making space for creativity
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…
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…
In the bleary few weeks of new motherhood, I have had a number of friends quietly comment that they wished that they had not just read about pregnancy and birth but also read a lot more about breastfeeding. Postpartum can be a bit of a surprise in terms of just how immediately and unceasingly…
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…
For many years I have loved reading books and blogs about babies and birth. Long before I was pregnant, or even trying to become pregnant, I have had a strange proclivity to peruse the 618 & 649 sections of the library, bringing home books on colic, toddler boundaries, and baby brain development, long before I…
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…
My reading for 2015 was dominated by pregnancy and birth books, and to a lesser extent the great Newbery project which slowed down but kept up a steady rhythm around the blog. Here are the other fun literary adventures that filled up last year. 31 in honor of my 31st birthday at the end…
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…