making space for creativity
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien is one of my all time favorite books. I distinctly remember visiting my cousins in Texas when I was 11 (they had just come off the mission field in Cameroon) and my Uncle Skip was reading this to his three kids, and I…
I’ve made it through 50 Newbery books! The good news is that they really do keep getting better. I stopped at the first 25 to offer up my favorites and general recommendations for those early Newberies (1922-1946) fully in this post. Picking my favorites for this second set of 25 (from 1947 to 1971) is…
The 50th Newbery Award went to Betsy Byars’s coming of age tale, The Summer of the Swans. The story follows 14-year-old Sara Godfrey who is deep in the middle of some quality teen angst (Are her shoes too big? The wrong color? Why does everything make her mad, and sad, and blah?) over…
William H. Armstrong’s 1970 Newbery Award Winning book, Sounder, is not really a book to like or dislike per se. If it weren’t based on a true story, maybe it’d be easier to like it or dislike it. But instead it just is. It’s the evocative and very difficult story of a…
The 48th Newbery was such a treat for me to re-read: the last book in one of my favorite series The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander: The High King. This is the very last adventure of Taran the Assistant Pig-Keeper, Gurgi his furry mostly human loyal companion, Flewddur Fflam the exaggerating…
Now this is the book I have been waiting for! I mean literally this particular book. I know that my husband (and Jim from the Office in episode 2.18) loved this book. But also just that I was hoping, when I dove into this Newbery project, that all the books would be these…
The 1967 Newbery, Up A Road Slowly by Irene Hunt is a portrait of seven-year-old Julie who, upon her mother’s death, goes to live with her Aunt Cordelia in the country. The novel traces Julie’s childhood from wild grief and disdain for her proper schoolmarm Aunt to the threshold of adulthood at age…
Elizabeth Borton de Treviño’s 1966 Newbery Award Winning book, I, Juan de Pareja, de Treviño creates a beautiful story of the real life slave of seventeenth-century Spanish artist Diego Velázquez. Using the few written records available (those relating to Velázquez inheriting the young slave from relatives and giving the old slave his freedom) and a…
In 44th Newbery, Shadow of a Bull by Maia Wojciechowska, Manolo Olivar, age 11, is the son of a famous matador who died in a bull fight when Manolo was 3. Since then, Manolo has grown up in the shadow of his famous father and the townspeople of Arcangel, Spain who are convinced…
Emily Neville’s 1963 Newbery winning coming of age tale, It’s Like this, Cat, follows 14-year-old Davy as he navigates New York City and his family in the 60s. I found the depiction of New York City life in the 60s so great. Davy as a 14 year old has so much freedom to…
I finally have arrived at the chance to re-read one of my all-time favorite books: the 1963 Newbery A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. (I’ve written about it before when I wrote about all the unties, and it’s on my list of favorite children’s fantasy series) It has always been the light ahead…
The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare, the 41st Newbery, is set in 30s AD Galilee and tells the tale of teenage Daniel, runaway blacksmith apprentice who is living in the mountains in hopes of avenging his parents’ death at the hands of the Romans. Daniel gets swept back into village life, meeting zealots…
Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell is based on the true story of 19th- century Nicoleño Native American Karana’s 18-year lone survival on California’s San Nicolas Island. When most of the men of the island are killed in a battle with Russian and Aleut fishermen, the remaining Nicoleños decide to travel to…
Joseph Krumgold won his second Newbery in 1960 with Onion John, becoming the first (of 6 to-date) authors to win two Newbery medals. Onion John follows the unlikely friendship of Andy, a baseball loving 12 year old in Serenity, New Jersey, and Onion John, an older Eastern European immigrant who lives on the…
Elizabeth George Speare’s The Witch of Blackbird Pond is the first Newbery I’ve gotten to re-read for this Newbery Project that I had been first assigned to read for school. I remember being apprehensive at age 12 that it was going to be about a witch, then really liking the first few chapters, and…