Newbery Books
May. 25th, 2020 09:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerOnce again it’s been a week of MANY Newbery Honor books, so I decided to make a separate post because otherwise the Wednesday Reading Meme would be VERY LONG. I’ve almost finished the Newbery Honor books of the 2000s that the library has available on ebook! (Just one left: Penny from Heaven.) Looking forward to diving in the 1990s.
My favorite - somehow whenever my enthusiasm for this project lags, I always find a book I really love - my favorite, as I was saying, was Kirby Larson’s Hattie Big Sky, a novel inspired by her own great-grandmother’s experience homesteading in eastern Montana during World War I.
I offer this quote an example of the writing style - simple, but evocative - rather than a reflection of the mood of the book, which overall is about finding friendship and home, even though there are certainly hardships too.
If you want a book that is sad, look no further than Gary D. Schmidt’s Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. I mentioned last week that I had an ominous feeling about this book, which was only strengthened when our hero Turner starts reading the Aeneid, during which the interracial relationship between Aeneus the Trojan and Dido, Queen of Carthage, does not turn out well for Dido.
The book never actually references the Dido plotline in the Aeneid, but nonetheless, things don’t turn out well for Lizzie Bright in the end. The evil, greedy townsfolk want to remove her village from Malaga Island so they can build fancy hotels, and in the end they succeed, at least with phase one of their plan: all the islanders get kicked off their island, and Lizzie is sent to the State School for the Feeble-Minded. Turner yearns to get her out, but for a long time he can’t because his father is in a coma following a confrontation with the sheriff after he protested the evacuation of Malaga Island… but then his father dies, so Turner is no longer needed at his bedside, and finally he goes to the State School…
Where he discovers that Lizzie died less than a week after she arrived. Also, the hotels are never even built. THE END.
The story is based on real events. The mostly black population of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine really did get pushed off their island in the early twentieth century because the muckety-mucks of Maine thought the Malaga Island settlement was bad for tourism, and a number of the residents really did get sent to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, and many of them really did die soon after their arrival, and the tourism never did develop anyway…
But my God does it make for a sad novel.
I also finished Ingrid Law’s Savvy, which was fine. A story about a family where most of the members develop a magic power (a “savvy”) when they turn thirteen sounds like it ought to be right up my alley, but somehow this one never caught fire for me. I suppose sometimes books are like that.
And finally, I zoomed through Jacqueline Woodson’s Show Way, a family-history picture book in the tradition of Robert Lawson’s They Were Strong and Good and Allen Say’s Grandfather’s Journey, which both won Caldecott Awards rather than Newberys, but nonetheless. I must confess I rarely have strong feelings about picture books that I didn’t read as a child - I think maybe you have to read them fifty times for the books to really make an impression, as they are so short? However, I did feel that this was a book that would make an impression if you read it fifty times, and the illustrations are beautiful.
My favorite - somehow whenever my enthusiasm for this project lags, I always find a book I really love - my favorite, as I was saying, was Kirby Larson’s Hattie Big Sky, a novel inspired by her own great-grandmother’s experience homesteading in eastern Montana during World War I.
There should be fireworks, at least, when a dream dies. But no, this one had blown apart as easily as a dandelion gone to seed.
I offer this quote an example of the writing style - simple, but evocative - rather than a reflection of the mood of the book, which overall is about finding friendship and home, even though there are certainly hardships too.
If you want a book that is sad, look no further than Gary D. Schmidt’s Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. I mentioned last week that I had an ominous feeling about this book, which was only strengthened when our hero Turner starts reading the Aeneid, during which the interracial relationship between Aeneus the Trojan and Dido, Queen of Carthage, does not turn out well for Dido.
The book never actually references the Dido plotline in the Aeneid, but nonetheless, things don’t turn out well for Lizzie Bright in the end. The evil, greedy townsfolk want to remove her village from Malaga Island so they can build fancy hotels, and in the end they succeed, at least with phase one of their plan: all the islanders get kicked off their island, and Lizzie is sent to the State School for the Feeble-Minded. Turner yearns to get her out, but for a long time he can’t because his father is in a coma following a confrontation with the sheriff after he protested the evacuation of Malaga Island… but then his father dies, so Turner is no longer needed at his bedside, and finally he goes to the State School…
Where he discovers that Lizzie died less than a week after she arrived. Also, the hotels are never even built. THE END.
The story is based on real events. The mostly black population of Malaga Island off the coast of Maine really did get pushed off their island in the early twentieth century because the muckety-mucks of Maine thought the Malaga Island settlement was bad for tourism, and a number of the residents really did get sent to the Maine School for the Feeble-Minded, and many of them really did die soon after their arrival, and the tourism never did develop anyway…
But my God does it make for a sad novel.
I also finished Ingrid Law’s Savvy, which was fine. A story about a family where most of the members develop a magic power (a “savvy”) when they turn thirteen sounds like it ought to be right up my alley, but somehow this one never caught fire for me. I suppose sometimes books are like that.
And finally, I zoomed through Jacqueline Woodson’s Show Way, a family-history picture book in the tradition of Robert Lawson’s They Were Strong and Good and Allen Say’s Grandfather’s Journey, which both won Caldecott Awards rather than Newberys, but nonetheless. I must confess I rarely have strong feelings about picture books that I didn’t read as a child - I think maybe you have to read them fifty times for the books to really make an impression, as they are so short? However, I did feel that this was a book that would make an impression if you read it fifty times, and the illustrations are beautiful.
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Date: 2020-05-26 11:55 am (UTC)And wow, the story of the erasure of the Malaga Island population--it's breathtakingly horrible how the evil of white supremacy just seeks to destroy *everything* not-itself. ... But also, I didn't know about that, and I appreciate your entry for telling me about it, even if it means I just have another thing to mourn.
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Date: 2020-05-26 10:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-05-26 04:33 pm (UTC)I must say I admire your fortitude in reading sad novels right now. I'm making my way through The Radetzky March, which okay it's sad but the Austro-Hungarian Empire is at least somewhat removed. Otherwise I'm barely even up to the level of angst found in a Kindle romance.
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Date: 2020-05-26 10:54 pm (UTC)