2011 Newbery Honor Books
Jan. 4th, 2020 12:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerBack 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, althoughancientreader, 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).
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).
