Jonathan Hunt
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Getting Real
I’m as happy as the next person to enthusiastically recommend THE REAL BOY to adults and children for pleasure reading, but like Nina I have grave reservations about it as a Newbery book. I’m hesitant to follow her mixed review with one of my own, especially because not many people have spoken up in favor [...]
Looking Back: 2005
Mark Flowers has an interesting series on his blog, Crossreferencing, in which he revisits the Printz choices from previous years to see whether he agrees with them or not. He’s done 2000-2003 so far. It’s a fun exercise, and while I don’t have the stamina to start the same thing here, I’m going to revisit [...]
Ghost Hawk
At last! It’s time to talk about GHOST HAWK, arguably Susan Cooper’s best book since The Dark Is Rising Sequence. (I say arguably because I think the other book you can make a case for is KING OF SHADOWS.) That’s not really part of the Newbery criteria, however, but the book does well in that [...]
October Nominations
Each member of the Newbery committee will submit three nominations to the chair sometime during the month of October, probably on or around October 15. Each nomination is submitted with a brief written justification. My strategy at this point is quite simple: I’m going to nominate the three best titles. In no particular order. ERUPTION! by [...]
Scientists in the Field
As you well know, last year was an amazing year for nonfiction. We had an unprecedented amount of depth and quality in the field, and while only one nonfiction book–BOMB–cracked the Newbery roster, I felt that several additional titles, namely MOONBIRD and TITANIC, were similarly worthy. While the nonfiction field is much thinner this year, there are still [...]
The Year of Billy Miller (and Other Beginning Chapter Books)
It was the first day of second grade and Billy Miller was worried. He was worried he wouldn’t be smart enough for the school year. There was a reason Billy was worried. Two weeks earlier on their drive home from visiting Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills of South Dakota . . . While I [...]
Penny and Her Marble (and Other Easy Readers)
Aside from the comparative simplicity of the text and the interdependence of text and illustrations, the biggest problem the committee faces in evaluating easy readers for Newbery recognition is that most publishers simply do not submit them, leaving committee members to find–and champion–them on their own. That’s easy to do when you have big names [...]
Doll Bones
Poppy set down one mermaid doll close to the stretch of asphalt road that represented the Blackest Sea. They were old—bought from Goodwill—with big shiny heads, different colored tails and frizzy hair. Then the mermaids waited for the boat to get closer, their silly plastic smiles hiding their lethal intentions. They’d crash the ship against [...]
The Thing About Luck
Kouun is “good luck” in Japanese, and one year my family had none of it. We were cursed with bad luck. Bad luck chased us around, pointing her bony finger. We got seven flat tires in six weeks. I got malaria, one of fifteen hundred cases in the United States that year. And my grandmother’s [...]
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