Newbery Books of the 1970s

[osprey_archer]

I don’t know exactly when the Newbery Award fully embraced doom & gloom as an improving aesthetic for children’s literature, but by the 1970s the trend seems to have been firmly in place. See for instance James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier’s My Brother Sam Is Dead, a book that was on my childhood bookshelves which I never actually read because, well, look at that title. This is a very post-Vietnam “war is hell” book, and it is about as grueling as “war is hell” books usually are, although it was thoughtful of the authors to tell us who was going to die in the title instead of saving it for a fun surprise. (Although there are some fun surprise deaths, too.)

Sam starts the book by signing up to fight in the American Revolution, a messy affair that sets neighbor against neighbor, especially in the mostly Tory town from which Sam hails and in which his little brother, our narrator Tim, still lives. This is not the kind of book where anyone gets to die heroically in battle, so my money was on Sam dying of cholera or something of that ilk, but he is falsely accused of cattle thievery, whereupon he is sentenced to be shot by firing squad, and because their terrible muskets have no ability to aim whatsoever the firing squad shoots him at such close range that it sets fire to his shirt and he collapses to the ground writhing in agony, and then someone has to shoot him again before he finally dies.

Scott O’Dell’s Sing Down the Moon is also pretty miserable. Our heroine, the Navajo girl Bright Morning, gets kidnapped and sold into slavery. She heroically escapes, with the help of her fiance Tall Boy, who is maimed in the attempt, which permanently spoils his disposition! (My general impression is that men in Scott O’Dell novels are useless at best.) They arrive back in the Canyon de Chelly just in time for the U.S. Cavalry to round up the whole tribe and march them to Bosque Redondo, a hellhole with alkaline soil unsuited to growing anything. Bright Morning and Tall Boy (now married) escape back to the Canyon de Chelly to have their baby, and… that’s where the book ends.

In a way it feels wrong to complain about this ending at the very same time that I’m complaining that the Newbery books of the 1970s are such downers, but this seems like a falsely positive place to stop. The book ends with the heroine and her son petting a lamb in the Canyon de Chelly, when we all know the cavalry’s going to drag them back to Bosque Redondo at some point. If you’re going for tragedy then commit to your tragedy, Scott O’Dell! Go full Rosemary Sutcliff or go home.

After the general misery of Laurence Yep’s Dragon’s Gate I approached Dragonwings with caution… but actually this one bucks the miserable trend of the 1970s Newberys! Yes, there’s some misery, but overall the book is enjoyable. In the early years of the twentieth century, young Moon Shadow moves to San Francisco to be with his father (yes, there IS an earthquake sequence), who grows obsessed with building an airplane.

He actually succeeds in building an airplane! And goes for a wonderful, swooping flight! …and then crash-lands and destroys the airplane and breaks his leg. Okay, that sounds like a downer, and possibly my judgment was warped by reading it in conjunction with the firing squad in My Brother Sam Is Dead, but as it was I felt the emphasis of the scene was on the fact that he fulfilled his dream of flight! and all the people who thought he could never make it happen watched and cheered! and unfortunately after that the plane crashed, as those very early planes so often did, but only at the end of his successful flight and also everyone is confident that his leg will heal just fine. So happy ending really, especially as other developments mean it will finally be possible for Moon Shadow’s mother to join them in San Francisco!

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

This is not the kind of book where anyone gets to die heroically in battle, so my money was on Sam dying of cholera or something of that ilk, but [spoilers redacted]

What??????????????

What??????????????

[osprey_archer]

His brother is watching as all of this happens, by the way. Sam happens to be stationed in his hometown when all this goes down so Tim gets to witness everything, hence the fact that he can write it all down in this book.

[troisoiseaux]

This just all feels extremely Old Yeller, except with his actual human sibling.

[littlerhymes]

The firing squad one... "Ah, now THIS is improving children's literature," said the judges, nodding firmly.

[osprey_archer]

"War IS hell," agreed the judges. "This book shows that very clearly! An excellent message for young minds, which could not be conveyed in any less scarring way."

[asakiyume]

I want to see the little ghoulish children who drink up these stories and go "more... MORE.... MORE"

(though I'm with you on the Laurence Yep one. Braking your leg isn't bad in the context of building a successful plane!)

[osprey_archer]

I have met actual human beings who loved Bridge to Terabithia so I firmly believe that there's someone out here for My Brother Sam Is Dead, too. Indeed, I had some ghoulish reading tastes as a child! Just not ghoulish in this... particular... way.

[conuly]

Sometimes you just want to sob at the end of a book.

[kore]

I didn't love Bridge to Terabithia, but I wasn't that impressed/traumatized by it, either? I had already read Watership Down so that was one of my big introductions to death and loss, lol. A lot of the bookish kids were reading "adult" books (most of which we didn't get, but we devoured them anyway. I found a library copy of Fear of Flying in my mom's night table drawer when I was like 12 and read all of it and seriously doubt I understood more than half of it. Not just the sex parts either). And we read 1984 and The Lottery in 7th and 8th grade at my janky public school in NM, so Terabithia didn't hold a lot of terror after those. As well as Go Ask Alice and junk like Flowers in the Attic, which last got passed around in my grade school classrooms until it fell apart. Newbery books were like Raisin Bran. Every couple of mouthfuls you'd get a raisin or two, but you still had to chew through all that bran.

S.E. Hinton was big. I always think of that as a big turning point in YA lit because it was written by somebody young and her books were way more realistic and dark. But Outsiders was like 1970 maybe! So there was still a ways to go.

[kore]

OH, I remember what actually traumatized me. Robert Cormier. I think we had to read Chocolate War (rather tame?) and then I went looking for other books by him and I was sorry I did. Jesus.

I don't think he won any Newbery awards either. Paul Fox did, but I loved this book she wrote called A Place Apart, about a girl in a very strange intense relationship with a boy (no sex nope), which won a kiddie NBA but not the Newbery. (Later on I found out she had written very good adult novels that fell into obscurity!....and that she was Courtney Love's grandmother.)

[kore]

As an actual kid in the 70s and 80s I pretty much ignored the tearjerker ones, altho there were tearjerker YA books I liked (Turtle Drum, A Summer to Die, &c &c). We had to read Door in the Wall (good) and Johnny Tremaine (ugh) in school. I liked the ones like Strawberry Girl, Witch of Blackbird Pond, Wrinkle in Time, Summer of the Swans, Westing Game, and so on. (I'm looking at a list to jog my memory.) I mostly remember the books with the gold foil stamp were always available in bookstores -- and the school library but that wasn't where I got most of my books from.

What I really liked were the Problem Books (Judy Blume got marketed as the Problem Books Queen) and I can't even remember how many I read of those. In fact I don't remember Judy Blume winning any Newbury?? which is amazing, because she was THE YA writer of that era. What I remember about the Newbery books is a lot of the time the runners-up seemed better than the winners, lol.

[osprey_archer]

At least with a title like A Summer to Die (or My Brother Sam Is Dead, for that matter) you know exactly what you're getting into. The book is going to punch you in the face, damn it, so get ready!

I LOVED A Witch of Blackbird Pond. I read it when I was so young that I was totally gobsmacked when Nat and Kit got together at the end. But they argue all the time! Do they even like each other? Why are they.... Oh all right, I'll allow it.

Judy Blume never won a Newbery or even got a Newbery Honor. Perhaps the Newbery committee was afraid of touching the Judy Blume controversy?

My theory is that the book that wins the Newbery Medal is often a compromise candidate. People come in all gung ho for book A! and ready to defeat book B! thus alienated the lovers of book B so they wouldn't vote for book A if it were the last book on earth! and vice versa! and finally everyone, exhausted, settles on book C, which isn't quite as good and therefore had no alienatingly intense partisans.

[philomytha]

Count me in as thinking that a broken leg is a small price to pay for making your own real working airplane!

Why people think doom and gloom is Improving, I don't know. The book I'm currently reading has a foreword in which the author frets over whether or not showing an escaping British POW shooting a sentry in the back is too wicked and immoral to have in a children's book (published 1949, I think).

[osprey_archer]

I mean YES his leg is broken but HE FLEW! Biggles would surely agree that this is a reasonable exchange.

It's fascinating the way that standards for these things change over time. In Sing Down the Moon I was really struck by the total absence of sexual threat: all sorts of other bad things happen, but not only is Bright Morning never even threatened with rape, it never even occurs to her that this might happen in the course of being kidnapped, sold into slavery, etc. Clearly the possibility of sexual violence was just a bridge too far for a children's book in the 1970s.

[rachelmanija]

he is falsely accused of cattle thievery, whereupon he is sentenced to be shot by firing squad, and because their terrible muskets have no ability to aim whatsoever the firing squad shoots him at such close range that it sets fire to his shirt and he collapses to the ground writhing in agony, and then someone has to shoot him again before he finally dies.

LOLOLOLOLOLOL that is amazing. I always just assumed he died in the war! Classic Newbery.

[osprey_archer]

Technically he IS dying in the war, because he is a soldier being shot for stealing from civilians... but it is the MOST IGNOMINOUS POSSIBLE WAR DEATH. Falsely accused of stealing his own family's cattle!

My money is on the 1950s as the decade when the Newbery committee fell in love with grimness & despair (I haven't run into any books of this type in the 1920s or 30s), possibly because the Newbery committee felt that the youth of the nation were growing up in excessive ease and needed to learn important lessons about the misery of life. We'll see if the books bear this theory out!

[kore]

Haha, I had all these! In Dell paperbacks probably, now long lost to my parents' epic garage sale when they thought they were Leaving The Country Forever (i.e. Nine Months).

From what I remember I thought Brother Sam was meh, Sing Down the Moon was good but not like Island of the Blue Dolphins (poor author, that was his one great book) and I liked Child of the Owl better because it had a Girl in it, which was still a little bit unusual in 1950s-1980s US YA (probably the wrong perception, since I didn't read all of it obviously, but I would nearly always read those award-winning type books if there was a heroine).

[osprey_archer]

I have to admit that I was meh on Island of the Blue Dolphins when I read it, but perhaps I would like it better now? Or perhaps Scott O'Dell and I are just not meant to be... which is unfortunate, because he also got two Newbery Honors in the 1960s, so I'll definitely be reading more of him. (I probably ought to have a Scott O'Dell tag. Drat.)

[copperfyre]

My childhood traumatizing ‘War Is Hell’ ‘firing squad executes a main character’ book was Private Peaceful, where the main character and his brother enlist in a Pal’s Battalion in WW1 (the main character lies about his age), and then the brother gets shot for cowardice when he refuses to obey orders to advance into machine gun fire and abandon the injured main character. It ends with the main character being all “well now I must survive the war to get back home and tell my mother and other brother and my brother’s sweetheart that he wasn’t actually a coward” but also he’s off to the Somme so…

[osprey_archer]

I did not realize that this was a subgenre! Well, possibly not really a subgenre, it might be only the two books... but it's weird that there are two children's war stories where the main character's brother is executed by firing squad for a crime he didn't commit.

[kore]

GAH.

[potofsoup]

I remember reading Dragonwings first and being somewhat unimpressed by its slice-of-life feeling, and then reading Dragon's Gate and being like, "well, at least Dragonwings wasn't depressing". I think my favorite Yep is the Dragon's Pearl series :)

And I vaguely recall reading My Brother Sam Is Dead! There sure were a lot of Misery History books back then, huh? I think the only one that I latched onto was True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, probably because it featured a not-miserable ending. :D

[osprey_archer]

The Dragon's Pearl series is the one with actual dragons, right? When I was a kid I kept picking up various Laurence Yep books going "hey, dragons!" only to realize, crushed, that the title did not refer to actual dragons.

Misery History seems to have been big from, like, the 1970s to the 1990s? Clearly publishers thought it was good for children.

[konstantya]

I read My Brother Sam Is Dead when I was about thirteen or fourteen, but hell if I can remember anything about it besides the title. I read it solely because I was on a big Revolution-era historical fiction kick and it met the criteria, but even at the time, I don't think it made much of an impression. (I was immune to deaths in YA at this point, and to its credit, it does at least let you know what you're in for, pfft.) Interesting to look at it as a reaction to Vietnam, though, despite taking place two-hundred years earlier. (Kind of like how M*A*S*H is technically set during the Korean War, but is effectively also all about Vietnam.)

I think, to date, the only Scott O'Dell book I ever read was Sarah Bishop? Which I read in high school and remember enjoying, but that might just be because I was an angsty teen girl who pretty much wanted to be left alone, and the titular character was coincidentally also an angsty teen girl who pretty much wanted to be left alone (albeit during the Revolutionary War).

[osprey_archer]

The Vietnam connection is not as blatant as it is in M*A*S*H, but given that it was published in 1974, it seems almost impossible that the writers didn't have Vietnam on the brain as they reminded their readers that War Is Hell.

Sarah Bishop just wants to be left alone SO MUCH and the rest of the world keeps getting in the WAY.