about a big move for the summer. It is very coming of age/dealing with sibling kind of stuff until about page 4 when we find out that her Daddy has recently returned from a WW II POW camp. He’s a decorated hero and all but still:

Maybe, she thought, it wasn’t just because of the city. She could remember times that had been nice there, and happy, before Daddy ever went away. And even while he was gone, sometimes Mother paid a lot of attention, and they went to the museum on Sunday afternoons and to hear the Pittsburgh Symphony and for picnics in the park. Everybody felt sorry for Mother because Daddy was missing, and nobody expected he would ever come back. But then he came.

She wouldn’t ever think that it was better before Daddy came back. Nobody must think such a terrible thing. But it was a worry. If a door slammed behind you, for instance, he’s shout “Who slammed that door?” You’d start to tell him the wind made it slam but there wasn’t time. Mother always hurried in, saying, “Ssssssh! Sssssh! Sssssh!” (p. 5-6)

It is one of those genuinely startling moments you trip over when you read the Newbery books. You are reading the childish concerns of a little girl prattling along and then suddenly you are dealing with guilt and loss and fear. There are wonderfully artfully traced moments of trauma and survivorship in this book. It is persistent and intergenerational and it is deeply tied to the warp and weft of this little girl’s story.

While the 1950s are often rightfully vilified for being times of deep racism and sexism there seems to have been a deep sense of community, a common spirit which is really celebrated in this book. Mr Chris, Harry the Hermit, loyal hard working Fritz, and the surprise friend Annie-Get-Your-Gun, they all limn out a world that is generous, kind, and ennobling for this tiny tight family.

Maple Hill, the house and property that Marly’s family moves to, is a sugar bush, a stand of maple trees which is tapped for sap which is turned into maple syrup. The description of the work that labor that goes into that sugaring season is vivid and wonderful:

She could carry three small bucketfuls in her bucket, but it was so heavy she couldn’t lift it to dump it into the high tank on the flatboat. Each time she had to wait for Fritz or Joe to come and empty it. But she got so she could fill her bucket as fast as they did and get it back to them almost every time so they didn’t have to wait for her. One arm got so tired she had to carry with the other; she could even switch the full bucket from side to side without spilling much. (p. 157).

They have also come a long way as a family when this kind of interaction has become smooth and easy and normal.

She went in and sank down on the old couch, and Daddy smiled at her.

“Good work,” he said. “Fritz says you’re the eighth wonder of the world.”

She was too tired to be pleased even. She was limp inside and outside. But after a while Fritz brought some eggs and boiled them in the syrup. They tasted wonderful, with some of the sweetness in them as if it had gone right through the shells. (p.157)

This novel was very very powerful to me personally. After two years of my own daily trauma and enormous pressure I found myself wounded back on my own hill in Central New York. I came off a job where I had over 160 staff and managed an organization with a monthly financial flip of over a million dollars. I dealt with constantly being undermined and pressure from various kinds of incompetence and corruption. The city we lived in was hard on my kids and I was working so much and for such high stakes I didn’t see it. I know for a fact that my kids stepped just as lightly as Marly and Joe had to, if not for the same caliber of pain and loss for their father.

I was in bad shape when I got to my sugar bush but we grow and move and try. I think that the best Newbery dads win by trying. This was the first year of our own sugaring. At four trees and six buckets it is nothing like Mr. Chris’s 1,800 trees but it was enough to put syrup on our own table and have a few bottles to give away and sell. Like Marly’s Daddy I found myself lost in the long contemplative work of the evaporator. I started to find daily joy in my daughter and sometimes a surprising pride and awe of my son.

Top marks, highly recommended for survivors of trauma and their families.

There are a lot of Newbery books that deal with the Great Depression and this one is my absolute favorite so far. What I really really like is that since it was published in 1938 it was a genuine creation of the time. The term The Great Depression is never used because this work of fiction predated that label. It was just the times they were in. A government loan for the money to build a new barn saves the family farm and helps the family hold together the community around them. That’s not even the thrust of the story, it is just there.

One of the supporting characters, Eric, literally walks out of the darkness looking for a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. He is a very well travelled child whose story would be terrifying now but which they all treat as a matter of course before bringing him into the family as an adopted kid (who is free to leave whenever he feels the need). After his parents’ deaths he is left an orphan on his own in NYC. At the ripe age of thirteen he sets out on his own to find a cousin who could take him in:

“I didn’t ride on the bus much though. I saved the money for food and hitchhiked. At night I slept in haystacks and old barns, and once when it was raining I spent the night in an empty drainpipe beside the road. It took me three weeks to reach Oregon and when I got to Slanelyville where my cousin lived, they told me in the post office that he had sold his farm and moved away a couple of months before. They didn’t know where, nobody knew. I asked everyone who’d known him at all. (p.47).

Eric spends a year travelling across the United States working ag jobs and in canning factories before being taken in by Garnet, the main character’s, family.

Structurally this is one of those kids novels that are really a series of adventures and anecdotes. Our main character is a young girl named Garnet and she is delightfully spunky and strong-willed. What is great is that all the characters in the book genuinely like her for it. There are a few times when things that are deemed “not for a girl” end up working their way back around and into her corner.

“I guess it ain’t no use,” he said. “I never saw a young one that didn’t get into mischief from time to time. You’re pretty well-behaved on the whole; I wouldn’t have you any different. Just think a little oftener, that’s all I mean. We don’t want anything to happen to you.

That is the scolding that she gets from a beloved neighbor after she takes off during a harvest day to hitchhike 18 miles each way to the biggest town in the region without letting anyone know where she was going. It is the harshest scolding she will get in the entire book and she did it because she got her nose out of joint over some things her older brother said when the thresher messed up.

As a modern parent some of Garnet’s decisions are hard to read. She hitchhikes a bunch in the course of the narrative. She often goes off on her own without telling anyone where she is going or when she will be back at a time when phones in buildings were rare, let alone the constant connection of the modern parent. My daughter is around the same age as Garnet and some of the chaos that this fictional girl gets into set my teeth on edge.

All the same, a simpler narrative for a simpler time. There are no grand tragedies, no great conflicts that go unresolved at chapter’s end. This one is so early on the list that it is easy to not see the parts of it that are innovative. I love how empowered Garnet is and as I looked at the life of author and illustrator Elizabeth Enright I can see why, Born to wealth and privilege in Oak Park Illinois her mother was Frank Lloyd Writght’s younger sister. Enright spent her childhood summers on Nantucket, studied dance under Martha Graham, and went to art school in NYC and Paris, eventually teaching writing at Barnard. I can’t help wondering if her view of girlhood in a fictional rural Wisconsin was colored by the power of her own girlhood. However she got there she has created a character in Garnet who is bright, sunny, optimistic, and dauntless.

This lovely book includes one of my favorite descriptions of an average day at a public library.

Many times the screen door of the library creaked and closed with a muffled bang as people came and went; other children and grown people, old ladies looking for books on crocheting and boys wanting stories about G-men. For a while rain splattered against the window beside the two girls but they scarcely heard it. (p. 61)

This is a fun if unextraordinary read. If you have a 4Her in your life or know a bookish Future Farmer of America they might adore it for what it is. There is not necessarily a lot for modern kids to really sink their teeth into but it is fun wholesome kids’s novel nonetheless. Enright’s illustrations are lovely. My copy of the book is an old permabound paperback so the pictures are greyscale but if you are able to find a copy of the book with the original color illustrations you should grab it on that basis alone.

In a list as big and prestigious as the Newberys there are going to be some clunkers, there is really no way around it. This isn’t a bad book per se but it is not at the level of most of the Newbery Medal and the Honor books I’ve written about so far. It’s an adventure story, of a sort, but the pacing and tone is way off. More importantly I think it fails to treat kids with the dignity that they deserve in literature of this mark.

It is set on the island of Capri at a time when the place was sleepy and isolated. Our main character is a boy of the island and he is certainly alive with wonder and curiosity. He’s 14 but written younger which always throws me a bit when authors make that choice. The real problem is that it is not really his story. He is a witness to the adventure more than he is the driver of it and I think that is a fundamental flaw of children’s lit. The story is for, of, and about the child, not about the things that the adults around them do that are independent of them that they are tagging along on.

Capri has a few set stanzas in its history. It has always been a resort, the Romans created it that way under Emperor Augustus. After the fall of Rome it became a sleepy little backwater, then it became a bohemian haven particularly for LGBTQ artists and thinkers, and in the second half of the 20th century it became a high end tourism destination for everyone. This tourism was largely drawn by natural beauty and the stunning blue grotto. This book is about the rediscovery of the Blue Grotto which was considered haunted and cursed for centuries by the locals. The opening of this space would become an international tourism destination and change the economic future of the island and its population.

The issue is that the action is not driven by our adolescent main character Michele but rather by three international guests to his family hotel, guests who seem much more interesting to the author than Michele or his family. They are a painter, a philosopher, and an adventurer, all of them from different foreign countries, all of them fabulously wealthy, all of them incredibly entitled. Michele is their witness, the audience to their adventures.

It was indeed just the beginning. From the east and the west, from the north and the south, by ones and twos, by tens and twenties, by hundreds and thousands, people have come to see this wonder. And each day the tides open wide the entrance, and reveal again one of the most beautiful places in all the world - the famous Blue Grotto on the Island of Capri. (p. 156, incidentally the last paragraph of the book).

It feels like Weil went on vacation to Capri, had an excellent tour guide, and came home to write this. She had a career writing books for kids, largely biographies, but this is the most notable thing that she did. It’s not a bad book but it is not a great one either. Worth a miss, there are better books found all over the Newbery lists.

This was the first piece of great literature I was ever exposed to. My teacher read it aloud in second grade and I still remember the excitement of hearing it. I grew up in a reading family, I was read to throughout my childhood, allowed to read myself to sleep at night from a young age, and family legend says that I started reading on my own at age four. This book was different though, I could tell even at the time. I knew that this was a masterpiece.

Re-reading it 47 years later I still agree with my very much younger self. This is a delightful crisp clean read. There’s a wonderful magical realism to it that nobody really questions why or how a cricket can play opera, they just let the magic happen.

Traffic came to a standstill. The buses, the cars, men and women walking - everything stopped. And what was strangest of all, no one minded. Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was as still as a meadow at evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass. (p. 140).

This is very much a book of New York City but the real NYC where people live and work and talk to each other. Chester Cricket is from out of town, a country rube with talent enough to make a splash in the Big Apple. Tucker Mouse feels like a good Yiddish guy from the Lower East Side and Harry Cat is a theater-goer and intellectual who is broad minded enough to be best friends and roommates with a mouse. The Bellini Family who own the newsstand where Chester performs are Italian immigrants and Mario, their son, spends time wandering the city working at the newspaper stand and wandering over the Chinatown on his own to get help for his pet cricket.

I’ve been fascinated and in love with cities my whole life despite being raised in a small town. I feel like this book had a huge part in that. The city is fascinating and enchanting and mysterious, and safe. The writing is light and bright and easy and the illustrations by Garth Williams are enchanting. There are lots of little jokes inside that you especially get if you have lived in NYC.

And the crowd kept on growing. That first day alone, there were more than seven hundred and eighty three people late to work because they had stopped to listen to Chester. (p.122)

Part of the reason why this one is so deeply wedded to a Gen X childhood is the incredible 1973 special “A Cricket in Times Square” (alternative title “A Cricket in the City”), by the brilliant Chuck Jones. This was part of a trio of specials he did based on kids lit (“The Cricket in Times Square”, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”, and “The White Seal”), that we all saw in the library, on TV, and at school. If the film projector came out and these were on offer you knew it was gonna be a great day.

When I saw that this book was an Honor title I wondered what the heck would have beaten it out to win that year. Well it was Island of the Blue Dolphins and boy oh boy do I bet there were some real arguments around the committee table that year.

As an adult this is a fast read. If you want a bit of hope in your life, take a couple of hours and read it for yourself just as a break from the cares and chaos of the every day. Better yet, find a kid and steal a few hours together to share it.

There are a few Newbery books which get overlooked because of outdated titles. Crazy Lady is one of them and I think that is really too bad. There is a lot going on in this one and I think that it could be a really great classroom or kids/tween book clubs.

It’s an urban Newbery, the author, Jane Leslie Conly is a native of Baltimore and she lives there still/ The fictional neighborhood is called Tently Heights which makes me wonder if it is subbing in for the very real Yale Heights. It’s a squarely urban working class nabe which rubs shoulders with true poverty one block over, just like in real cities.

This is another “sad parent story” Newbery as so many are. Vernon, our narrator, is the middle child of five whose mother has died three years prior dropping dead of a stroke at her workstation in a textile factory. His father is clearly still mourning but also clearly doing his best. At the start of the book his best really isn’t super great, it’s strained and tired and worn. There is not a lot on offer at home for Vernon, at the start of the book he is struggling with his family a lot and his family is clearly struggling too.

Set in 1981 I had a real connection to this book as I was myself a tweener that year just like Vernon. At one point Mad Magazine and Ronald Reagan are mentioned in one sentence and I had to smile because I can promise you that I was definitely reading Mad while Ronnie was in office. While it was published in 1992 this one feels very 80s and very true to the gritty 80s, not the clean lines of New Wave which we see so much in retro designs of the decade. It was a time when a lot of kids handled a lot of stuff on their own.

Middle school is a tough time of growing and Vernon gets the absolute worst of it. When the book begins he’s fighting with his family constantly, his grades suck, and he’s running with a crowd that is starting to get into really genuine bad behaviors and on their way to do worse. Through all of this he knows things are going badly and he is desperate to turn things around. He starts doing chores for a retired teacher in the neighborhood in exchange for tutoring. She then connects him with Maxine and Ronald, the Crazy Lady and her son.

The kid who was holding onto her was even stranger than she was. He was tall and skinny-real skinny. His skin was broken out, which made me think he was a teenager, but you couldn’t be sure. The look on his face was more like a little kid’s: scared. His eyes were open wide and his mouth was working as if he wanted to talk and he was holding tight.” (p. 13).

Ronald has developmental delay and Maxine is a chronic alcoholic. Once Vernon starts to get to know them better and play a bigger part in their lives her addiction becomes a real challenge in a lot of ways that he cannot be expected to understand. A lot of AA meetings open with a prayer for “Those still sick and suffering and for the children who have no choice in the matter.” This book is that prayer brought to life.

Acceptable and normative language sure has changed, and that is a big problem for this book. “Soneone found out he went to a school for retarded kids” (p. 15) sure doesn’t mince words and has made this one of ALA’s top 100 most challenged and banned books pretty much since its publication. It’s too bad because there is so much more to this book than a couple of outdated phrases that are used to make a point, not to hurt anyone or encourage abusive language.

In all great storytelling there are tropes and patterns and kids literature at the Newbery level is no different. One familiar pattern goes like this: Kid in trouble/kid getting into trouble => Kid meets unexpected ally => unexpected ally challenges Kid’s worldview => Kid matures and deepens as a person => Kid undergoes redemptive change. What makes the literature on this list work is how masterfully that story is told. Leslie Conly does a wonderful job of creating Vernon and his world. It is a messy story where great characters make a lot of poor decisions. Addiction ultimately wins, except that it really doesn’t. Being a tweener boy is tough, you want to be SOMETHING but you have no idea what that looks like or who can help you get there. When you are a boy at this age there is a certain sense of shame in kindness.

Vernon steps up though. His influence actually makes Maxine moderate for a bit, a little bit anyway. He finds out about the Special Olympics and creates an entire block party in his neighborhood to collect money to pay for Ronald’s fees and new sneakers. It’s incredibly powerful for him and he changes not only in himself but in the eyes of his family and community. While he is at the Special Olympics he meets one of Ronald’s classmates and her dad who is with her wearing a suit. As they part ways the man asks:

“Are you Ronald’s brother?”

“No, just a friend from the neighborhood.”

“We’ll see you later friend.” He shook my hand and Lily did too. I was surprised he did that. He was the kind of person you’d see downtown or in the business section of the newspaper. (p164)

This is a kid in trouble who has lost his way yet he earns a lot of power and respect in a few months and doesn’t even really notice that it is happening. By the end of the book Vernon is a pretty remarkable young man and everyone around him knows it.

The cops didn’t hold her. I talked to Old Man Meyers and his wife and promised to clean up the mess if they’d give her one last chance. They weren’t happy about it but I kept on talking and finally they agreed just to get rid of me.” (p 135).

If the last five pages don’t make you cry there is something very wrong with you.

When I looked up June Leslie Conly I was fascinated by her. This was her second book and it was a Newbery Honor and her first book was the last in the NIMH series by Robert C. O’Brien. I figured she was a talented journeyman writer who had been called in to finish off O’Brien’s legacy. Nope, she’s the daughter of Robert Leslie Carroll Conly who took the pen name Robert C. O’Brien and wrote Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH which won the Newbery medal in 1972 and is one of the great works of American literature for children. He was a staff writer and editor with National Geographic and had a contract that stipulated he could not publish under his own name for any other publication. He took that very seriously and when he won the Newbery his agent gave his speech. His wife actually did an interview as “Mrs. O’Brien”. June Leslie Conly also co-authored Z for Zacharia, uncredited, with her mom’s help working from her dad’s notes after his death. For the record, while Z for Zacharia is often cited as an early YA novel but it really is not and was never intended to be. I say this as someone who was handed it at age 12 and quickly found myself way out of my depth.

Crazy Lady is a classic. It’s inspiring and insightful with a clean and resonant narrative voice. The title and the limited offensive language (which is used for effect, not pejoratively), has really held it back from the recognition and longevity that it deserves. Go and read it as an adult, maybe in partnership with the right kid. This one hit me in the heart.

This one is a real classic of children’s lit with very high name recognition. It was required reading for just about all of Gen X particularly us kids up in New England and the Northeast. It’s a book about brothers, actually written by brothers, which I think adds a really powerful veracity to the tone and tenor of the book. It really gets at how uniquely brothers love one another. It is a relationship which, at its best, is very simple: an indelible bond against the world - together no matter what. This novel shows how the core simplicity of that relationship can complicate every other aspect of your life when the world starts to push back.

James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier were brothers and a writing team who did a bunch of historical fiction for kids. Christopher was a history professor and went on to be the State Historian for Connecticut. James was a musician, editor, and writer who did a lot of work in jazz journalism. Christopher (the younger brother), did the research and James (the elder), wrote the narrative. They both lived pretty remarkable and creative lives and the dynamic of them working together really gets that filial energy working.

It is pretty remarkable from a sheer storytelling perspective that Sam’s ultimate fate is literally the title of the book yet we are left hanging on hoping for him for the entire book. While he is a beloved member of a tight knit family he is not actually a great brother or son. Tim goes through a subtle and wonderful change in the course of the story where he outgrows his brother, despite still loving and admiring him. While Sam may be Tim’s hero and the apple of his parents’ eye many of his decisions are far from noble and he is never the only who suffers for them,

Indeed the Revolutionary War is depicted as anything but heroic throughout the entire book. There are no grand battles, no bayonet charges. Nobody is going to build a statue to Sam’s courage. War seems a very dirty, cold, and hungry thing in these pages. This is pretty extraordinary to me because I was there at the time and America LOVED celebrating that war. I was 6 for the bicentennial and had a full Rebel officer uniform courtesy of my doting grandmother who knew of my love for dressing up. In New England at least we were ALL into it and that makes this book that much more remarkable. Published in 74 this was just a couple of years beforehand, right on the cusp of national fervor for a war we felt really good about after Viet Nam.

This one hit me pretty hard with everything going on in our country right now. Sam’s family, including our narrator Tim, are loyalists who don’t favor independence from the King. Their dad is an immigrant to Britain who fought for the King to earn his citizenship, he is in no hurry to throw it away for something he sees as not impacting their daily life outside of the war itself. They want nothing to do with the war which they see as disruptive and destructive. Some families in their community are known loyalists, some are equally known rebels. They are neighbors, they help one another, they trade with one another, but they are also fundamentally enemies. Some towns are seen as loyal to one side or the other and that impacts troop movements which impacts the people who live in those communities. It made me think about Red States and Blue States and how they are really mauve counties and fuchsia municipalities. As pressures build in our own nation this fifty two year old book feels very contemporary and very prescient. Sam is radicalized at Yale no less which feels rather on the nose.

I enjoyed this book immensely but reading it alongside my daily drip of news scared the heck out of me.

Fun historical fiction dominates much of the Newbery Awards and this is a great example of what the genre can do. This book does that great thing that good historical fiction books do by illuminating the mysteries of the past, taking a thing that is foreign and remote, and then weaving a story around these mysterious and different things that you (and especially a kid) can get a hook on.

The scene is Poland in the late middle ages and it is a space of magic and discord. There is alchemy and political discord. There’s mesmerism and betrayal. There’s a treasure, and a family secret, and a hidden message in the music of a trumpet. If you want to hear the actual call of the trumpet just click here, it’s a historic tradition that continues to this day. The action is wild at times. There are sacred relics of Poland’s history, terrifying Cossack bandits, and a massive fire that will consume the city at the height of the action.

These early Newbery winners from the 20s are just great to me. They are straight up inspiring stories for boys and girls. There are no narrative tricks or frills, just clean accessible storytelling and an awful lot of it. There is plenty of narrative meat on the bones and more than enough story to go around. The good characters are very good, the bad characters are evil incarnate, and everyone in the book pretty much falls into one camp or the other.

It is interesting to hear the author speak of a Krakow of long ago when his view itself is, in many ways, from long ago. Written in 1928 this Poland has seen nothing of WW II, the holocaust, the Iron curtain, or Solidarity. Krakow escaped much of the destruction of WW II but only because it was the seat of the invading government. The ghettos happened here as well. This is a Poland which still seems innocent like so many of the characters in this book yet it has a certain portent to it. The great fire that is at the center of the book seems to foretell the destruction for a greater Poland in years to come.

I love the gentleness of this era of the Newbery Award winners. They are not tricky, there are lessons in them but they speak to basic behavior and good values without being preachy or saccharine. They are books that respect the kids who read them and value them for the adults that they will be, not the adults that they think that they are when they are still very young. Sometimes it seems like kids in the 21st century are adults in miniature. These early winners speak to when kids were still allowed to be children and to perhaps discover the world at a gentler pace.

Amazingly, the author, Eric Philbrook Kelly, was born in the same town I grew up in, Amesbury Massachusettes. Amesbury is a tiny town at the very northern tip of the state, right on the New Hampshire border. At the time of his birth it would have been a thriving mill town making carriages and hats. Like so many Newbery authors he lived an adventurous life, spending extensive time in Poland including travelling with a boxcar full of Polish troops during WWI and helping the State Department with Polish refugees settling in Mexico after WWII. The deeper I go in these books the wilder the stories I find, both on the page and off.

This is a very classic example of a very particular type of book. This is, as best I can tell, as near to perfect a youth historical fiction as you are likely to get. It’s a mystery that just happens to include carefully researched historical information, a complex family drama, ruminations on friendship (across class lines no less), and an immersive drop into a culture and way of life that is as distant from that of any child today as it can be, and yet it is eternal.

This is set in Ancient Egypt at the height of the whole death cults and tombs and it is amazing to see how she just drops us down in this economy that is so wholly based on the dead. There is a whole worldview that she is able to create that allows us to access a culture that is completely alien to us. That is one of the marvels of the Newbery books to me, they let kids dip a toe into a hundred different cultures. A lot of work has been done over the last few years about how to develop and encourage empathy and novels have consistently been a means to develop feeling for the “other” since you get to inhabit the world and life of an “other” so closely in a good novel.

There is a wonderful “bad brother” element that makes me think of As You Like It for the very nefarious awfulness of the brother in question. A sibling with no fealty or friendship, just blood that they will use against you. Serious stuff for a children’s novel but so well executed and it powers the historical teaching about the social structures of Ancient Egypt. The fact that he is forced to live with his brother is a story unto itself when he should be off at an apprenticeship.

In the end there is a pay off that is one of those wonderful payoffs that you really only get in kids’ literature. The bravery of the main character is such that it all works out in the end. After neglect and misuse he is elevated to greatness, a small child made hugely important. It’s all worth it in the end in a way that is neatly tied up and deeply satisfying. It’s the end of the story that the bookish optimistic kid in me still loves, and cheers, and cries to.

Jarvis McGraw is a really competent novelist and does such great exposition. Her dialog is really seamless and she sets us up for the next beat smoothly and quickly. I am really pretty fascinated by her as well. Born in Houston Texas in 1915 she moved to Oklahoma City when she was 8. She wrote as a child and would have been living there in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl. OKC was outside the heart of the storms but they would have been impacted by it. She moved to Portland Oregon where she lived for many years before her death in 2000. A good part of her life on a 23 acre nut orchard with her husband, novelist William Corbin. When I think of her I think of the motto “Keep Portland Weird” and wonder if she was perhaps one of the people who made it that way to begin with.

She also illustrated the covers for her novels which I think is really endearing and wonderful. The Newbery committees loved her, as they should, and while she never won the medal she had three books that were named Newbery Honor books. They are all historical fiction and they all take place in very different places and times. Moccasin Trail (52), is a tale of colonial America and the interplay of European and Indigenous cultures, The Golden Goblet (62), is a mystery set in Ancient Egypt, and The Moorchild (96), a tale of a changeling trying to fit in. It’s an incredibly broad cultural sweep but also it is an amazing run of award winning children’s novels over the course of forty four years of creative output. Amazing stuff, I have yet to read her other two and I am looking forward to them!

This masterwork crosses over a half a dozen genres effortlessly. It is haunting, exciting, educational, entertaining, and deeply satisfying. It’s part hard sci-fi, part historical fiction, part coming of age story. It is partially a ton of things and it inhabits all of those things completely in the moment. It is mercurial, a whirling narrative kaleidoscope, a maelstrom, and a haunting note of deja vu. It is a perfect children’s novel and a profound read as an adult.

Set in Zimbabwe of 2194 it is a shining example of Afro-futurism. The worldbuilding is complex and compelling and includes postscripts and appendixes. Flying cars and ancient fetish magic work comfortably side by side. The characters in the family are classic, almost hypertropes (Father is the ultimate strong father, Mother is kind and wise and perfect, little brother is brave, little sister is sassy), but they inhabit their roles so well that they stoke the forge that burns throughout the novel reshaping our hero.

This book is a true film noir narrative for children, which is actually quite strange. That statement would be pretty open to debate if you define film noir as being in black and white with lots of deep shadows. There are TONS of kids’ narrative that can hold to that, some classics sure but look no further than the funny papers. My thing is that I am very tied to the original strict definition as laid out in A Panorama of American Film Noir 1955, by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton. Originally written in French this work lays out a very clear and specific definition of what noir is: A Joe Average finds himself up to his neck in a situation out of his control. He gets to this situation through a choice of his (or her) own making, usually as a shortcut or first taste of the underhanded. He is dropped into a world of crime and vice which exists alongside but outside the comfortable world rules, a world wherein none can be trusted. He is redeemed or destroyed through his choices and how he responds to the opportunities for corruption he is presented with. After his end, be it good or bad, we see the wheels of corruption and crime grinding on regardless. In a classic film noir there is also eroticized violence as an absolutely essential component but here that is not present in the least. I’ve never seen anything like it and I watch and read in the genre of noir a lot.

Farmer has also created an ideal hero journey as laid out by Joseph Campbell, so there is that too, but, as I keep saying, this book is many many many wonderful things at once.

There is a lot of African history here, both explicit and told as metaphor. There are deep reflections on environmentalism and the correlation between poverty and pollution. There are reflections on colonialism and post-colonial cultural integration with new power dynamics. There is casual cruelty, both siblings are kept hostage in different ways at some point. There is deep filial love but there is also internalized childhood abuse and maternal manipulation.

This is a profoundly moving and fascinating book. As part of these essays I like to place these Newbery books into the context of my own life a bit. The first time I read this book was in the dead of winter in the heart of Central New York. I read it to my own family, wife, son, and daughter, all sprawled out together on the floor in front of a roaring woodstove. It was perhaps as far from the steaming urban African environment of Harare as you can physically be yet Nancy Farmer transported us every night through a very dark and cold winter. That was the winter when the ancient fuse box in our Victorian farmhouse gave up the ghost. It took a couple of weeks for a replacement part to be found and we lost central heat, lights, and running water for that time. The woodstove, this story, and our family burned all the brighter for the cold and the dark. This is the novel that we shared the most and still talk about the most to this day.

Addendum: 1995 was a hell of a year for the Newberys. Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech won the medal and there were only two Honor books that year, The Eye the Ear and The Arm, and Catherine Called Birdy by Karen Cushman. Wow!

This one is one of my absolute favorites. I think it is tone perfect and captures that wonderful/ delicious/ horrific/ awkwardness of adolescence. This is the 1964 winner so there is a lot of quiet rebellion without the full bore revolution of the later 60s. The narrator pushes back against the rules around him but he never really breaks any of them. It’s set against a background of middle class New York in the Sixties and the setting and extended cast of characters are so subtilly yet so vibrantly limned out that it reminds me of a watercolor.

For all that there is no dreaminess to this narrative. It is a clear cut story of a boy trying to make his way in the great big world with New York City as his local town. He talks about going over to Brooklyn and crossing the Staten Island Bridge, he sneaks his bike onto the beltway to meet up with a friend and makes calculations of his pocket change with bus fare in mind. He meets a girl and he is clumsy and charming and an idiot but never malicious or mean. Mary’s mom is a beatnik and it is hilarious to see the depiction of the alternate household of pre hippie Coney Island. Of course he also adopts a cat who is partly our surrogate and partly the walking incarnation of Dave Mitchell’s transition into adulthood.

It’s easy to make a comparison to good old bad old Holden Caulfield. Both are rebellious children of New York City, both are adolescent men. Granted Holden is older and much darker but they are only two years apart. Both stories are told in the first person and both of them are pushing back against the world that surrounds them. Davey is just so much nicer and kinder and less jaded. His parents are middle class and would never send him away to a boarding school when there is a perfectly good PS around the corner. He’s younger than Holden, sure, but he seems much more mature in a lot of ways and frankly the writing while less literary certainly is a far sight easier to take (and this from a Salinger fan from way back).

While this is one of my all time favorite Newbery winners it has the title that I like the least. I get the conceit that the cat is his outside audience for his inmost thoughts. I understand that Cat is his first foray into adulthood and the perils and hazards of responsibility that come with it. I get that Cat sums up that note of quiet rebellion that is the period tone undertone of the book. Cats are independent and go their own way, not like all those unnamed Dogs to duty of Newberys past. I get that in so many ways it is a perfect title for the book and that its very awkwardness is part of the appeal, part of what makes it unique and interesting. I guess I just think it is a clunker, I don’t like how it scans, and I feel like it is a phrase not a concept. I suppose I am the one trying to make the title, like the protagonist, fit into a box.

Dave’s relationship with his father is one of the main themes of this book and is also emblematic of the theme of gentle rebellion that marks the book and puts it in the context of being forethinking in the mid sixties. It was a time of great change in America and that change was only picking up speed. The conflict between a demanding and strict yet ultimately deeply loving father and his son whose gentle forays into independence are adventures fraught with stumbles is a classic conflict that Neville manages to make compelling and, again, uniquely subtle. Over the course of the book the two find deeper wells of respect for each other and in the process find their conflicts happening less and ending up with better results in the end.

It reminds me of a special few years I had with my dad whom I miss a great deal. Reading this book I think again how I knew everything there was to know in the world when I was 14 and how my Pops could always show me where maybe I was missing the bigger story. That there were people tied to those facts that I was so interested in and feelings that drove those people to take those actions that made those facts. There’s a lot of that in this book too. People do unusual things and turn up in unusual places and while it would be easy to call them “College Dropout” or “Crazy Cat Lady” or “Some Girl from Coney Island” there is a lot more to everyone than you really might expect, even a lot more to a stray cat that you bring home partially to piss off your old man.

I got a lot of gifts from my pops, a great set of hair, a strong public speaking voice, but the greatest gift he gave me was empathy and he taught me a lot of lessons in that course when I was about the same age as Dave Mitchell. This book is all about empathy as well which is perhaps why I find it such a gem. It is, for me, a luminous pearl, a work with a quiet cool radiance. Nothing too flashy, not much to grab your attention, just a steady pure light and the faint reflection of yourself upon its surface.

NB be sure to get an edition with the illustrations by Emil Weiss, who has his own fascinating story. They are lovely and add nicely to the novel.

This is a short little page turner that can easily be read in an evening and makes for a deeply satisfying literary experience. It is hopeful, charming, and optimistic. This is a book that will genuinely make you feel good reading it.

Which is pretty incredible given that the topic is urban family homelessness. The family that is under the bridge is there because they have no place else to live. It’s not drugs or crime or any of that very dramatic stuff that brings them there, just bad luck and difficult circumstances. They aren’t even really a family at the outset of the book and that is part of the charm of the narrative.

The protagonist in The Family Under the Bridge is actually not the children but an elderly vagrant by the name of Armand Pouly. This in itself is pretty fascinating. Yes there are children in the book, yes investment in them is a driving motivator in the narrative but ultimately this is a children’s book that is the story of an elderly man. How wild is that? Armand is an utterly delightful old codger, relentlessly optimistic and devoutly attached to his life of unattachment and no work.

When he discovers the children hidden at “his” spot beneath one of Paris’ bridges he is immediately cautious lest the “little starlings” steal his heart. The children have a mother who works as a laundress and is desperate to make it clear that they are NOT tramps despite the reality of their situation but it is Armand who quickly takes over care of them while she works in the day.

Poor Armand, three small children and a stray dog change him utterly as a person. There is a MAGNIFICENT moment at the end of the book where he has transformed into a figure of great gravitas engaged in seeking employment and housing for his new family:

Monsieur noted his hesitation. “We really want a family man,” he said.

That brought Armand’s mind back to the needy Calcets. “Oh, I’ve got a family all right monsieur,” he said, “Three children and their mother. You should see my grandchildren. They would steal your heart away.”

At this point in the book if you are not crying your eyes out then you have no soul.

The book also has lovely gentle little illustrations by Garth Williams who also did the very famous illustrations for Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little. It’s pretty amazing that he can create images of children literally sleeping on the streets of Paris and still have them be charming and easy on us the reader.

While the Newbery books often deal with poverty it is usually rural poverty. People are tenant farmers or sharecroppers or on the road after the farm fails. This is the first Newbery that I have encountered that deals with child poverty in an urban environment, particularly a text that is based on family homelessness. It is interesting that this book, which is a product of the golden era of American prosperity and conformity (the 1950s) deals with poverty and individuals on the fringe of society in such a gentle and generous way.

Armand’s transformation is an inspiration for us all. Who knows what small act will freight us with great responsibilities? I think that what we do for those who have been entrusted to our care is one of the great measures of mankind. Armand, the shabby, drifting, Parisian tramp, is a literary hero for the ages.

Side note: I will be looking at a LOT of the honor books here. The winners of the Newbery are, of course, amazing but a lot of really fascinating books ALMOST got the prize as well.

I read this for the first time on my commute and I fell head over heels in love with it. It’s a fast read (I did it on one leg of my morning commute) and is very approachable and accessible for younger readers. There is a wide swath of reading levels that show up in the Newbery awards and I would put this one as one of the lower, faster, easier levels. It is still a rich narrative that has a lot to sink your teeth into. The illustrations by Louis Slobodkin are delightful and really add to the book.

This book gets at bullying more effectively than any other book that I have read and it did it before bullying even became a “thing”. For most of the book the girls in an elementary classroom tease a classmate mercilessly. I love how quickly you begin to dread the phrase “the fun” as in “that’s when the fun started” or “we started up the fun again”. In no time at all the phrase “fun” gives you a sinking and sick feeling in your stomach.

It’s a very wise look at bullying too. The narrator is well aware that what they are doing is wrong but she is desperately afraid of the pack turning on her. She is friends with the popular important girl but she knows that can change and she is afraid that doing the right thing will make her a target for the same abuse. There is a lovely moment when the bullying has run its sad course when she has to determine just what kind of a person her best friend is. I think that the phrase: Peggy was really all right, just as she always thought. Peg was really all right. She was okay. Is a wonderful commentary on the difficulties of friendship. Please be the person I thought you were, please, please, please.

I’m very interested in seeing how the Newbery books are reflective of their time in history. There is one section which places this one securely in a historical context.

She had stood by silently, and that was just as bad as what Peggy had done. Worse. She was a coward. At least Peggy hadn’t considered that they were being mean, but she, Maddie, had thought they were doing wrong. She had thought, supposing she was the one being made fun of. She could put herself in Wanda’s shoes. But she had done just as much as Peggy to make life miserable for Wanda by simply standing by and saying nothing.

This phrase speaks to me of children whose fathers and brothers were off fighting a war that did not touch their shores. Why is your daddy far away? Why did your brother die? They did it because they are not cowards, they did it because it was the right thing, they did it because there are thousands of little Polish girls who need someone to stand up for them far away.

This is a horrid piece of racist, warmongering, xenophobic propaganda that won the Newbery Medal in 1942 as America launched itself into World War II. It is a study in fear of invasion and the terror of “the other”. This is a short fast read, the paperback I read clocked in at 62 pages, and the reading level is easy with little introspection or discussion of higher issues. This is a book about the women and children who are left behind and the innate danger that finds them when the menfolk are off.

The setting is update New York during the French and Indian Wars and our protagonists are a group of Dutch settlers. I will say that this Revolutionary War era fiction was MUCH more popular in the past and was very prevalent when I was a kid around the bicentennial. It is interesting to see a group of people and an era of American history that isn’t represented often. That is about the only redeeming quality of this book for me.

It’s pretty racist. The family who are our heros are, in fact, slave owners. They live in mortal fear of the “Indians” who are invading their valley. The illustrations throughout the book show these Native Americans as lurking, sneaking, watching from the woods while the good mama, boy, and toddler girl, all grow more and more fearful of their safety. There is no attempt to humanize the enemy, far from it, in fact they are described as:

They hardly looked like men, the way they moved. They were trotting, stooped over, first one and then another coming up, like dogs sifting up to the scent of food.

I guess that kind of thing was OK in 1942 but it seems hardly worthy of accolades and laurels, unless of course you are a nation caught up in the fever of war.

I also find the incredibly bad parenting hard to take. The father, Teunis, goes off to “hold the bridge” but you get the sense that this is a bunch of guys hanging out more than actual soldiers. The only “Indian” they kill is one that they find crippled and injured in a stream. When one of his friends goes to the farm to check on his family the one thing that Teunis asks to have brought back is his flask of schnapps. Gertrude, the mother, chooses to not take her children to her mother in law’s house despite the fact that it is made of brick and populated by armed slaves for security. She thinks that they are safer, her and her two children, in their tiny cabin. This decision nearly costs her her life and those of her children.

Perhaps the thing that is hardest to take in this regard is that in the end she makes her ten year old son pull the trigger on the Spanish gun that the book is named for. She sets herself up as a lure (which is really just a terrible idea) so that she can lead her attackers into the line of fire of what amounts to a portable cannon. She makes it so that her child kills three people and nobody blinks an eye at it. In fact:

Trudy grew sleepy, after a while, and lost her interest in the dead Indians. She was no longer afraid of them.

That’s the little sister who is about four or five who then falls asleep on her brother’s lap while they are warmed by the fire of their house burning down while their mother is unconscious from blood loss next to them.

I’m glad I read this one even if I did hate it. It’s not a badly executed book, just prejudiced and xenophobic. This is a Newbery which acts as a mirror to its age, an age when the nation went to war, even our kids.

Newbery Thoughts - The Wheel on the School

Meindert DeJong Newbery Medal Winner 1955

Illustrated by Maurice Sendak

This novel is very sweet, very kindly, the tone is gentle, it feels very much like a Flemish painting, all soft and watery and subtle. The whole thing reads like a kindly tale told by a loving elder.

At the same time there are deep and driven depictions of community, rebuilding, finding luck and grace and something magical from a time before but which is now missing. In all the sweetness and safe adventure I felt myself longing for a sense and pace of community which is lacking in our own society in America right now. This is a story of a deepening community of care and social solidarity to common good that we can all learn from.

There is not a single character of color or significant difference of faith or cultural background. That being said, it is a tiny village in a pre-industrial northern Dutch fishing village. Amsterdam seems distant and untrustworthy. The world outside feels impossibly remote and equally unimportant.

I love the intergenerational aspect of it. It feels very European and, as someone who lives with a 92 woman, a daily closeness with the elderly that doesn’t happen in our society very much anymore.

Janus had become real; he had become a part of their village. He wasn’t a fearsome ogre to be hated and outwitted. (p.77)

Janus had become important, in the same way that old Grandmother Sibble III had become real & important. He had become a friend! (p.77)

Eventually the whole village gets involved and adults across the age and social spectrums are getting deeply involved in the quest of children. It’s got a delightful purity of intent and a the idea that an entire community would be inspired by the vision of children is both inspiring and a bit overwhelming. This grand shared adventure leads to a lot of little quests. This is NOT a short book but it IS perfect for storytime either in a classroom or at bedside.

Legend has it that DeJong started writing children’s books at the suggestion of a children’s librarian. He was certainly a darling of the Newbery committees for many years. He had a great run: Hurry Home Candy (Newbery Honor 1954), Along Came a Dog (Newbery Honor 1958), The Wheel on the School (Newbery Winner 1955), The House of the Sixty Fathers (Newbery Honor 1956). He did a bunch of books with Maurice Sendak which doesn’t hurt of course but this was when Sendak was still a nobody.

Yeah, I said that, Sendak was a nobody, he was being really carefully cultivated by Ursula Nordstrom (who I will be doing a whole other essay about). His work here is clearly his….if you know to look for it. The kids are cherubic and the scenery is quietly lovely but this is a long time before Where the Wild Things Are (1963). They worked together a bunch, which is interesting. I had never heard of DeJong before I started my work on the Newberys but Sendak is on the tip of our tongues when it comes to children’s authors, and on those of our children and librarians and honestly just everyone.

I bet you haven’t read many of these though:

Hurry Home, Candy, 1953 (Newbery Honor, 1954)

Shadrach, 1953 (Newbery Honor, 1954)

The Wheel On the School, 1954 (Newbery Medal, 1955)

Little Cow & the Turtle, 1955

The House of Sixty Fathers, 1956 (Newbery Honor, 1957)

Along Came a Dog, 1958 (Newbery Honor, 1959)

The Singing Hill, 1962

Originally I was inclined to dislike and oversimplify this book but I ended up enjoying it immensely and being genuinely moved by it. It is exciting right up to the last page, it contains a commentary on community, as well as a great deal of rumination about unexpected connections and hidden allies. In the end it was absolutely delightful with a deceptively complex narrative which is nonetheless perfect for storytime.

This story of survivorship is a fast, accessible, character-driven short novel. It’s one of those great Puffin Classics that really stand the test of time. The cast is small and hewn from life set within a kind of dreamy narrative. It is a wonderful tone poem of a family recovering from crisis and abuse.

While it was published in 95 this one feels older. It feels like a societal problem book from the 70s and I think that is when it is set, though that is quite deliberately timeless. This is a very real, very raw, very true depiction of rural New England poverty. There is a lot of fear and a lot of risk and a very accurate depiction of depression as it shows itself in both kids and adults. Regarding Christmas -

Last year had been bad with the tree. Van had made a big deal out of finding and cutting down the biggest one he could and when he couldn’t get it through the door he’d gotten ugly (p.93)

There are some helpers, some minor characters who desperately want to do good for this family and they do get to help a little but mostly they are separated by an invisible wall of trauma. It is a silent, secretive, exclusive horror that keeps even the best-intentioned at bay. There are also some incredible moments of genuinely heart rending courage.

I really enjoyed and appreciated the New England touches. “Like many surprises the first winter storm to hit Stark came in the night. It struck two days before Christmas and covered every exposed thing with a delicate but strong layer of ice,” I remember those storms as a child and the strange magical limning of everything in a rime of heavy breakable ice. I love these cultural moments in the Newbery books which I think are so key for kids to get exposed to all kinds of landscapes, both physical and mental.

In the end What Jaime Saw is a fast and wonderful read. It’s sad, as so many Newberys are, but it is also ultimately redemptive. It’s a pretty intense depiction of trauma in its many stages and shades of bruising. I enjoyed it immensely and it also broke my heart. Highly recommended.