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2022 Newbery Honor Books
Jun. 21st, 2022 12:53 pmThe Newbery Award has gone HARD on dead and dying family members this year. Not only did The Last Cuentista kill the heroine’s entire family (one member twice), but three of the four honor winners also involved family death.
It is therefore perhaps surprising that I nonetheless really liked two of them. Kyle Lukoff’s Too Bright to See kicks off with the funeral of Bug’s Uncle Roderick, a fabulous drag queen brought low by cancer. But although grief is an ongoing theme in the book, it’s really more about ghosts, friendships, and Bug’s ongoing voyage of self-discovery, which ends ( spoilers )
It has some real Mary Downing Hahn vibes - both in the delicious creepiness of the ghosts, and the fact that it successfully blends serious issues with a cracking good story.
I also quite enjoyed Darcie Little Badger’s A Snake Falls to Earth, not least because (amazingly!) this Newbery Honor-winning novel with a sick grandmother ends with the grandmother GETTING BETTER! Groundbreaking. A fresh new vision of Newbery possibilities.
Plus, like Too Bright to See, this is ALSO a cracking good story. I thought Little Badger’s first novel Elatsoe had good bones but stiff prose, but in A Snake Falls to Earth, Little Badger has clearly worked out those first novel kinks. The book has a lively and distinctive voice, particularly in the chapters set in the Reflected World, where Oli the cottonmouth lives with many other animal people, a setting that draws powerfully on Little Badger’s Lipan Apache heritage. (I particularly loved Oli’s coyote friends, the twins Risk and Reign.) The early chapters set on earth don’t have quite the same oomph, but when the two storylines collided I just couldn’t stop reading.
Rajani LaRocca’s Red, White, and Whole, on the other hand, is a much more classic Newbery book about illness and death. This book-in-verse begins well, exploring the life of Reha, an Indian-American girl in 1983 trying to navigate the two worlds of India (and the local Indian-American community, who have become like relatives) and America (high school, malls, the possibility of dating boys, etc)... and then Reha’s mom gets leukemia. Three guesses what happens next and the first two don’t count.
Finally, breaking from the illness ‘n’ death theme, we have Andrea Wang’s Watercress, which also won the Caldecott Medal for its beautiful soft watercolor illustrations by Jason Chin. I particularly loved his tall, graceful, faintly looming corn.
In his note at the back of the book, Chin commented that he chose watercolor for the illustrations because the medium is common in both the Eastern and Western art traditions, befitting a story about the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants. She is initially mortified when her parents stop to pick watercress by the roadside, but comes to understand why they can’t pass up a source of free food when they tell her about their experiences during the famine.
…So, okay, while that is not illness ‘n’ death that is still some family trauma. Look, Newbery’s gotta Newbery.
I’ve had some interesting conversations with our children’s librarian (who recently moved to a new job! SOB) about the purpose of the Newbery Medal. Technically, of course, it is meant to reward “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children,” but in practice parents, teachers, anxious relatives, etc., often use it as a guide to find a present or a book recommendation for a child. Should the Newbery committee take that into account and perhaps dial back on the misery? Or should they fearlessly plow ahead, rewarding quality wherever they find it, even though reading Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust at a tender age has given me a lifelong aversion to novels in verse which was only reinforced by reading Red, White, and Whole?
It is therefore perhaps surprising that I nonetheless really liked two of them. Kyle Lukoff’s Too Bright to See kicks off with the funeral of Bug’s Uncle Roderick, a fabulous drag queen brought low by cancer. But although grief is an ongoing theme in the book, it’s really more about ghosts, friendships, and Bug’s ongoing voyage of self-discovery, which ends ( spoilers )
It has some real Mary Downing Hahn vibes - both in the delicious creepiness of the ghosts, and the fact that it successfully blends serious issues with a cracking good story.
I also quite enjoyed Darcie Little Badger’s A Snake Falls to Earth, not least because (amazingly!) this Newbery Honor-winning novel with a sick grandmother ends with the grandmother GETTING BETTER! Groundbreaking. A fresh new vision of Newbery possibilities.
Plus, like Too Bright to See, this is ALSO a cracking good story. I thought Little Badger’s first novel Elatsoe had good bones but stiff prose, but in A Snake Falls to Earth, Little Badger has clearly worked out those first novel kinks. The book has a lively and distinctive voice, particularly in the chapters set in the Reflected World, where Oli the cottonmouth lives with many other animal people, a setting that draws powerfully on Little Badger’s Lipan Apache heritage. (I particularly loved Oli’s coyote friends, the twins Risk and Reign.) The early chapters set on earth don’t have quite the same oomph, but when the two storylines collided I just couldn’t stop reading.
Rajani LaRocca’s Red, White, and Whole, on the other hand, is a much more classic Newbery book about illness and death. This book-in-verse begins well, exploring the life of Reha, an Indian-American girl in 1983 trying to navigate the two worlds of India (and the local Indian-American community, who have become like relatives) and America (high school, malls, the possibility of dating boys, etc)... and then Reha’s mom gets leukemia. Three guesses what happens next and the first two don’t count.
Finally, breaking from the illness ‘n’ death theme, we have Andrea Wang’s Watercress, which also won the Caldecott Medal for its beautiful soft watercolor illustrations by Jason Chin. I particularly loved his tall, graceful, faintly looming corn.
In his note at the back of the book, Chin commented that he chose watercolor for the illustrations because the medium is common in both the Eastern and Western art traditions, befitting a story about the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants. She is initially mortified when her parents stop to pick watercress by the roadside, but comes to understand why they can’t pass up a source of free food when they tell her about their experiences during the famine.
…So, okay, while that is not illness ‘n’ death that is still some family trauma. Look, Newbery’s gotta Newbery.
I’ve had some interesting conversations with our children’s librarian (who recently moved to a new job! SOB) about the purpose of the Newbery Medal. Technically, of course, it is meant to reward “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children,” but in practice parents, teachers, anxious relatives, etc., often use it as a guide to find a present or a book recommendation for a child. Should the Newbery committee take that into account and perhaps dial back on the misery? Or should they fearlessly plow ahead, rewarding quality wherever they find it, even though reading Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust at a tender age has given me a lifelong aversion to novels in verse which was only reinforced by reading Red, White, and Whole?
