making space for creativity
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…
Last week, I was chatting with a friend at the park about her upcoming second baby when she asked me to weigh in on whether to try and potty-train her first child who is about to turn two. Yes! I said, that’s the perfect time to potty-train. I gushed enthusiastically about how great it is…
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…
2009 Newbery winner, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman is the tale of a boy called Nobody (Bod for short) who was rescued and raised by the ghosts of a graveyard when he was a baby. Part fairytale, part retelling of The Jungle Book, this book takes its place among the great works of children’s…
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…
2007 Newbery winner, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron (2007) is the tale of Lucky and her search for a family. After Lucky’s mother dies, her father contacts his first wife, beautiful French Brigitte (who had divorced him when he refused to have children), to come look after Lucky in the middle of…
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…
2006 Newbery winner, Criss Cross, by Lynne Rae Perkins, tells the story of four teenagers on the verge of high school who have crisscrossed paths, switching narrators each chapter as they tell and retell the story of their summer. Incorporating illustrations, poetry, and connected small vignettes, the book is loosely based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer…
We’ve playfully been referring to our early Summer 2021 trip out to Maryland as “Spring Break 2020” because that was the first thing we had to cancel mid-March as the Pandemic closed the world down, and it’s the first thing we’ve really done as the world opened back up. There is nothing like having tiny…
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…