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Newbery Honor Books of the 1960s
Dec. 29th, 2022 08:04 pmSliding in under the wire of 2022 with the last of the Newbery Honor books of the 1960s! Really galloped through the 1960s: I zoomed through in just slightly over a month.
Olivia Coolidge’s Men of Athens is a collection of short stories set before, during, and after Athens’ brief golden age, often with an intriguingly slantwise choice of narrators. The final story, for instance, centers on a member of the jury that condemned Socrates: a poverty-stricken old man who always turns up for jury duty because his crippled leg leaves him with few other avenues to make money.
Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family is a fable that received absolutely rapturous reviews in its day: it was proclaimed an instant classic by none other than P. L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins novels. Awkwardly, I’d never heard of The Animal Family before, so these prognostications have not been borne out by time.
The book is about a mermaid who comes ashore to live with a hunter (no one has names in this book), and they adopt a bear and a lynx and at last a shipwrecked boy, and coming together and caring for each other is what makes a family. It’s nice, and I enjoyed it, and I remain baffled by the reviewers' euphoria over the book.
Ester Wier’s The Loner also grapples with the question of what it means to be a family. It also starts out with a hero who has no name, as the boy has long since forgotten whatever name he had before he was orphaned and left to fend for himself in a series of picking camps. He meets a girl named Radelia, who decides that she will give him a name, but just as she swings around to tell him the name she’s picked, her long yellow hair gets caught in a potato harvester that rips off her scalp!
The boy, stunned with grief, leaves the potato farm, collapses in the wilderness, where he is found by a sheepdog and adopted by the shepherd, a six-foot-two fifty-something woman named Boss who has been grieving the death of her son Ben, killed last year by a grizzly bear. The boy gets a name by pointing at a passage in the Bible (it is, of course, about David, the famous shepherd lad), learns how to herd sheep, and makes friends with a dog who does not die. But the one sheep with a personality gets mauled to death by the grizzly who killed Ben (David shoots the bear dead), the 1960s being perhaps the peak era for Newbery Pet Death.
And finally, Carol Kendall’s The Gammage Cup is a secondary world fantasy (a great rarity in Newbery land!), featuring the Minnipins, who live in 1950s conformity hell where everyone wears a green cloak and every house has a green door and Curly Green who has painted her door scarlet is regarded as a dangerous disturber of the peace.
Our heroine Muggles stands somewhere in between: she isn’t so dangerously strange as Curly Green and company, but her habit of occasionally wearing a flagrant orange sash shows that she’s not a good conformist Minnipin, either. And soon events conspire to push her closer to Them, as the oddballs collectively are called, culminating in a scene where They are banished from the village.
While Muggles and company make a home for themselves on the mountain, they discover that the Minnipins’ ancestral enemies the Mushrooms (hairless mushroom-colored creatures with potbellies) are tunneling through the mountains to get into the valley… and soon enough, the invaders take one of Muggles’ friends CAPTIVE! Whereupon he discovers that the Mushrooms have a magical healing salve. “Is this is a sign that we are going to get some more in-depth exploration of Mushroom culture?" I wondered.
ABSOLUTELY NOT. The Mushrooms remain faceless enemies to be slaughtered. Their army is dispatched to a Mushroom, Muggles and company are welcomed back to town, and the Minnipins rejoice!
***
Although I enjoyed this madcap dash through the Newbery Honors of the 1960s, I intend to slow down considerably going forward. Take my time! Stop and smell the roses! Perhaps make more space in my life for things that are not books.
Olivia Coolidge’s Men of Athens is a collection of short stories set before, during, and after Athens’ brief golden age, often with an intriguingly slantwise choice of narrators. The final story, for instance, centers on a member of the jury that condemned Socrates: a poverty-stricken old man who always turns up for jury duty because his crippled leg leaves him with few other avenues to make money.
Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family is a fable that received absolutely rapturous reviews in its day: it was proclaimed an instant classic by none other than P. L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins novels. Awkwardly, I’d never heard of The Animal Family before, so these prognostications have not been borne out by time.
The book is about a mermaid who comes ashore to live with a hunter (no one has names in this book), and they adopt a bear and a lynx and at last a shipwrecked boy, and coming together and caring for each other is what makes a family. It’s nice, and I enjoyed it, and I remain baffled by the reviewers' euphoria over the book.
Ester Wier’s The Loner also grapples with the question of what it means to be a family. It also starts out with a hero who has no name, as the boy has long since forgotten whatever name he had before he was orphaned and left to fend for himself in a series of picking camps. He meets a girl named Radelia, who decides that she will give him a name, but just as she swings around to tell him the name she’s picked, her long yellow hair gets caught in a potato harvester that rips off her scalp!
The boy, stunned with grief, leaves the potato farm, collapses in the wilderness, where he is found by a sheepdog and adopted by the shepherd, a six-foot-two fifty-something woman named Boss who has been grieving the death of her son Ben, killed last year by a grizzly bear. The boy gets a name by pointing at a passage in the Bible (it is, of course, about David, the famous shepherd lad), learns how to herd sheep, and makes friends with a dog who does not die. But the one sheep with a personality gets mauled to death by the grizzly who killed Ben (David shoots the bear dead), the 1960s being perhaps the peak era for Newbery Pet Death.
And finally, Carol Kendall’s The Gammage Cup is a secondary world fantasy (a great rarity in Newbery land!), featuring the Minnipins, who live in 1950s conformity hell where everyone wears a green cloak and every house has a green door and Curly Green who has painted her door scarlet is regarded as a dangerous disturber of the peace.
Our heroine Muggles stands somewhere in between: she isn’t so dangerously strange as Curly Green and company, but her habit of occasionally wearing a flagrant orange sash shows that she’s not a good conformist Minnipin, either. And soon events conspire to push her closer to Them, as the oddballs collectively are called, culminating in a scene where They are banished from the village.
While Muggles and company make a home for themselves on the mountain, they discover that the Minnipins’ ancestral enemies the Mushrooms (hairless mushroom-colored creatures with potbellies) are tunneling through the mountains to get into the valley… and soon enough, the invaders take one of Muggles’ friends CAPTIVE! Whereupon he discovers that the Mushrooms have a magical healing salve. “Is this is a sign that we are going to get some more in-depth exploration of Mushroom culture?" I wondered.
ABSOLUTELY NOT. The Mushrooms remain faceless enemies to be slaughtered. Their army is dispatched to a Mushroom, Muggles and company are welcomed back to town, and the Minnipins rejoice!
***
Although I enjoyed this madcap dash through the Newbery Honors of the 1960s, I intend to slow down considerably going forward. Take my time! Stop and smell the roses! Perhaps make more space in my life for things that are not books.
