Caldecott Monday: Madeline's Rescue

[osprey_archer]

I was so excited about Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline's Rescue, my Caldecott book for this week, that I went out and got an eclair to eat while reading it. Maximum Frenchness achieved!

Anyway, this book is cute. I do wonder why Bemelmans won for this book and not for the first Madeline book, which is so iconic, but then when it was first published I daresay no one knew it was going to be iconic.

I actually haven't read any of the Madeline books - there are it seems five others - and now I'm contemplating getting them allllll and baking some madeleines (my mother has a madeleine pan) or possibly just buying more eclairs and having a miniature Madeline reading festival.

Honestly the hardest part of the Caldecott project is that I keep running across non-Caldecott picture books I'd like to read (or have read, and would like to reread) - I'm so poorly read in picture books.

Like next week is Marcia Brown's Cinderella, which looks cute, but she also wrote an adaptation of Stone Soup, and I LOVED Stone Soup as a child - the soldiers walking in town and the townsfolk slowly coming out with their hidden carrots and cabbages and everyone having a great big soup feast at the end.

...Anyway. I don't actually have a lot to say about this book (although I did like the page where they're looking for their lost dog in a graveyard that has all the famous dead French people: Sarah Bernhardt! Hugo! Bizet! Also Oscar Wilde with a sad little poem about outcasts), but it is cute and I did enjoy it.

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

I do wonder why Bemelmans won for this book and not for the first Madeline book, which is so iconic,

I suppose it depends what it was up against! And there are always a few years where you look at surviving shortlists for awards and see the OBVIOUS CLASSIC being ignored for something random and you wonder what they were on. But it no doubt made sense in the room back in the day.

I'm not sure I've actually read a Madeline book either. I think I must have done - we definitely had a couple in the main library I was based in, but I can barely even picture them at all.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Having checked Wikipedia, I see that the first Madeline book actually was a runner-up for the Caldecott Award the year it was published! It lost to Abraham Lincoln, which I daresay the judges felt had more educational value.

I'd love to be a fly on the wall at some of these awards meetings. I think someone could write a fascinating history book based on the meeting minutes - The Controversies of the Caldecotts or something like that - although probably the audience for it would be limited and anyway the awards committee wouldn't want to release the minutes. Alas!

[thisbluespirit]

There really is no telling what the judges thought. Your best guess would be to look at what the criteria was for that year, if it still exists. (If the Caldecott is anything like the Greenaway, the criteria will have changed several times over the years.)

I have been a judge for the Carnegie and Kate Greenaway awards over here, which are the UK equivalents, and I would be very much against people publishing the minutes even if they existed! (Well, maybe if they were kept fully anonymous. It gets very intense and personal in the room, and there is quite a lot of public interest and feelings on the books that should never get put back on individual judges, especially not in these awards, which are judged just by regular children's librarians on either side of the ocean). Also, people who aren't & haven't been judges are always very quick to assume an agenda - this was educational, it was politics, this would make more of a splash in the media. I have to say that, while extra considerations may happen during nominations and even during shortlisting, by the time you progress to choosing the winner, there is no room for anything but the books and the criteria and a whole lot of passionate arguing and reluctant voting. Obviously, other awards will be run very differently, but I suspect that last winner-chosing point in the room is similar throughout. And then the press publish their reactions and tell us that we did it for all the reasons we didn't, when at the end of the day, we just battled over the criteria tooth and nail. An unscrupulous chair might be able to swing things, but you'd really hope that wouldn't happen! (In the CKG awards anyway, the chair only gets a vote if there's a tie - so they can't push something through unless that happens, which it probably won't.)

I think the noms and judging process is quite similar between the two, though, and what can easily happen (because nominations are made by ALA members in the US, and CILIP members in the UK) is that quite major things can be omitted from the longlist, rather like a Yuletide fandom you assume someone else will nominate. Shortlisting (for the Carnegie currently) is difficult and sometimes things can undeservedly slip the shortlist - one of the key points of the Carnegie is about the winner having to be a book that can be read and re-read. While every judge will re-read the shortlist, they won't necessarily have read the whole longlist twice, which means that you can miss out on the book that shines on re-reading and put something through that turns out to lose a lot on the second read. But mostly it takes a lot to get on the shortlist when 12 people are sitting in a room all day trying to agree on what they read.

The Greenaway is both easier because the criteria is really practical and harder because people get even more emotionally attached.

I can't tell you about mid-century Caldecott judges, though. I can totally be a fly on the wall for early 21st C Carnegie and Kate Greenaway awards. ;-)

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

I would support going back to read the first Madeline book! I loved it when I was little. I'm pretty sure there was a cartoon movie (or maybe TV show?) made of it too, and I can still remember the narrator's voice reciting all those rhyming lines.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Wikipedia tells me there was both a cartoon movie and a TV show; there is clearly an entire Madeline universe of which I was unaware. And maybe there was a live action movie at some point? I have a vague memory of perhaps seeing previews for it.