making space for creativity
I am not normally someone who would pick up a book about a US Civil War soldier, but since Rifles for Watie by Harold Keith was next on the Newbery Award books (#37, winner for 1958) I plowed through it. The first thing I noticed was that it was long and very well…
A sweet story about maple syrup and returning to the land, the 1957 Newbery, Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorensen, is a story about a WWII vet and his family who summer at an old family house. There, they grow gardens and heal ailments of body and soul in the New…
Carry on Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham is the 1956 Newbery winner. It’s a biography of Nathaniel Bowditch who had little formal education but was one of the great mathematicians in early America, dedicated to making the published charts for nautical navigation accurate. Ok that sounds dull, but it’s a really lovely story…
The 34th Newbery, The Wheel on the School, by Meindert de Jong is super charming and the sort of book I imaged reading when I embarked on this project to read all the Newberies. It’s set in the author’s native Holland, in a fishing village along a dike the holds back the sea during,…
…And Now Miguel by Joseph Krumgold is our 33rd Newbery Award winner. It’s about a young shepherd boy who longs to leave home and be fully accepted into a family, which is almost exactly the premise of the previous Newbery Secret of the Andes. Only Miguel Chevez is a middle child in a…
The 1953 Newbery Award winning book, Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark, follows a young indigenous Peruvian llama shepherd, Cusi, as he seeks to discover why he has been raised by a mysterious old wise man, Chuto, in an isolated Andean valley. Cusi and his companion, Misti the llama, travel first to…
The 1952 Newbery Award winning book, Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes, is a charming tale of a puppy and his two children. Little Ginger comes to responsible ten-year-old Jerry Pye and his dreamy nine-year-old sister Rachel, only to be stolen a few months later, and the book meanders through the Pye’s home, Jerry’s school…
Our 30th Newbery is a biographical novel: the 1951 book Amos Fortune, Free Man, by Elizabeth Yates. Taking her title from his gravestone in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, Yates traces and expands upon the real life of an amazing gold coast slave through his various owners, wives, and employments until his death in 1801 at age…
The 1950 Newbery winning book, The Door in the Wall, by Marguerite de Angeli, spins a medieval tale about an English boy named Robin, separated from his parents, and crippled by the plague who learns to walk and trust again, eventually saving a castle from the attacking Welsh. What I liked. Even…
King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian, Marguerite Henry’s 1949 book and the winner of the 28th Newbery, spins the tale of mute stable boy Agba and his beloved colt Sham as they are bought and sold, forgotten and celebrated throughout North Africa and Europe. It is one of the Newberys…
William Pène du Bois’s 1948 Newbery winning book The Twenty-One Balloons tells the story of a math teacher – turned amateur balloonist who ends up stranded on the supposedly uninhabited Pacific island of Krakatoa right before its fated (and real-life) volcanic eruption in 1883. The majority of the book takes place on (and the…
The 26th Newbery, Carolyn Sherwin Bailey’s 1947 Miss Hickory, is a quirky, but fairly charming, tale of a wooden doll’s extraordinary year when her little girl moves away, a chipmunk takes over her home, and she’s forced to fend for herself in the great New England woods. Similarity to other…
Twenty-Five Newberies in, I thought I’d pause and reflect on a quarter century’s worth of award winning children books from 1922 to 1946. I started this project with pretty high hopes about the delight of reading so many wonderful children’s books. However, it became apparent only a few books in that this was going to…
Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski tells the story of Biddie Boyer and her family as they move south to a new town in northern Florida in the early years of the 1900s. This lovely historical fiction Newbery captures the rural poverty and toughness of the Florida “Crackers” as the Boyers begin to farm (strawberries)…
The 1945 Newbery, Robert Lawson’s Rabbit Hill, tells the tale of a community of wild animals that live near a vacant farm house. They receive news that a new family is moving in that spring. Rumors are that the new family are farmers, and times of plenty may be around the corner for the…