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Ah, the weekend. Housecleaning, tomato canning, and anticipation of the NBA Longlists to be announced 9am Eastern Monday morning. I’m completely opportunistic regarding the National Books Awards. If I like them, I salute them, if not, I dismiss them. (My loss.) I think this is easier to do with awards that have no posted criteria [...]
At Heavy Medal Jonathan and I strive for discussion of books within the confines of the Newbery criteria. Use in curriculum? Doesn’t matter. Breadth of popularity? Doesn’t matter. ”Importance” of theme or message? Uniqueness to the canon? Comparison to books of other years? Doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t matter. This is not to say these things [...]
Spring. After a exhausting fall and winter of measuring the year’s best books against each other; the new publishing year opens and those of us who doggedly follow children’s literature in the peculiar quest of speculating about the Newbery Medal get excited. Very excited. The slate is clean: what book will garner next year’s golden [...]
It was a fun day here in Seattle as everyone expressed their excitement about the awards. General appreciation about the spread of styles in the Newbery selections, and the seemingly generous five honors for the Caldecott… though if you scan through the earlier decades of the Newbery and Caldecott, you’ll see many years with five [...]
…but we don’t know. Roxanne Feldman does (member of the committee) but she’s not telling. She’s snuggling up with her phone and the new Kiki Strike, copyright 2013.
Tomorrow I fly to Seattle; the Newbery committee is headed there right now, if they didn’t come in yesterday to get acclimated. They may be preparing for the opening of their discussion, Friday morning, by reviewing the titles they feel they can most strongly champion. At the same time that they articulate their defense of [...]
On this exciting inauguration/MLK Day, it feels special to have you all checking in to Heavy Medal! While you’re here, don’t forget to vote (deadline Tuesday morning), and to update us on your Mock Newberys. Meanwhile, in some comment that I can no longer find, I promised a “Nonfiction Smackdown.” Building our shortlist, there was very [...]
This one hasn’t gotten a stand-alone post from us yet. Jonathan headlined it at his Louise Erdrich post, but most of the resulting comments ended up being about THE ROUND HOUSE (which will be the first thing I read following this Newbery season). He brought it up again at 2012 Best Books Outliers, [...]
ALSC is hosting Facebook Forums with Caldecott medal and honor-winning illustrators, as a part of the 75th Anniversary Celebration of the Caldecott Medal. This past Thursday morning, Melissa Sweet was at the ALSC Facebook site to chat with whoever showed up. A couple of her responses to the “how does the medal change your life” [...]
As Jonathan pointed out in a recent comment, our blog facelift now includes some links on the right sidebar. Scroll below those all-important ads, and you’ll find quick links to some of the official Newbery resources we most regularly point you to, as well as a list of other Mock Newbery sites. Our live discussion [...]
We’ve revisited nearly all of our shortlisted titles, with STARRY RIVER OF THE SKY still to go, before our Mock Discussion on January 13th in Oakland. (If you’ve read all the titles and would like to come, email me for the Evite). Participants may be preparing notes, flipping through copies again to re-read an [...]
This was my Holiday re-read treat. We posted Jonathan’s and Nina’s takes way back in September, when the world seemed new. Between then and now, SPLENDORS & GLOOMS has been used in many discussions as a comparative work…a sort of default book that exhibits a high standard of sentence-level writing, and of overall craft. In my [...]
Everyone, we’ve heard from SLJ that for technical issues (which many of you have been experiencing) they are fast-forwarding their server upgrade to: tonight. This means that at 12 midnight EST we will be “freezing” posting so that they can migrate our content…giving us a face lift in the process! (Check out http://100ScopeNotes.com or http://blogs.slj.com/connect-the-pop for [...]
As I understand better the distance created for me in the prose style of BOMB, I also understand better why I find Nelson’s book so engaging, collapsing that distance. So it’s interesting to note that for many of you who responded in Jonathan’s first post on this title, your concern was exactly one of distance. [...]
JEPP has come up a few times in comments this season, in most interesting contrast to WONDER SHOW and WILL SPARROW’S ROAD for its depiction of characters with dwarfism. It is easily the most complex and complete depiction of the three, because here the dwarf is the protagonist, and the book itself is longer (nearly 400 [...]
Do you have a favorite author that provokes a Pavlovian response? When I hear “Polly Horvath’s new book” I drool. ”…two new books..” knocked me to the floor in fits. Up and dusted, I tried to put my brain in order so that I could read her current titles as objectively as possible…meaning, likely, that [...]
Do you have a favorite author that provokes a Pavlovian response? When I hear “Polly Horvath’s new book” I drool. “…two new books..” knocked me to the floor in fits.
Up and dusted, I tried to put my brain in order so that I could read her current titles as objectively as possible…meaning, likely, that I [...]
Jonathan introduced this title briefly into discussion, and it might be the outside longshot on our shortlist. I’ve seen comments from otherwise-Woodson-fans call this one “too afterschool special,” or note that the parallels between Laurel’s addiction and the Hurricane seem “too forced.” Then of course there’s the age-range question. Yet others, myself included, can’t help but [...]
