Category: Read

Writing in the style of William Blake’s short lyrical poems, Nancy Willard’s short, beautifully illustrated book A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers won the 1982 Newbery. It was the first book of poetry to win the Newbery, and Alice and Martin Provensen’s illustrations won the book a Caldecott honor…

The 60th Newbery winner, Jacob Have I Loved, by Katherine Paterson, is the first of these Newbery books that I still have my copy of from when I read it as a child. Evidently, I liked it enough to print my whole address in the front, so it could be returned to me should I…

Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game was the 58th Newbery winning book and the award’s first mystery. Set in southern Wisconsin along Lake Michigan (Milwaukee perhaps?), 16 people move into an apartment complex and are each invited to prove that he or she is the true heir to their wealthy next door neighbor by discovering which…

  Bridge to Terabithia  by Katherine Paterson won the 1978 Newbery Award. Jess Aarons the narrator and protagonist is a lonely 10 year old who secretly draws, longs to be the fastest kid in school, and is sandwiched into a family of sisters. Leslie Burke moves into the farm house next to theirs, and they…

    Mildred  D Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry  is the 1977 Newbery winner about the 1930s black Mississippi Logan family through the eyes of the narrator, nine-year-old Cassie Logan. Cassie and her bothers, Stacey (12), Christopher-John (7), and Little Man (6) are not sharecroppers, but their grandmother (Big Ma) owns land that…

      The fourth book of the Dark is Rising Sequence, the 1976 Newbery winner, The Grey King by Susan Cooper continues the modern Arthurian fantasy, this time set in beautiful Wales. I read the first three books to get ready for this one, because I definitely have a want-to-check-all-the-boxes-and-read-everything-in-order personality, but I don’t…

  I feel pretty guilty about not liking this book: M.C. Higgins the Great by Virginia Hamilton, winner of the 1975 Newbery award. Its subject matter (Appalachian Poor Communities) and its author (one of the first women (or person!) of color to win the Newbery) are both things that I think the Newbery Award books…

    Paula Fox’s book The Slave Dancer won the 1974 Newbery Medal. It’s the brutal portrayal of an illegal 1840s American slave ship through the eyes of an impressed young white New Orleans  teen musician, Jessie Bollier, brought to make the slaves “dance” during the exercise time. Even before the ship has picked up its cargo…

  Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George is the 52nd Newbery. It follows the life of an Inuit (Eskimo) girl named Miyax (Julie is her English name) after the death of her mother, raised by her hunter father before an aunt forces her to leave the desolate hunting camps to live with her…

  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…