making space for creativity
2015 Newbery winner, The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, is a free verse novel about two African American middle-school, basketball-loving, twin brothers. They are sons of a semi-pro player who had a career in Italy, (Evan tells me this is reminiscent of Kobe Bryant who grew up partially in Italy when his father played there), but his…
2014 Newbery winner, Flora & Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo is the tale of the girl, Flora, who loves her comics, and her divorced father who gave them to her. She also finds herself with her own superhero squirrel who she saved from death-by-vacuum and gained superpowers in the process. Ulysses, the squirrel,…
2013 Newbery winner, The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate is a book about a gorilla named Ivan who is living in small cage in a mall next to an old elephant named Stella and a tiny mangy stray dog named Bob. When the mall’s owner buys a new baby elephant, Ruby, to help the…
The 2012 Newbery winner is Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos. In a funny, fictional autobiography, Jack Gantos’s mid 1960s summer is ruined when he accidently shoots off his father’s Japanese sniper rifle. His only reprieve from two months of being grounded is to help his elderly neighbor Ms. Volkner write obituaries for the…
Moon Over Manifest by Clare Vanderpool is a tale set around the fictional (but inspired by a real) town of Manifest, Kansas. Told half in the summer of Depression Era 1936 and half in the end of World War I 1918 and 1919, Abilene Tucker is a young girl dropped off for the summer of…
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…
Dignity in motherhood can be hard to find. I clearly remember leaving a well-baby check-up for my fairly small baby daughter with myself covered in that mustard-brown baby poop of a nursing baby. Of course, she was in a new diaper and a fresh set of clothes because I had brought those with us, but…
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…
Last year I put together a list of tried and true favorites for one-year-olds. That list could have been titled “Lily approved books” because she is considerably more picky than Jackson was (or the other two-year-old children I’ve nannied) about which books she does and doesn’t like. And that “discerning taste” continued into her second…
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…