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Newbery Honor Books of 1929
Apr. 24th, 2023 10:52 amMay I have your attention, please! I have polished off the Newbery Honor books of the 1920s, wrapping up with the honorees from 1929, which turned out to be a doozy.
A couple of the books sound cringeworthy based on the titles alone: Grace Moon’s Runaway Papoose and John Bennett’s The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo with Seventeen other Laughable Tales and 200 Comical Silhouettes.
In Runaway Papoose, it is at least clear that Moon devoted a lot of research to the Navajo, which sounds like the bare minimum but is, let me assure you, a bar that many early twentieth century books don’t even attempt to step over. I also found it pretty dull, in that puzzling way that I found a lot of the 1920s Newbery-winning adventure stories dull; the committee and I clearly just had diverging tastes. So, overall, unsurprising that this book sank into obscurity over the years.
I went to the Lilly absolutely braced for John Bennett’s The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo with Seventeen Other Laughable Tales and 200 Comical Silhouettes, but perhaps because I went in with such low expectations, it was far better than expected. Only the first of the Laughable Tales takes place in fairy tale China; the Other Seventeen gently parodic stories take place in fairy tale Middle Ages and fairy tale Germany and fairy tale Arabia and fairy tale Spain, all spattered with gleefully deliberate anachronisms (tin cans, sharp Yankee peddlers selling clocks). There are also a smattering of comical American poems and a little play and a wordless comic about two knights who meet for a duel, and one cuts the other’s head off, and the headless knight rides his horse back home carrying his own head on a pike. (Also the 200 Comical Silhouettes are silhouette illustrations a la Boxcar Children.)
This quote from “Ye Lily Mayden & Ye Little Taylor-Boy” is representative of the tone.
To this list of “Oh boy, how racist is this one going to be?” I have to add Cornelia Meigs’ Clearing Weather, partly just because I read Meigs' Swift Rivers and, well, that had some moments. Clearing Weather is a Boy Meets Boat book set just after the Revolutionary War. Actually, two boys meet a boat, and also each other, and I briefly hoped it was going to be slashy, but the Newbery Award has an almost unerring instinct away from that sort of thing.
So the boys are torn asunder because one of them stays to look after the boat-building business while the other goes off on a trading expedition. Which grows to an around-the-world expedition! They’ll stop in the Pacific Northwest to trade for furs with the Indians, then sail to China! The adventure part is actually quite pacy and exciting, but also it’s just about as racist as you would guess.
Elinor Whitney Field’s Tod of the Fens is another one of those bafflingly dull historical adventures that seem to have been so popular with the Newbery committee of the 1920s. This one is set in 15th century Boston (the original English Boston) and features young Prince Hal as a practical joker who decides that it would be droll to steal the keys to the town coffer and then dump them in the shadow of St. Botolph’s Tower, where no one ever goes because it’s supposedly haunted by Satan. Okay, dude? Why, though.
There’s also a side dish of xenophobia: everyone dislikes and distrusts the Easterlings from the Hanseatic League, who at one point kidnap the heroine, just to be evil I guess?, because rather than attempt to get a ransom or anything, they turn her over to an English smuggler. We know he isn’t all that bad because he has a nice sheep dog, and he frees her and sends her on her merry way.
Finally, one I uncomplicatedly liked! Grace Hallock’s The Boy Who Was features a young goatherd named Nino, blessed (cursed?) by a siren to live forever in the hills above Amalfi, across from the island of Capri. Well, it sounds like a curse to me, but it seems to be a blessing for Nino, because he lives on cheerful and unchanged for centuries as his life intersects with various historical events: the eruption of Pompeii, the Children’s Crusade, the attempts of the Carbonari to unite Italy.
(If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Newbery project, it’s how vast is the field of history and how patchy my knowledge. What happened to southern Italy in the decades between Pompeii and conquest by Austria and/or Spain, I can never remember who got there first? I had no idea, but Nino knew! The Normans invaded, the Goths invaded, and then the Saracens almost invaded, only for their fleet to be sunk by a miraculous storm.)
Aside from this book, Hallock’s writing career appears to have consisted entirely of health manuals. On her very first foray into children’s literature, she won the runner-up to the most prestigious prize in the field - and then never wrote another children’s book again. Baffling.
And that's a wrap on the Newbery Honors of the 1920s!
A couple of the books sound cringeworthy based on the titles alone: Grace Moon’s Runaway Papoose and John Bennett’s The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo with Seventeen other Laughable Tales and 200 Comical Silhouettes.
In Runaway Papoose, it is at least clear that Moon devoted a lot of research to the Navajo, which sounds like the bare minimum but is, let me assure you, a bar that many early twentieth century books don’t even attempt to step over. I also found it pretty dull, in that puzzling way that I found a lot of the 1920s Newbery-winning adventure stories dull; the committee and I clearly just had diverging tastes. So, overall, unsurprising that this book sank into obscurity over the years.
I went to the Lilly absolutely braced for John Bennett’s The Pigtail of Ah Lee Ben Loo with Seventeen Other Laughable Tales and 200 Comical Silhouettes, but perhaps because I went in with such low expectations, it was far better than expected. Only the first of the Laughable Tales takes place in fairy tale China; the Other Seventeen gently parodic stories take place in fairy tale Middle Ages and fairy tale Germany and fairy tale Arabia and fairy tale Spain, all spattered with gleefully deliberate anachronisms (tin cans, sharp Yankee peddlers selling clocks). There are also a smattering of comical American poems and a little play and a wordless comic about two knights who meet for a duel, and one cuts the other’s head off, and the headless knight rides his horse back home carrying his own head on a pike. (Also the 200 Comical Silhouettes are silhouette illustrations a la Boxcar Children.)
This quote from “Ye Lily Mayden & Ye Little Taylor-Boy” is representative of the tone.
Sir Launcelot de Id-i-otte
Of race was so refined
In all the strain there was not brain
Enough to make one mind
To this list of “Oh boy, how racist is this one going to be?” I have to add Cornelia Meigs’ Clearing Weather, partly just because I read Meigs' Swift Rivers and, well, that had some moments. Clearing Weather is a Boy Meets Boat book set just after the Revolutionary War. Actually, two boys meet a boat, and also each other, and I briefly hoped it was going to be slashy, but the Newbery Award has an almost unerring instinct away from that sort of thing.
So the boys are torn asunder because one of them stays to look after the boat-building business while the other goes off on a trading expedition. Which grows to an around-the-world expedition! They’ll stop in the Pacific Northwest to trade for furs with the Indians, then sail to China! The adventure part is actually quite pacy and exciting, but also it’s just about as racist as you would guess.
Elinor Whitney Field’s Tod of the Fens is another one of those bafflingly dull historical adventures that seem to have been so popular with the Newbery committee of the 1920s. This one is set in 15th century Boston (the original English Boston) and features young Prince Hal as a practical joker who decides that it would be droll to steal the keys to the town coffer and then dump them in the shadow of St. Botolph’s Tower, where no one ever goes because it’s supposedly haunted by Satan. Okay, dude? Why, though.
There’s also a side dish of xenophobia: everyone dislikes and distrusts the Easterlings from the Hanseatic League, who at one point kidnap the heroine, just to be evil I guess?, because rather than attempt to get a ransom or anything, they turn her over to an English smuggler. We know he isn’t all that bad because he has a nice sheep dog, and he frees her and sends her on her merry way.
Finally, one I uncomplicatedly liked! Grace Hallock’s The Boy Who Was features a young goatherd named Nino, blessed (cursed?) by a siren to live forever in the hills above Amalfi, across from the island of Capri. Well, it sounds like a curse to me, but it seems to be a blessing for Nino, because he lives on cheerful and unchanged for centuries as his life intersects with various historical events: the eruption of Pompeii, the Children’s Crusade, the attempts of the Carbonari to unite Italy.
(If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Newbery project, it’s how vast is the field of history and how patchy my knowledge. What happened to southern Italy in the decades between Pompeii and conquest by Austria and/or Spain, I can never remember who got there first? I had no idea, but Nino knew! The Normans invaded, the Goths invaded, and then the Saracens almost invaded, only for their fleet to be sunk by a miraculous storm.)
Aside from this book, Hallock’s writing career appears to have consisted entirely of health manuals. On her very first foray into children’s literature, she won the runner-up to the most prestigious prize in the field - and then never wrote another children’s book again. Baffling.
And that's a wrap on the Newbery Honors of the 1920s!
