making space for creativity
2010 Newbery winner, When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead is the story that Miranda began to write to the sender of mysterious letters from the future. The letters predicted the future in a way that made Miranda trust that they were authentic, and the letter writer said that there were several things she must…
2008 Newbery winner, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz is a set of 19 related monologues (plus 2 dialogues) about children during the Middle Ages in England. In her forward, she writes that while she was working as a school librarian, a group of students was studying the Middle…
2005 Newbery winner, Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata (2005) is about Japanese-American sisters Katie and Lynn who move to the South in the 1970s with their baby brother and under-employed parents. The title means sparkling or shimmering, a term about beautiful things that are both seen through and reflective (the sky, eyes, the sea). At it’s…
2004 Newbery winner, The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread by Kate DiCamillo is a lovely fairy tale about a brave knight who loved a princess. The knight happens to be a very small mouse, and the princess happens to be recently motherless…
2003 Newbery winner, Crispin, by Avi is about a medieval boy with no name and only a mother who had no current social status but could read. The book opens with her death and a great concern about what is going to happen to the boy. He learns that he has a name, a noble…
2002 Newbery winner, A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park (2002) is set in 12th century Korea. It chronicles orphan boy Tree-ear’s apprenticeship to master potter Min. The village of Ch’ul’po is renowned in all Korea for its beautiful green clay ceramics and made slightly unusual by the presence of a crippled homeless bridge dweller Crane-man…
2001 Newbery winner, A Year Down Yonder by Richard Peck (2001) follows Mary Alice as she spend the year with her formidable Grandmother in a little town in rural Illinois in the middle of the Great Depression. It’s a gem of a Newbery: short, funny, and skillfully written. A sequel to the delightful A Long Way…
2000 Newbery winner, Bud, Not Buddy, by Christopher Paul Curtis: Bud Caldwell, age ten, is a motherless boy with spunk and a hunch that he can find his long-lost father. Set in depression era Flint, Michigan, Bud is a young African American boy who has been at an orphanage or out at various foster families…
1999 Newbery winner, Holes, by Louis Sachar stars Stanley Yelnats, a chronically unlucky boy who is sent to the juvenile detention Camp Greenlake on false charges of theft. With half the story taking place a hundred years before, the past and present of Stanley, the other inmate/campers, and “The Warden” are spun into a tight,…
1998 Newbery winner, Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse is a verse novel set in Depression-era panhandle Oklahoma during the devastating Dust Bowl. Narrator Billie Jo is an only child of fourteen whose mother is finally pregnant with a much anticipated new baby while their farm is enduring a terrible drought. I came into…
1997 Newbery winner, The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg stars four unlikely sixth grade academic quiz bowl team members. Exploring the backstory of each character’s specific talents and knowledge, the book is told in a series of five narrators: the four competitors and their teacher and coach Mrs. Olinski. The stories are told…
I’m 75% through the Newbery Award winning books! Here’s a quick look at # 1-25 and 26-50. For this batch (#51-75) from 1972 to 1996, some of my very favorite books of all time I got to re-read (again!). These are books I have returned to and re-read over and over: Mrs. Frisby and the…
1996 Newbery winner, The Midwife’s Apprentice, by Karen Cushman has long been a favorite of mine by one of my long-time favorite authors. I think that reading Karen Cushman’s first novel Catherine Called Birdy (1994) was one of the reasons I wanted to study early modern English history in college and graduate school. I love…
1994 Newbery winner, The Giver, by Lois Lowry is a book that is often cited as an all time favorite. It is a hard book too, but one that you are so glad you read. Young Jonas lives in a future world without pain or suffering, but when he is chosen to become the keeper…
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli (1991 Newbery winner) follows the crazy fast, incredibly athletic, kind, and lonely Jeffrey Lionel Magee. Magee runs into town, and outruns, out-catches, out-reads, and out-unentangles everyone in Two Mills. He was orphaned at a young age, taken in by two quarreling relatives and is in search of a family. He’s…