osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2022-12-23 08:32 am
osprey_archer) wrote2022-12-23 08:32 am
Newbery Honor Books of the 1960s
Sadly I will not be finishing the Newbery Honor books of the 1960s by the end of 2022, because SOMEBODY (one of the school libraries attached to my library system) sat on The Gammage Cup for a month and I still don’t have it. But I remind myself that it is about the journey, not the destination, this project is a meander up the garden path and not a race, etc. etc., the point is to read books and ponder the development of children’s literature in the United States and perhaps find a few new authors I like.
On that note, I will start this raft of reviewlets with Mary Stolz’s other Newbery Honor book, The Noonday Friends, a contemporary novel about a girl whose home duties mean that she can mostly hang out with her best friend only at the school lunch hour. As such it is less about friendship than I hoped from the title (I basically hope all friendship books will be The Changeling), but I enjoyed the family dynamics and the New York City setting. (You can tell how much the city has changed in the last few decades: the heroine's father comments that owning an apartment building in Greenwich Village wouldn't necessarily make the owner rich.)
Also, shoutout to Stolz for writing a book where the main character’s father had what sounds like a heart attack a few years ago but does NOT die over the course of the story. In fact, he doesn’t even get close to dying! No dramatic scenes where he clutches his chest and collapses.
Mary Hays Weik’s The Jazz Man is a short book illustrated by Weik’s daughter Ann Grifalconi’s dramatic woodcuts. The woodcuts are the best part; the story, about a young boy in Harlem who is transported from his depressing life by the stylings of a jazz quartet across the alley, is forgettable.
Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s The Golden Goblet suffered from “unfortunately, I know the title of this book, and the character doesn’t.” In between the title, the cover of the book which depicts Ranofer finding the golden goblet stashed in a chest, and the fact that I have read books before, I clocked the fact that we were doing Evil Tomb Robbers long before the idea was even a glimmer in Ranofer’s eye.
I don’t mind knowing where a book is going, but I do mind figuring out every revelation ages before the main character does. Maybe if I had read the book at the target age I would have found it less predictable? But I did read Mara, Daughter of the Nile at the target age and didn’t much like it either, so maybe I just don’t get on with McGraw’s ancient Egypt books. It’s too bad, because I SO loved her book The Moorchild, and none of her others have hit the spot the same way.
Edwin Tunis’s Frontier Living is about daily life on the American frontier - not just the Wild West (we don’t get to the Wild West till the last twenty pages or so, in fact) but the Appalachians, Spanish California, etc., all copiously illustrated with intricate pen-and-ink drawings like David Macaulay’s Cathedral. I love books about daily life in the past, so I quite enjoyed this, although Tunis is not as interested in my pet subject “What did people eat?” as I would have preferred.
On that note, I will start this raft of reviewlets with Mary Stolz’s other Newbery Honor book, The Noonday Friends, a contemporary novel about a girl whose home duties mean that she can mostly hang out with her best friend only at the school lunch hour. As such it is less about friendship than I hoped from the title (I basically hope all friendship books will be The Changeling), but I enjoyed the family dynamics and the New York City setting. (You can tell how much the city has changed in the last few decades: the heroine's father comments that owning an apartment building in Greenwich Village wouldn't necessarily make the owner rich.)
Also, shoutout to Stolz for writing a book where the main character’s father had what sounds like a heart attack a few years ago but does NOT die over the course of the story. In fact, he doesn’t even get close to dying! No dramatic scenes where he clutches his chest and collapses.
Mary Hays Weik’s The Jazz Man is a short book illustrated by Weik’s daughter Ann Grifalconi’s dramatic woodcuts. The woodcuts are the best part; the story, about a young boy in Harlem who is transported from his depressing life by the stylings of a jazz quartet across the alley, is forgettable.
Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s The Golden Goblet suffered from “unfortunately, I know the title of this book, and the character doesn’t.” In between the title, the cover of the book which depicts Ranofer finding the golden goblet stashed in a chest, and the fact that I have read books before, I clocked the fact that we were doing Evil Tomb Robbers long before the idea was even a glimmer in Ranofer’s eye.
I don’t mind knowing where a book is going, but I do mind figuring out every revelation ages before the main character does. Maybe if I had read the book at the target age I would have found it less predictable? But I did read Mara, Daughter of the Nile at the target age and didn’t much like it either, so maybe I just don’t get on with McGraw’s ancient Egypt books. It’s too bad, because I SO loved her book The Moorchild, and none of her others have hit the spot the same way.
Edwin Tunis’s Frontier Living is about daily life on the American frontier - not just the Wild West (we don’t get to the Wild West till the last twenty pages or so, in fact) but the Appalachians, Spanish California, etc., all copiously illustrated with intricate pen-and-ink drawings like David Macaulay’s Cathedral. I love books about daily life in the past, so I quite enjoyed this, although Tunis is not as interested in my pet subject “What did people eat?” as I would have preferred.
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The Golden Goblet and The Egypt Game are such wildly different books, too, even if they have the ancient Egypt theme in common. The Egypt Game is about Imagination and Friendship and coming up with silly (but deeply serious) games with your friends and also realizing that your grandmother whom you have been forced to live with is not really that bad, whereas The Golden Goblet is about being forced to live with your hated half-brother who won't apprentice you to a goldsmith and is generally so awful that the only way forward is to capture him in the act of tomb-robbing.
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Frontier Living sounds great, and like it would make for good quickie research if you wanted a few choice details for a story in one of those settings.
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Frontier Living would be a great source for a telling detail or two for a story. The illustrations are so meticulous.