Newbery, Caldecott, & Printz: "The Call"

Every year, I'm on pins and needles to find out who won the ALA awards. The Newbery, Caldecott, and Printz Awards are like the kidlit Oscars, and I'm the giggly fangirl who can't wait for all the celebrity gossip.

So you can imagine how much I loved Publishers Weekly for printing an article on where the winners were when they received "The Call." I love being privy to the details: Jack Gantos' brief hope that it wasn't going to be his mom on the other line, Chris Raschka's search for his lost cell phone, John Corey Whaley's shock when he received a second call.

And of course I have to hoot and holler for my favorites. Chris Raschka: Hooray! Two decades after its first publication, Charlie Parker Played Be Bop is still in my Top 10 picture books of all time.

If you need all the details, too, I recommend the Publisher's Weekly article:
Gantos, Raschka, Whaley: Where They Were When the Award Call Came

And the winners are...

2011 ALA Awards

So today is kind of like the Oscars in the kidlit world. Today, the American Library Association bestows huge names like "Caldecott" and "Newbery" and "Printz" on the best children's books of 2010. The lists came out this morning, to much ballyhoo and celebration.

You can view the complete list of winners at the ALA website, but here are the bits I was most excited about:

A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Philip and Erin Stead
Won the Caldecott Medal!
The timeless charm of this book made it a shoo-in if you ask me. You can read my original blog post about Amos here.

One Crazy Summer by Rita Williams-Garcia
Won The Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor Award!
Well-deserved. I loved how Williams-Garcia balanced humor and powerful moments in a story about three young girls who spend a summer at a Black Panthers day camp in the 1960s.

Peter Sis
Won the May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award!
I've gushed plenty about Peter Sis on this blog, so I will spare you. If you'd like to read previous posts about the talents of Peter Sis, you may.




And then, of course, there was the wildcard...

The Newbery Award this year was given to a book I'd never heard of! What? The Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool was a dark horse. It came out of nowhere and apparently, swept the Newbery Committee off its feet. How cool is that? I love it when the underdog pulls it off in the end. Especially an underdog so off-the-radar (either that, or I'm just that out of the loop). And now I've got a new book on my to-read list.

Congratulations to all!!!

Summer Blog Reruns: Rules by Cynthia Lord

This week, I'm working hard on a revision of my novel, so I'm going to take a break and do a few blog reruns. In honor of Cynthia Lord's new book Touch Blue coming out this month, here is a rerun about her first book.

Rules by Cynthia Lord: Originally posted June 11, 2007

I know that I'm behind the times. It's been well over a year since Cynthia Lord's book Rules came out, and about six months since it received the American Library Association's prestigious Newbery Honor Award for her "distinguished contribution to American literature for children." My favorite kidlit bloggers published their thoughtful, insightful reviews ages ago. And I just read the book this weekend.

Rules, simply put, is a story of a young girl trying to find her place in family, friendships, and life, while also figuring out how to deal with her younger brother's autism and all the unusual pressure and demand that condition can put on a family. This may not sound like light reading, but Cynthia Lord's humor and honesty and real, three-dimensional characters make the chapters fly by and you hardly want to put the book down. (As evidenced by this Sunday morning when my husband said, "Let's make pancakes!"...which is usually enough to make me drop whatever I'm doing and immediately dash for the kitchen...and instead I mumbled absently, "Mmmm...maybe after I finish this chapter. Or the next.")

I don't want to say much because you really should just read it, but here is one of the details I loved most about this book:

Catherine, the main character, is constantly writing rules for her brother, David, so "at least he'll know how the world works, and I won't have to keep explaining." Some of Catherine's life rules include:

• If someone says "hi," you say "hi" back.
• Not everything worth keeping has to be useful.
• No toys in the fish tank.
• Pantless brothers are not my problem.

While some of these rules are written out of adolescent frustration, there are some rules that are incredibly poignant and show a real, deep love. For instance, David often has trouble finding words to express himself, so Catherine writes him these two rules:

• If you don't have the words you need, borrow someone else's.
• If you need to borrow words, Arnold Lobel wrote some good ones.

So throughout the book, Catherine and David, quote to each other from Andrew Lobel's Frog and Toad books, almost like a secret language between brother and sister.

"Dad's still coming," I say. "Late doesn't mean not coming."

But those words don't help. So I reach over, wipe away his tear with the side of my thumb, and say the only words I know will calm him: "'Frog, you are looking quite green.'"

David sniffles. "'But I always look green,' said Frog. 'I am a frog.'"

This is what makes the book so lovely. The relationships. The very real, honest quality of Catherine's interactions with her brother, her father, the new girl next door, the boy she meets in the waiting room of David's occupational therapy appointments. This is not a drama about how difficult it is to live with autism. This is a book about growing up. About families. And as Cynthia Lord (who lives in Maine!) wrote on her website (totally worth checking out) in answer to a 5th grader's question about why she chose to write about autism:

Life is long and challenges come into every family, even if you don’t start life with them. RULES is about accepting there is value in everything, even in imperfection. Sometimes things can’t be changed, but you can change your feelings about them.

According to Booklist, Rules is geared for grades 4-7, but I think there's something here for all ages. I think a younger child would enjoy having this read out loud, and obviously I enjoyed reading it as an adult. (I did eventually get to those pancakes, too!)

Newbery Awards!

Last week the ALSC announced the big kidlit awards for 2009. I was so excited to hear that two of my favorite books of the year received Newbery Awards!

Rebecca Stead's mysterious novel When You Reach Me won the Newbery title and Phillip Hoose's enlightening book Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice won a Newbery Honor. (If you missed my previous posts raving about the titles, you can find them here and here.)

If you haven't picked these books up yet, I guess now you have another reason. Hooray!

To see the rest of the winners, as well as the winners of the Caldecott, Corretta Scott King, and Printz Awards, please visit the ALSC.

Cynthia Lord's Summer Blog Reruns

This summer, author Cynthia Lord has been going through some of the blog posts she wrote back when she was in the process of writing Rules. Before it was published. Before it won the Newbery Honor. Before it swept reader's choice awards across the country.

If you have ever been curious about how a writer's mind works while working on a novel, these "summer reruns" are fascinating reading.

If you are a writer, you're bound to pick up some tips and inspiration.

And, most especially, if you're a fan of Rules, it's a real treat to get a special in-the-moment glimpse of Ms. Lord's processes, struggles, and triumphs during the book's creation.

Here are some of the recent highlights:

• How she came up with some of the details for Catherine's room
• How she finally made Catherine's friend Kristi come alive
• How she started over (Seriously. She wiped her entire file clean and started the book over after it was written and sold because she knew it could be better. Bold. Scary. Absolutely courageous.)

Christopher Paul Curtis: Elijah of Buxton

It's going to be hard for me to write about this book without resorting to blatant gushing, but I'll do my best. Elijah of Buxton is one of those books that kept popping up on all the lists this year. When it won both the Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King Award, I thought I'd better pick it up and give it a shot.

Now I had read Christopher Paul Curtis' Bud, Not Buddy when it won the Newbery Medal in 2000, and I liked it quite a bit, but I have to admit I wasn't completely blown away. I didn't rush out and recommend it to everyone I knew. Elijah of Buxton is another story.

The book is set in the mid 1860's in Buxton, Canada--one of the early Black settlements of escaped slaves from the United States. Elijah, the book's fictional hero, is the first free-born child in the settlement.

In some ways, it's a basic coming of age story. Elijah is what his mother calls a "fra-gile" child, and he is trying very hard to learn how to become more grown-up. In other ways, it's an amazing glimpse into what life on one of these settlements could have been like. There is a poignant juxtaposition between the young children in the settlement who've known nothing but freedom, and the adults, who have each risked everything to be free and carry heavy wounds and scars that the children can't begin to comprehend.

Mostly what I loved about this book, besides the beautiful writing and engaging story, is that it is ultimately a story about community. It is about how people can come together to try to make the world a better place, not just for themselves, but for one another. When Elijah, who goes to school and can read and write, is asked to read a letter to Mrs. Holton, informing her that her husband has been whipped to death by a slave owner, the women of the settlement go with him:

Mostly I think I didn't bawl 'cause once Ma and them women bunched up 'round Mrs. Holton with their watching, waiting eyes and hands, it felt like a whole slew of soldiers was ringing that parlour with swords drawed and waren't no sorrow so powerful it could bust through.

I'll warn you, I bawled. I cried straight through the entire last three chapters. But it's not just sadness that makes you cry, it's the redemption and grace and joy mixed up in the sadness that is so affecting. This is a beautiful story and I know it won all the "literature for young people" awards, but I would recommend it to adults as well. A good story's a good story, after all.

You can visit the real Buxton Museum website here.

You can read about Christopher Paul Curtis' R.E.A.D Program and Kenya School Project here.