Newbery books, 2018
Apr. 15th, 2018 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerMy April challenge was “read a book nominated for an award in 2018.” I decided to go ahead and read all the 2018 Newbery books. (There are only four, and one was a picture book and another was in verse, so this wasn’t that hard.)
Erin Entrada Kelly’s Hello, Universe won the Newbery this year, and unfortunately it’s by far my least favorite book of the batch. The plot felt mechanical, and the characters just never popped into three-dimensionality for me. In particular, Kelly’s depiction of the class bully was flat. This would have been fine if she hadn’t written chapters in his POV - I totally buy that the other children would see him as a meanness machine rather than a person - but he shouldn’t be completely cardboard in his own head.
This is particularly a pity because any of the honor books would have made a good winner - even the picture book, Derrick Barnes’ Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, even though I have a bit of a bias against picture books winning the Newbery Medal. In 2016 Last Stop on Market Street somehow beat out both The War that Saved My Life AND Roller Girl, two wonderful and memorable books, and I still haven’t recovered.
But Crown a good book. It’s about an eleven- or twelve-year-old black boy getting a haircut and musing about how fly he looks, which is very sweet (without being cloying) and also sometimes quite funny.
I also quite liked Renée Watson’s Piecing Me Together, which about Jade, a young black high school student and collage artist who is attending a rich majority-white high school on scholarship. There’s a lot of good stuff in here - Jade’s dedication to her art, her friendships, connections to the Black Lives Matter movement - but I think my favorite part of the book was her complicated relationship with the mentor she gets through the Woman to Woman program.
On the one hand, Jade appreciates that this program is a great opportunity to her. On the other hand, she super resents the fact that she is always seen as in need of help, as the one needing opportunities, at the condescension with which Maxine - who comes from a wealthy black family - sometimes treats her. The way that Maxine sees Jade as somehow better than the other girls in her neighborhood, because she’s gotten herself into this fancy high school, - but Jade still sees herself as one of them and still loves them.
Or, as Jade puts it: “Those girls are not the opposite of me. We are perpendicular. We may be on different paths, yes. But there’s a place where we touch, where we connect and are just the same.”
But if I were god-king of the universe or at least the Newbery committee, the book I would have chosen to win is Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down, the book in verse. After 15-year-old Will’s older brother Shawn is shot in a gang turf war, Will vows revenge. He sticks Shawn’s gun down the back of his pants, heads down to the elevator, and then… the elevator stops at each floor, and at each stop another ghost of someone from Will’s past killed by gun violence enters.
One: A ghost story! I love a well-done ghost story!
Two: This is a premise that has a lot of potential to get sappy or offer pat, easy, cheap answers, but it doesn’t. It feels real and raw and painful, and the way Reynolds writes, the way he spaces the words on the page particularly, makes you feel the emotions, mimics the slow thud of a heart as you take in the fact that a tragedy has happened and things will never be the same.
Erin Entrada Kelly’s Hello, Universe won the Newbery this year, and unfortunately it’s by far my least favorite book of the batch. The plot felt mechanical, and the characters just never popped into three-dimensionality for me. In particular, Kelly’s depiction of the class bully was flat. This would have been fine if she hadn’t written chapters in his POV - I totally buy that the other children would see him as a meanness machine rather than a person - but he shouldn’t be completely cardboard in his own head.
This is particularly a pity because any of the honor books would have made a good winner - even the picture book, Derrick Barnes’ Crown: An Ode to the Fresh Cut, even though I have a bit of a bias against picture books winning the Newbery Medal. In 2016 Last Stop on Market Street somehow beat out both The War that Saved My Life AND Roller Girl, two wonderful and memorable books, and I still haven’t recovered.
But Crown a good book. It’s about an eleven- or twelve-year-old black boy getting a haircut and musing about how fly he looks, which is very sweet (without being cloying) and also sometimes quite funny.
I also quite liked Renée Watson’s Piecing Me Together, which about Jade, a young black high school student and collage artist who is attending a rich majority-white high school on scholarship. There’s a lot of good stuff in here - Jade’s dedication to her art, her friendships, connections to the Black Lives Matter movement - but I think my favorite part of the book was her complicated relationship with the mentor she gets through the Woman to Woman program.
On the one hand, Jade appreciates that this program is a great opportunity to her. On the other hand, she super resents the fact that she is always seen as in need of help, as the one needing opportunities, at the condescension with which Maxine - who comes from a wealthy black family - sometimes treats her. The way that Maxine sees Jade as somehow better than the other girls in her neighborhood, because she’s gotten herself into this fancy high school, - but Jade still sees herself as one of them and still loves them.
Or, as Jade puts it: “Those girls are not the opposite of me. We are perpendicular. We may be on different paths, yes. But there’s a place where we touch, where we connect and are just the same.”
But if I were god-king of the universe or at least the Newbery committee, the book I would have chosen to win is Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down, the book in verse. After 15-year-old Will’s older brother Shawn is shot in a gang turf war, Will vows revenge. He sticks Shawn’s gun down the back of his pants, heads down to the elevator, and then… the elevator stops at each floor, and at each stop another ghost of someone from Will’s past killed by gun violence enters.
One: A ghost story! I love a well-done ghost story!
Two: This is a premise that has a lot of potential to get sappy or offer pat, easy, cheap answers, but it doesn’t. It feels real and raw and painful, and the way Reynolds writes, the way he spaces the words on the page particularly, makes you feel the emotions, mimics the slow thud of a heart as you take in the fact that a tragedy has happened and things will never be the same.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-16 02:41 pm (UTC)That sounds wonderful. I'll look for it.
no subject
Date: 2018-04-16 11:20 pm (UTC)