Now that Heavy Medal and Calling Caldecott have been revving their proverbial engines, my idle speculations and fantasies get a bit more oomph.  The nice thing is that nothing Heavy Medals has discussed so far strikes me as a serious contender (except the Spinelli, of course).  I’m also choosing to post this the same morning that the National Book Award longlist is announced at 9 a.m., so it would probably have made a certain amount of sense to wait another day.  Then again, the National Book Awards are like oil and water to the ALA given awards.  They rarely mix.

It should also be said that out of all my prediction editions, fall has the worst track record.  Spring, for whatever reason, tends to have the best so you can always go back and read that one if you’ve half a mind to do so. Last year around this time I had discounted Ivan (I later recanted), dismissed Three Times Lucky, and the only thing I got right on the Newbery side was a mention of Splendors and Glooms.  Not exactly groundbreaking or insightful.  Caldecott fared slightly better with inclusions of Green and Extra Yarn but I said of This Is Not My Hat, “No, I’m afraid his work on Extra Yarn has a better chance. This one is a visual stunner, but not quite there on the writing side.” [enter sad trombone music here]

So with that knowledge in your back pocket . . .

NEWBERY 2014

Doll Bones by Holly Black – I’m not changing my mind on this one.  Nope.  Not happening.  Still the one that I want.  I’ve seen other folks mention that it does what Hokey Pokey did, but many people prefer Black’s singular take.  In an interesting sidenote, my assumption that the creepiness of the doll would outweigh the fact that it is, in fact, a doll was apparently misplaced.  I felt positive that significant numbers of boys would pick this up thanks to the word “Bones” in the title and the fact that the doll looks half inclined to smother you in your sleep.  I guess she should have had the creep factor increased, though, since a run through of patrons with the book out in my system shows that the ratio of girls to boys is about 8:1.  Bummer.  Hopefully a nice bright shiny medal would overcome that problem.

The Water Castle by Megan Frazer Blakemore – It’s possible that at first I mentioned Blakemore’s book because it was early in the year and the surprise of it shocked me into an inclusion.  Time has passed since I picked it up.  At least half a year has gone by since I read it, and yet the characters are as fresh and clear in my mind as they were when first I picked up its pages.  It’s science fiction, a format that has only won the Newbery Award proper five times before (I’m counting The Twenty-One Balloons – you are free to try to determine what the other four were) so that’s against its favor certainly.  Still and all, I think it can, I think it can, I think it can  . . .

Africa Is My Home: A Child of the Amistad by Monica Edinger – It’s official.  2013 is officially a bad nonfiction year for the Newbery.  While it is possible a The Mad Potter: George E. Ohr, Eccentric Genius by Jan Greenberg & Sandra Jordan or a Courage Has No Color by Tanya Lee Stone might slip in, the odds are not as strong as I would like.  The closest we can come to a possibility is Edinger’s fictional take on a nonfiction event.  Concerns that I’ve heard surrounding the book verge on the mildly ludicrous so far, so it may turn out to be a serious contender.  One to watch a little more closely, certainly.

Salt by Helen Frost

As it happens, I wouldn’t actually call this book the most talked about story about historical Native Americans of 2013.  That honor falls upon Susan Cooper’s well-meaning and unfortunate Ghost Hawk.  But where Ghost Hawk feels more like a too long amalgamation best suited to an adult readership, Frost (who has never received sufficient praise for her books, though they come up in Newbery discussions all the time) nailed it here.  Salt utilizes her verse format to a good end, the history is dead on, and the characterizations manage in their brief amount of time to ring real and true.  One to discuss, at the very least.