A Certain Slant of Light

Last but not least, we arrive at Christina Soontornvat’s The Last Mapmaker, the Newbery Honor book I was most excited about this year! I greatly enjoyed Soontornvat’s All Thirteen and A Wish in the Dark (especially impressive as I’d gone in with a bit of a grudge against them: “Who could possibly deserve two Newbery Honors in one year?” I griped), and she’s surpassed herself here.

The Last Mapmaker is a secondary world fantasy (a great rarity among Newbery winners) about Sai, a mapmaker’s apprentice who finds herself on a voyage of exploration… which may or may not be seeking a secret continent full of dragons! The book is a lot of fun, and I think best enjoyed without any spoilers beyond that basic premise, so if that sounds like something you might like, perhaps best not to read the spoilery musings ( behind this cut. )

Inspired by my affection for Soontornvat’s Newbery Honor-winning works, I decided to look into what else she had written, and discovered that she wrote the six-book easy reader Diary of an Ice Princess series, which is about a magical ice princess who has to learn to control her Windtamer powers. To read or not to read? That is the question.

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!”