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2010 Newbery Honor Books
Dec. 21st, 2019 11:00 amThere were four Newbery Honor books in 2010, two of which I have previously read. Jacqueline Kelly’s The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate is about an eleven-year-old girl discovering her interest in natural history in the early 20th century, which sounds like it really ought to be my jam (and just look at its beautiful silhouette cover!), but I struggled to get into it.
On the other hand, Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, a fantasy novel inspired by Chinese folklore, so delighted me that I have since read every children’s novel that Lin has written. Highly recommended if you like children’s fantasy in general or are looking for Asian-inspired fantasy settings in particular. It’s got beautiful illustrations, too.
That left two books to read: Rodman Philbrick’s The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg and Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
The title of The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg seems to suggest unreliable narrator shenanigans, but actually the book is a straightforward picaresque tale about twelve-year-old Homer P. Figg, who sets out on a journey across Civil War American to rescue his older brother Harold, whom their wicked uncle has forced to join the army even though he’s only seventeen. Along the way, Homer meets:
- two wicked slavecatchers, Stink and Smelt, who try to force him to work for them;
- a Quaker conductor on the Underground Railroad who funds his operation with his tourmaline mine;
- an adventuress and her con man partner who end up locking him in a pig crate;
- the cast of a traveling medicine show, including a tattooed lady and two jugglers;
- and an aeronaut with a hot air balloon named Tilda. (The balloon, not the aeronaut.)
Because it’s a picaresque novel, even the potentially distressing parts (the abusive uncle! the death threats! the pig crate!) are told with a light hand. On a Newbery Distressingness Scale of one to “my best friend tragically drowned while trying to visit our imaginary kingdom,” it’s maybe a three.
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice is a nonfiction book about a forgotten figure in the Civil Rights movement. A few months before Rosa Parks’ refusal to leave her seat sparked the Montgomery bus boycotts, high school student Claudette Colvin was likewise arrested for refusing to leave her seat on a segregated bus - and Colvin’s earlier case, Hoose argues, is what prompted Montgomery’s black leaders to begin preparing for a boycott. Thus, when Parks was arrested, everyone was prepared to swing into action.
I loved Hoose’s excerpts from his interviews with Colvin, which offer a fascinating view of her childhood in segregated Alabama, and his descriptions of the on-the-ground politics of the Montgomery bus boycotts. I suspect most Americans know the basics of this story, but like many things in history, it was much more complicated on the ground than the received version makes it appear.
***
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice also sent me on a tangential train of thought about how far back I should continue reading the non-fiction Newbery Honor books. I have no qualms about reading the recent non-fiction honor books, but at some point I feel that the information is going to be so outdated that it will no longer be worthwhile. What do you think would be a good cut-off point? 1990? 1970?
Confession time: I never actually read the first Newbery Medal winner, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, because it was written in 1922 and is therefore obviously wildly out of date and, judging by the Newbery winners of the 1920s that I did read, probably racist. In recent years an updated Story of Mankind has been published, but how much can you update a book before it is no longer the book that won the medal? It’s a sort of Book of Theseus problem.
On the other hand, Grace Lin’s Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, a fantasy novel inspired by Chinese folklore, so delighted me that I have since read every children’s novel that Lin has written. Highly recommended if you like children’s fantasy in general or are looking for Asian-inspired fantasy settings in particular. It’s got beautiful illustrations, too.
That left two books to read: Rodman Philbrick’s The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg and Phillip Hoose’s Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
The title of The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg seems to suggest unreliable narrator shenanigans, but actually the book is a straightforward picaresque tale about twelve-year-old Homer P. Figg, who sets out on a journey across Civil War American to rescue his older brother Harold, whom their wicked uncle has forced to join the army even though he’s only seventeen. Along the way, Homer meets:
- two wicked slavecatchers, Stink and Smelt, who try to force him to work for them;
- a Quaker conductor on the Underground Railroad who funds his operation with his tourmaline mine;
- an adventuress and her con man partner who end up locking him in a pig crate;
- the cast of a traveling medicine show, including a tattooed lady and two jugglers;
- and an aeronaut with a hot air balloon named Tilda. (The balloon, not the aeronaut.)
Because it’s a picaresque novel, even the potentially distressing parts (the abusive uncle! the death threats! the pig crate!) are told with a light hand. On a Newbery Distressingness Scale of one to “my best friend tragically drowned while trying to visit our imaginary kingdom,” it’s maybe a three.
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice is a nonfiction book about a forgotten figure in the Civil Rights movement. A few months before Rosa Parks’ refusal to leave her seat sparked the Montgomery bus boycotts, high school student Claudette Colvin was likewise arrested for refusing to leave her seat on a segregated bus - and Colvin’s earlier case, Hoose argues, is what prompted Montgomery’s black leaders to begin preparing for a boycott. Thus, when Parks was arrested, everyone was prepared to swing into action.
I loved Hoose’s excerpts from his interviews with Colvin, which offer a fascinating view of her childhood in segregated Alabama, and his descriptions of the on-the-ground politics of the Montgomery bus boycotts. I suspect most Americans know the basics of this story, but like many things in history, it was much more complicated on the ground than the received version makes it appear.
***
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice also sent me on a tangential train of thought about how far back I should continue reading the non-fiction Newbery Honor books. I have no qualms about reading the recent non-fiction honor books, but at some point I feel that the information is going to be so outdated that it will no longer be worthwhile. What do you think would be a good cut-off point? 1990? 1970?
Confession time: I never actually read the first Newbery Medal winner, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind, because it was written in 1922 and is therefore obviously wildly out of date and, judging by the Newbery winners of the 1920s that I did read, probably racist. In recent years an updated Story of Mankind has been published, but how much can you update a book before it is no longer the book that won the medal? It’s a sort of Book of Theseus problem.
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