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Newbery Books of the 1970s
Aug. 12th, 2022 08:31 amI 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 ( Spoilers! An upsetting death! )
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.
( Spoilers )
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 ( Spoilers! An upsetting death! )
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.
( Spoilers )
