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2019 Newbery Books
Dec. 3rd, 2019 04:31 pmI’ve finally read all the 2019 Newbery books! Just in time for the 2020 winners to be announced… at the end of January, so there is at least a little pause.
The 2019 winner was Meg Medina’s Merci Suarez Changes Gears, which I took a loooong time to read because the first time I tried it, I realized that Merci’s grandfather has Alzheimer’s long before anyone thought to inform poor Merci of this fact, and I just noped out because generally speaking books about illness are not my thing.
But I went back to it in the end, and I finished it, and if you’ve got to write a book about someone’s beloved grandfather’s worsening Alzheimer’s, this is a pretty good book. I enjoyed Merci’s extended family (her family and her grandparents and her aunt all live in a row of three houses, Las Casitas, an arrangement that renders her grandfather’s Alzheimer’s far more manageable than it might be otherwise), and the classroom dynamics are well-rendered, although it worried me that Merci - while friendly with most of the kids in her class - doesn’t seem to have any actual friends. How will she survive middle school without any buddies to back her up?? But by the end of the book she acquires a couple of probably future friends, so I felt a little better.
There were two Newbery Honor books this year. Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary is set during the Partition of India in 1947, and takes the form of a diary written by an eleven-year-old girl as her Hindu family moves from the newly-formed Pakistan to the city of Jodhpur in India. This is undoubtedly an important subject, and I can’t think of any other American children’s books that deal with it, but I found this book a slog.
The other Honor book, Catherine Gilbert Murdock The Book of Boy, is basically bonkers. It’s about a boy in medieval France whom everyone thinks is a hunchback but it turns out ( I see no way to discuss this book without spoilers )
It’s an entertaining book, but I think Murdock needed to think through the moral underpinnings a bit more.
The 2019 winner was Meg Medina’s Merci Suarez Changes Gears, which I took a loooong time to read because the first time I tried it, I realized that Merci’s grandfather has Alzheimer’s long before anyone thought to inform poor Merci of this fact, and I just noped out because generally speaking books about illness are not my thing.
But I went back to it in the end, and I finished it, and if you’ve got to write a book about someone’s beloved grandfather’s worsening Alzheimer’s, this is a pretty good book. I enjoyed Merci’s extended family (her family and her grandparents and her aunt all live in a row of three houses, Las Casitas, an arrangement that renders her grandfather’s Alzheimer’s far more manageable than it might be otherwise), and the classroom dynamics are well-rendered, although it worried me that Merci - while friendly with most of the kids in her class - doesn’t seem to have any actual friends. How will she survive middle school without any buddies to back her up?? But by the end of the book she acquires a couple of probably future friends, so I felt a little better.
There were two Newbery Honor books this year. Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary is set during the Partition of India in 1947, and takes the form of a diary written by an eleven-year-old girl as her Hindu family moves from the newly-formed Pakistan to the city of Jodhpur in India. This is undoubtedly an important subject, and I can’t think of any other American children’s books that deal with it, but I found this book a slog.
The other Honor book, Catherine Gilbert Murdock The Book of Boy, is basically bonkers. It’s about a boy in medieval France whom everyone thinks is a hunchback but it turns out ( I see no way to discuss this book without spoilers )
It’s an entertaining book, but I think Murdock needed to think through the moral underpinnings a bit more.
