2021 Newbery Honor Books

[osprey_archer]

I have finished reading the 2021 Newbery Honor books! There were FIVE of them this year, so I feel quite accomplished, especially as one of them was a pretty demanding read.

That one was Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s Fighting Words, which is about child sexual abuse. The blurb implies this without actually stating it; it does at least mention that the main character’s sister attempts suicide partway through the book, but still, I feel that this is a case where the blurb should also act as a content warning.

It is very well written; in fact, I think it’s probably the best written of the Newbery books this year, including the actual winner. Bradley is a fantastic writer, and the protagonist’s voice is amazing, so sharp and snappy and individual. Well worth reading if you are up for the subject matter, but be warned, it is a grueling book.

Erin Entrada Kelly won the Newbery a couple of years ago with Hello Universe, which I found singularly unimpressive, so I groaned when I saw that another one of her books won an honor this year. However, I found We Dream of Space a definite improvement over Hello Universe, although probably still not a book I would read off my own bat: it’s a book about a dysfunctional family with two parents who are just really contemptuous and mean to each other, and also the whole book is building up to the Challenger launch and then, of course, you’ve got the Challenger explosion. Just overall kind of a bummer. The subject matter isn’t as rough as Fighting Words, but unlike Fighting Words it doesn’t achieve the kind of depth or individuality of voice that makes the roughness it does have worthwhile.

There are also TWO books by Christina Soontornvat, A Wish in the Dark and All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team. I must confess I had Doubts about the necessity of giving the same person two Newbery Honors in the same year, but actually I really loved both books and I would have been hard pressed to choose between them had I been on the committee.

A Wish in the Dark is set in the city of Chattana, lit by magical glowing orbs created by the wise, benevolent, all-powerful… “evil dictator,” I said, with a sigh, settling in for another garden variety dystopia. But Chattana feels real and complicated and alive - slightly dystopian, yes, but then what place is not these days? And the characters feel just as real and complicated, too, and even the best of them sometimes make mistakes (even Pong’s wise mentor, Father Cham - I found this sequence very moving), and yet they keep trying to look after each other.

All Thirteen is just what it says on the tin. If you followed the news in 2018 (or simply know how to extrapolate from a title) you know that all thirteen members of the soccer team DO get out of the cave in one piece, but even so the book builds up a genuine sense of tension and drama, and it’s so heart-warming to read about people from all over the world pulling together to help rescue these kids.

And finally, Carole Boston Weatherford’s Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom is a picture book in poetry about an enslaved man who escaped slavery by, well, mailing himself through the post office. This is one of those books where it’s perfectly fine… but lots of books are fine, and I don’t quite get what made the Newbery committee go, “That one!”

Comments

[asakiyume]

My thought reading your description of the first couple of books is, Wow. The Newbery Awards are really about trying to train kids to read literary fiction, I guess. It's all so same-y. I guess sometimes you do get things like verse novels and stuff, and those are somewhat different in form, but they really do seem to have their rut that they're stuck in. "This is literature, and only this."

Which isn't to say it can't be well done, of course! But just. Same-y.

[osprey_archer]

I'm not sure this complaint is entirely fair to Fighting Words, because the book doesn't feel same-y in the same way as We Dream of Space - We Dream of Space has what you might call the Earnest Newbery Bait voice, whereas Fighting Words very much has its own style.

And Fighting Words is so intensely earnest in its desire to show children suffering from sexual abuse how to seek help - you can feel this bursting out of the text itself, and it's explicitly stated in the afterward. And if it does help some kids get help that's good, right? (However, given that the book description doesn't actually mention abuse, you wonder how many kids who could benefit in that way will even find it.)

But I do also feel that many kids will find the reading experience so painful that they'll decide "Reading sucks," or at very least "Award-winning books suck." It may turn out to be the Bridge to Terabithia of the current generation.

[asakiyume]

Point taken about the criticism.... although it now leads me to a new criticism, which is Maybe a Pamphlet or a School Talk Is the Way You Should Have Gone.

... I mean, but actually, it's fine with me if there are books like Fighting Words (the rest of the world breathes a sigh of relief at my imprimatur, I know). The world is full of all sorts of people with all sorts of reading desires ET CETERA, I KNOW, BUT.... it just seems as if the Newbery committee is overly committed to reading as a very serious--VERY SERIOUS--endeavor that needs to be approached with proper deference, and their choices are going to ensure that. But I know that's not really fair either. Maybe it's more... when a book like Fighting Words comes along, it's like they just can't resist. They HAVE to nod toward it.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, I definitely think that, like, the dignity of the award or the weight of tradition or something pushes the Newbery committee toward books with Weighty Themes. And, to be fair, the award is meant to award books for their literary excellence, not for their accessibility to the widest possible range of children... But I think teachers/parents often use the award as if it IS meant to mark books that appeal most to children, and it might be more useful if that was taken into account.

[kore]

I had not realized up til now Frog and Toad had NOT won, and that's honestly shocking to me, given how many people on Twitter I see reblogging the quotes bot. https://twitter.com/frogandtoadbot?lang=en

[sovay]

it just seems as if the Newbery committee is overly committed to reading as a very serious--VERY SERIOUS--endeavor that needs to be approached with proper deference, and their choices are going to ensure that.

I turn out to have random intense opinions about certain years of the Newbury, except that I wouldn't have taken it away from Lloyd Alexander for The High King (1965).

[asakiyume]

Very good point! I am and always will be delighted with that Newbery.

[kore]

Wrinkle in Time, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Sounder, Summer of the Swans, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Slave Dancer, The Door in the Wall, M.C. Higgins, The Great, Roll of Thunder, Westing Game, Hero and the Crown, Dicey's Song, Number the Stars....a lot of real classics. Altho my knowledge only goes up to about the mid-eighties, LOL.

Altho looking at an actual list I'm amazed at some of the bridesmaids. The Long Winter, Mr Popper's Penguins, Misty of Chincoteague, CHARLOTTE'S WEB, Cricket in Times Square, The Animal Family, The Tombs of Atuan, The Headless Cupid, Frog and Toad, The Dark is Rising, The Perilous guard, Catherine Called Birdy?? Jeez....

[asakiyume]

You're right--there are a *lot* in there that I love.

[kore]

Yeah, I know the Horror and Terror of the Newbery awards is a perennial book talk topic, because it's true! So many of them are traumatic! But I don't think that's the majority of the nominated books even. But of course those are going to be the ones that people remember, especially if they were forced to read them. (I had to read Johnny Tremain in like two grade school classes. It's pretty good, but not that good.

//defensively hugs Island of the Blue Dolphins, which was on my "if I ran away I could totes survive on my own eating berries" mental shelf along with Clan of the Cave Bear

[osprey_archer]

Oh yeah, there are a whole bunch of Newbery Honor books that have endured longer than whatever book actually won that year... but also a whole lot of medal winners that have held up just fine, so maybe what this tells us about the nature of book awards is that award committees are pretty good at finding quality but not too good at telling exactly which qualities will endure.

Laura Ingalls Wilder has to be the authorial "always a bridesmaid, never a bride" - she was the runner up for the Newbery Award five times. Probably had a greater cultural impact than almost any of the other books.

[conuly]

Probably had a greater cultural impact than almost any of the other books.

And is still having it, most recently afaik in the form of Prairie Lotus, which the author straight-up admits in her afterward is based on/inspired by her attempts to write herself into the story as a child.

[kore]

Birchbark House series, too -- and I thought for sure there was another Native American series in answer to it but I can't find it now.

[kore]

Yeah, I was looking at the list of winners and that just boggled me!

[kore]

I honestly think the PAIN AND AGONY side of the Newbery and other kids' awards gets somewhat exaggerated, and that distorts how many good and non-traumatic books actually get nominated, because of course everyone remembers the howlers. (For the record: Old Yeller was beaten out by something called Miracles on Maple Hill, lol.) But at least Back In My Day, she wheezes, it was also a surefire way to get books into school libraries ("It's award-winning!") that weren't just from the perspective of white boys, and the Newbery label was definitely how I encountered books like Blue Willow, Strawberry Girl, Island of the Blue Dolphins (okay, very whumpy), and Roll of Thunder and Sing Down the Moon, too. There's also a definite influence from the "problem books" of the sixties and seventies where the book had to be structured around A Difficulty, To Be Overcome (a lot of Judy Blume is like this). And the idea that tragedy is more Serious and Important than the comic or the everyday, and that any serious take on an issue has to be depressing. And so on.

//not sure where I was going, need more coffee

[osprey_archer]

Oh yeah, I think people definitely remember That One Book that traumatized them, even though they maybe read and loved half a dozen of those non-traumatizing Newbery books that you listed above. I can still recount the mounting misery of Out of the Dust almost blow by blow, even though it's been two decades since I read it, because it was so upsetting that it burned itself into my brain.

But also, one reader's super traumatizing book is another reader's jam. I have met people who honest to God loved Bridge to Terabithia. I don't think it's possible to weed out potentially traumatizing books without also weeding out many of the books that have the potential to become touchstones in people's lives, because a book with a capacity to touch readers deeply is going to create strong reactions in both directions.

[conuly]

I'm the person who loved - and still loves! - Terabithia. Sometimes, even as a child, I just wanted a good sob.

But there's a difference between a child or adolescent reading a sad book because they want to read a sad book, and between it being foisted on them by adults or, worse yet, to them being subjected to the Death March Through Literature.

[osprey_archer]

I think what really got me about Terabithia was that I found the book description misleading. I didn't go into it expecting to cry my eyes out; I thought it was a portal fantasy, or at least two kids playing an imaginary games about portal fantasies, and when it turned out to be about DEATH I felt cheated.

[kore]

I think for me that was The Red Pony, altho that wasn't a Newbery trauma, my dad read it to me and then I ALSO had to read it for school because I grew up in California and damn did the school boards love their local Nobel-prize-winning author. >:-(((

I honestly can't imagine someone loving Terabithia (I read it and IDK, girl with the splinter of ice in her heart because it didn't traumatize me the way it did everyone else? Bzuh?) but I do love Lois Lowry's very autobiographical novel A Summer To Die, about her very close sister dying of leukemia, and it's also a very Seventies book but in a good way so I really identified with the heroine. But the emphasis in that book isn't so much on the sister's death, altho it's tragic, but on life going on and how her family's love still keeps her alive for them (I tried to think of a less soppy way of putting that, need more coffee).

[osprey_archer]

The Terabithia lovers exist! In fact, there is a comment directly above yours from someone who DID love Terabithia. The world contains multitudes, I guess.

I have not read A Summer to Die, probably because I avoided all cancer books like the plague, but I know that cancer books also have a big following - all those Lurlene McDaniels books about young cancer patients finding romance? (Or at least I think that's what they were about, I did not read them because of the aforementioned aversion to cancer books.) Those were HUGE.

[conuly]

or the record: Old Yeller was beaten out by something called Miracles on Maple Hill, lol.

The protagonist's father has a bad case of war-induced PTSD, though nobody calls it that in the book, I don't think. At least he's neither drunk nor violent.

[osprey_archer]

The emotional trajectory of the book is basically the opposite of Old Yeller, IIRC. Miracles on Maple Hill starts in a dark place and gets better, whereas Old Yeller ends in tragedy.

[kore]

and also the whole book is building up to the Challenger launch

Ohh dear.

[osprey_archer]

I like angst as much as the next person so you'd think that I would be on board with the "kick your reader in the face" school of writing that Kelly seems to subscribe to... but I'm not, at least not the way Kelly does it, anyway.

[kore]

Challenger is totally one of those flashbulb memories for me, I was hanging out in my room having just dropped out of both a super artsy boarding school and Santa Fe High (long story) and there was a blizzard going and I was listening to the radio, and my dad came running down the hall and said "Honey come quick come quick, something happened to the space shuttle!" and then we watched CNN til our eyeballs dried out. Just....so tragic and looking back on it, the coverage was so vulturous.

[landofnowhere]

*Fighting Words* sounds tempting, despite the subject matter -- I enjoyed Kimberly Brubaker Bradley's WWII books, but I might regret it.

[osprey_archer]

FWIW I think Fighting Words was even better than The War that Saved My Life, but also more emotionally draining.

[conuly]

That one was Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s Fighting Words, which is about child sexual abuse. The blurb implies this without actually stating it; it does at least mention that the main character’s sister attempts suicide partway through the book, but still, I feel that this is a case where the blurb should also act as a content warning.

I believe that's the author's backstory, so she presumably handles the subject well.

Erin Entrada Kelly won the Newbery a couple of years ago with Hello Universe, which I found singularly unimpressive, so I groaned when I saw that another one of her books won an honor this year.

I usually like her books, though I agree that Hello, Universe was really weak.

[osprey_archer]

Yes, she does, and I know that authors have very little control over the book description, so this is really on the publisher. Maybe they were trying to avoid controversy by not having the words "sexual abuse" right out there on the book jacket where censorious parents can read it.