2011 Newbery Honor Books

[osprey_archer]

Back when I was doing my first Newbery project, I tallied up the winners by genre, and discovered that the Newbery award committee has a clear preference for historical fiction novels. This has become less pronounced over the years, but clearly the award went back to its roots in 2011, where the main winner Moon over Manifest AND three of the Honor winners were all historical fiction. (The fourth was Dark Emperor and Other Poems of the Night.)

Jennifer L. Holm’s Turtle in Paradise is set in the Great Depression (another perennial favorite with the Newbery judges, if you happen to be planning to write some Newbery-bait) on Key West, where our heroine, Turtle, has been sent to spend the summer with some relatives. The author herself has family history on Key West, which may account for the excellent local color in the book: I particularly enjoyed the lively nicknames, which were apparently a Conch tradition (Conch being the name that the denizens of Key West called themselves).

I enjoyed the local color - in general I'm a sucker for local color; and I thought it was a nice book, but aside from the Newbery-baitiness of it all, I'm not sure why it won an award.

Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer is a little more meaty, although ancientreader, I suspect this is another book that would fit into your rant about eat-your-vegetables, know-your-history books for African-American children. (At least no one dies terribly in it?) In 1968, Delphine and her two little sisters are sent to spend their summer in Oakland, home of the Black Panthers and also their mother Cecile, who abandoned them when Delphine was four.

I am baffled by Delphine’s father’s decision to send his girls across the country to stay with Cecile for a month - it’s clearly his decision; Cecile mentions repeatedly that she didn’t ask for the girls to be sent to her and didn’t want them to come. However, I suspect as a child I would have relegated this to the general category of “incomprehensible things adult characters do” (I also thought adult characters were boring anyway and rarely gave their motivations any thought) and anyway I suspect the premise is built around giving Delphine an outsider’s perspective on the Black Panthers so she can act as the readers’ guide to this piece of history that many children today either won’t be familiar with at all or will know only through distorted later histories.

And finally, Margi Preus’s Heart of a Samurai: Based on the True Story of Nakahama Manjiro is a novel about a fourteen-year-old Japanese fisherman, Manjiro, who was shipwrecked, picked up by an American whaler, adopted by the ship’s captain Whitfield, and then spent three years in American schools learning navigation (among other things) before beginning his long, slow journey back to Japan… where he arrived just in time for the shogun to summon him for advice on WTF to do about this Commodore Perry who had just sailed into the harbor.

It was at this point that Manjiro acquired his second name, Nakahama, because the shogun raised him to the rank of samurai. Hence the title of the book.

Definitely a “truth is stranger than fiction” life! The epilogue notes that Manjiro’s descendants still keep in touch with Whitfield’s, which I think is beautiful (although it must have been awkward on both sides during World War II).

Comments

[sovay]

his long, slow journey back to Japan… where he arrived just in time for the shogun to summon him for advice on WTF to do about this Commodore Perry who had just sailed into the harbor.

I know this story, but didn't know there was a novel. I will check it out!

The epilogue notes that Manjiro’s descendants still keep in touch with Whitfield’s, which I think is beautiful

Yes. I like that.

[osprey_archer]

I hadn't heard the story before! But now that I know it, I feel that it gives me a greater understanding of how the Japanese government came to an understanding with Commodore Perry when he arrived in the harbor.

[ancientreader]

Are there coincidences, or are you Hydra? Someone just recommended One Crazy Summer to me, and yep, I did indeed think eat-your-vegetables thoughts about it, not altogether reflexively because one of the kids I tutor had it as a school assignment before the holidays, and having read a chapter with him, I found it Very Educational. Though I will admit the prose was not as leaden as one generally finds in the boiled-vegetable genre.

I remember when I was a kid discovering that a Newbery stamp on a cover was a reliable indicator that even if the jacket copy didn't seem alluring, the book was going to win me over and then some. To judge by the books you're describing, it's not that way anymore; the judges aren't picking books that will delight children, if often also stretching them, but rather books that they think will improve children. It's very sad, especially when, God knows, there are plenty of writers of color producing wonderful stories.

[osprey_archer]

I'm not sure it's a good idea to generalize about The Newbery Award These Days from the books I've been describing; if nothing else, you have to remember that these are the books I kept putting off because they sounded the least intrinsically appealing. And Turtle in Paradise, at least, includes literal pirate treasure, which is clearly much higher on the "delight" scale than the "improve."

But more generally "delight" and "improve" are two values that have long been in tension for American children's books (at least since the 1860s, when St. Nicholas Magazine first started publication with a clarion call on the "delight" side), and the Newberys have always had difficulty balancing them. Pick almost any decade and there's generally at least one "Oh God you chose this book to teach children an Important Lesson about Death, didn't you?" book.

...Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if the 2010s turn out to have listed hard in the "improve" direction. But the pendulum will inevitably swing back.

[ancientreader]

Thanks for the perspective -- you're right, of course, and even I know enough about the history of children's books to be aware of those pendulum swings.

I have a serious hateboner for improving books, which I guess is pretty obvious.

[osprey_archer]

I feel that the world has taken a hard dive into "BOOKS MUST BE IMPROVING" these last few years (not just for children's books, either) and I understand where it's coming from, but I also feel that a book can only be so improving before it becomes fundamentally false about what humans are actually like, and also that if the improvement-to-delight ratio is too skewed, no one will actually be improved because the only people who will like it are the ones who have already drunk whatever Koolaid the book is selling.

It's like someone read a load of didactic Christian fiction and said "Exactly like this, but with progressive values!"