Since the announcement on June 1, we’ve been celebrating our 2013 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winners and Honor books with special web extras. Here’s a cheat sheet!

Picture Book resources

• on winner Building Our House: Five Questions for Jonathan Bean, Q&A with Betty Carter, his 2008 BGHB acceptance speech, and his January/February 2009 Horn Book Magazine cover
• on Honor book Open This Little Book: metafictional picture books
• on Honor book Black Dog: surreal picture books
• reviews of all three honorees

Nonfiction resources

• on winner Electric Ben: more books by Robert Byrd and “What Makes a Good Picture Book Biography?“
• on Honor book Hand in Hand: Q&A for Andrea Davis Pinkney
• on Honor book Dreaming Up: more picture books on building and construction
• “Narrative Nonfiction: Kicking Ass at Last” by Elizabeth Partridge, “Nonfiction: What’s Really New and Different — and What Isn’t” by Barbara Bader, and “More than Just the Facts: A Hundred Years of Children’s Nonfiction” by James Cross Giblin
• reviews of all three honorees

Fiction resources

• on winner Eleanor & Park: Katrina’s blog post, “Love, exciting and new,” and “What Makes a Good YA Love Story?“
• on Honor book Seraphina: dragon-centric fantasy
• on Honor book A Corner of White: more books by Jaclyn Moriarty
• recommended fantasy for all ages
• “What Hath Harry Wrought?“
• reviews of all three honorees

Horn Book staff members (Kitty Flynn and Martha Parravano wrote so passionately they get their own posts!) and reviewers tell us why they love their favorite Boston Globe–Horn Book winners and honor books.

Learn more about past winners with BGHB trivia!

To stay up to date on all Boston Globe–Horn Book announcements, click on the tag Boston Globe Horn Book Awards.

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In Big Momma Makes the World (Candlewick, 2003 Picture Book Award winner), Phyllis Root’s earthy text is perfectly paired with Helen Oxenbury’s warm, loving illustrations of Big Momma and her chubby baby in this original creation story. As Big Momma would say, “That’s good. That’s real good.”

In Revenge of the Whale: The True Story of the Whaleship Essex (Putnam, 2003 Nonfiction Honor Book), Nathaniel Philbrick writes with such immediacy and intensity about an almost-two-hundred-year-old event — this is one of the most riveting and memorable works of nonfiction I’ve ever read.

Steven Kellogg’s dynamic paintings match the wonder and awe in Faith McNulty’s informative text in If You Decide to Go to the Moon (Scholastic, 2006 Nonfiction Award winner). I love the trajectory of this book: in the beginning, readers look out into the vastness of space along with the boy astronaut; by book’s end, we’re looking at the beauty of our own home planet with fresh eyes.

I struggled with The Fire-Eaters (Delacorte, 2004 Fiction Award winner) the first time through. But something about the story compelled me to try again. And when the fog cleared, I was blown away by David Almond’s command of imagery and setting.

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins, 2009 Fiction Honor Book). What’s not to love about this book? Seriously. And the audiobook, narrated by Neil himself, is perfection.

Salley Mavor’s homespun fabric relief sculptures in Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes (Houghton, 2011 Picture Book Award winner) are mesmerizing. I love getting lost in her scenes with the music of these traditional rhymes in my head.

For more Boston Globe–Horn Book love, click on the tag my favorite BGHB winner.

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I couldn’t pick a favorite, so instead I chose one of the many books that clamored, “Read me again!”: Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, a 1977 Boston Globe–Horn Book Fiction Honor Book.

The setting is the British WWII home front; the protagonist is fourteen-year-old Chas McGill, an ambitious boy with the second-best collection of war souvenirs in town. When one day deep in the woods he happens upon a downed German plane with a working machine gun, it becomes his mission to possess (and eventually fire) that gun.

Setting and character are evoked with immediacy, the dialogue is fresh and often funny, and the plot is a corker, but the most brilliant thing about this book is…well, there are two. One is how steadfastly Westall hews to a young person’s point of view. For instance, when Chas sees the flies buzzing around the dead pilot’s face and looks into what used to be one of his eyes, he’s violently sick. Here’s his (totally believably kid-like) reaction: “He thought his mother would be angry at him for having wasted a good breakfast when food was hard to get.” The other brilliant thing is Westall’s exploration of the human impulse to make war. Who’s on which side, and what are the sides? The dynamics are constantly shifting: England against Nazi Germany, yes, but also kids against kids; kids against adults; higher class against lower class (“West Chirton rubbish!” “Balkwell snob!”). And when Chas and his cohorts capture another downed German flyer and he becomes their friend, the lines get really blurry.

I don’t need to point out how relevant the book is today. And I probably also don’t need to say that it doesn’t end well. But it does close on a bravely defiant note, and one that perhaps reveals Westall’s true worldview: the war that counts, the war that lasts, will always be children versus adults.

For more Boston Globe–Horn Book love, click on the tag my favorite BGHB winner.

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Katie Bircher, Horn Book Assistant Editor:
Wordless graphic novel The Arrival (Levine/Scholastic, 2008 Special Citation) was my introduction to Shaun Tan, now one of my most beloved illustrators. Photorealistic illustrations portray a gorgeous surreal world (uncannily intermingled with scenes reminiscent of the Ellis Island of our own late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries) to relate the profound disorientation of a recent immigrant. Another favorite of mine is Neil Gaiman’s episodic bildungsroman The Graveyard Book (HarperCollins, 2009 Fiction Honor book), which pays homage to Kipling’s The Jungle Book, but — being the tale of a living boy raised by ghosts in a cemetery — is imbued with the kind of dark magic only Gaiman can conjure.

Siân Gaetano, Horn Book intern:
I Know Here by Laurel Croza, illustrated by Matt James (Groundwood, 2010 Picture Book Award winner), a quiet and beautiful picture book, is so simple, so endearing, and so sharp that just the remembering of the reading experience brings me joy. The sweeping double-page spreads, the compact text, the protagonist’s strong, deep connection to home all work together to create one stunning book. And I have got to read Eleanor & Park…

Elissa Gershowitz, Horn Book Magazine Senior Editor and Online Content Editor:
Holes by Louis Sachar (Foster/Farrar, 1999 Fiction Award winner) goes without saying. Same with Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game (Dutton, 1978 Fiction Award winner). Both are twisty, puzzle-y, funny, weirdo books that I can read over and over and over again. A book I read just once, but will always remember, is Playing Beattie Bow by Ruth Park (1982 Fiction Award winner). It was while on my honeymoon in Australia, and I read it while staying in the Rocks district in Sydney, where the time-travel story takes place. A strange book, with a beautifully evoked setting.

Katrina Hedeen, Horn Book Guide Assistant Editor:
Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet (Candlewick, 2012 Fiction Honor Book) is part love story, part family history, part you-are-there recounting of the Cuban Missile Crisis, all brilliantly coalesced into a sophisticated exploration about what affects the trajectory of one’s life. And the ending is as powerful as they come.

Shara Hardeson, Horn Book Guide Editorial Assistant:
In 2008, the first year I was invited to attend the BGHB awards ceremony, Jonathan Bean’s At Night won the Picture Book Award. Bean’s lulling story of a little girl’s private excursion from her bed to a rooftop garden overlooking the city always stayed with me, I think because he perfectly captured the child’s desire for quiet, independent contemplation.

Jennifer Lu, Horn Book intern:
I haven’t read all the BGHB winners yet, but right now, I pick When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (Lamb/Random, 2010 Fiction Award winner) for its lovely layered characters, extremely tight plot, and irresistible mix of the mundane and the mysterious. Plus, there’s time travel!

Cynthia K. Ritter, Horn Book Magazine Assistant Editor:
I would choose Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes by Salley Mavor (Houghton, 2010 Picture Book Award winner) for three reasons: every time I read it I imagine the three-dimensional and tactile hand-sewn fabric relief collages coming to life on the page — they are that vibrant; Mavor’s playful artistic style is perfectly suited to capture the essence of the classic nursery rhymes for her very young audience; and after getting the chance to hear how she works and see her original art at the 2011 Horn Book at Simmons colloquium and for our January/February 2012 Horn Book Magazine cover, I remain in utter awe of the time, tenacity, and talent it took for her to create the detailed images. It’s a collection every family should own.

For more Boston Globe–Horn Book love, click on the tag my favorite BGHB winner.

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Betty Carter:
Holes by Louis Sachar (Foster/Farrar, 1999 Fiction Award winner). The circular nature of this novel, from Stanley Yelnats’s palindromic name to the combination of family histories, creates a full and satisfying read. But Sachar’s restraint, both in the pacing of the action and the revelations about the characters, is pure genius.

Jonathan Hunt:
Well, I think 2009 was a particularly strong year, but I’m biased.  [ed. note: JH was on the committee that year] I’m pleased to see a pair of my all-time favorites in Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game (Dutton, 1978 Fiction Award winner) and Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising (Atheneum, 1973 Fiction Award winner), but perusing the list of winners underscores the unique eligibility period. The Boston Globe-Horn Book committee considers books published between June of a particular year and May of the following year; Newbery follows the calendar year (January through December). In 1991 Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac Magee (Little, Brown, 1990) won the Newbery Medal and Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (Orchard, 1991) was the lone Newbery Honor Book. But they both got to be winners with the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards: Charlotte Doyle was the 1991 Fiction Award winner and Maniac Magee was the 1990 Fiction Award winner.

Susan Dove Lempke:
I love many of the BGHB books, but the one that pops into my head very frequently is M. T. Anderson’s prophetic Feed (Candlewick, 2003 Fiction Honor Book). It has a great opening line (“We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck”) that captures the attention of the reader while showing the malaise and limited vocabulary of the futuristic narrator. Much of what Anderson wrote has already come true, and this thoughtful but also funny novel gives us a chance to ponder what the pitfalls of all-knowing technology might be.

Dean Schneider:
Marching for Freedom: Walk Together, Children, and Don’t You Grow Weary by Elizabeth Partridge (Viking, 2010 Nonfiction Award winner) is one of my all-time favorite nonfiction books, a masterful blending of the eyewitness narrative and gorgeous photography. It’s now the heart of a civil rights unit I do with my seventh graders, along with Kekla Magoon’s The Rock and the River.

Robin Smith:
My favorite BGHB winner is A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams (Greenwillow, 1983 Picture Book Award winner). Every time I read it to my second graders, they are completely taken in by the story of this one little girl, her loss, and the community that lifts her family. It’s one book that draws them back for an extra private look during free reading time. I always find a few copies tucked away in desks weeks after I read it out loud. It speaks directly to the hearts of children.

For more Boston Globe–Horn Book love, click on the tag my favorite BGHB winner.

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Q: Two books have won the Boston Globe–Horn Book Fiction Award, the National Book Award, and the Newbery Medal. Can you name them?

A: Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins, the Great (Macmillan) was the first book to win all three awards, receiving the Fiction Award in 1974 and both the National Book Award and the Newbery in 1975. Holes (Foster/Farrar) by Louis Sachar followed suit, winning the NBA in 1998 and the Fiction Award and the Newbery in 1999.

Q:  Five books (in addition to M.C. Higgins, the Great and Holes) have won both a BGHB Award and the Newbery Medal. What are the five double winners?

A: The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin (Dutton; 1978 BGHB Fiction Award and 1979 Newbery)
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli (Little, Brown; 1990 BGHB Fiction Award and 1991 Newbery)
A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers written by Nancy Willard, illustrated by Alice and Martin Provensen (1982 BGHB Picture Book Award and Newbery)
Missing May by Cynthia Rylant (Jackson/Orchard; 1992 BGHB Fiction Award and 1993 Newbery)
When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (Lamb/Random; 2010 BGHB Fiction Award and Newbery)

Q: Besides M.C. Higgins, the Great and Holes, which three BGHB–winning books also won a National Book Award?

A:
Outside Over There by Maurice Sendak (Harper; 1981 BGHB Picture Book Award and 1982 NBA)
The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson (Candlewick; 2006 NBA and 2007 BGHB Fiction Award)
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian written by Sherman Alexie, illustrated by Ellen Forney (Little, Brown; 2007 NBA and 2008 BGHB Fiction Award)

Q: Three BGHB Picture Book Award winners also won the Caldecott Medal. What are they?

A:
Lon Po Po: A Little Red Riding Hood Story from China translated and illustrated by Ed Young (Philomel; 1990 BGHB Picture Book Award and Caldecott)
Grandfather’s Journey written and illustrated by Allen Say (Houghton, 1994 BGHB Picture Book Award and Caldecott)
The Man Who Walked Between the Towers written and illustrated by Mordicai Gerstein (Roaring Brook; 2004 BGHB Picture Book Award and Caldecott)

Q: Only one author has won three Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards. Who is it?

A: Virginia Hamilton won the Fiction Award twice: in 1974 for M.C. Higgins, the Great (Macmillan) and in 1983 for Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (Philomel). She also won the 1988 Nonfiction Award for Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave (Knopf).

Q: Who is the youngest author to be honored by the Boston Globe–Horn Book committee?

A: Kate Lied wrote 1997 Nonfiction Honor Book Potato: A Tale of the Great Depression at age eight.

Q: What four picture books illustrated with photographs have received BGHB Awards?

A:
The Weaver’s Gift written by Kathryn Lasky, illustrated with photographs by Christopher G. Knight (Warne; 1981 Nonfiction Award)
1,2,3 written and illustrated with photographs by Tana Hoban (Greenwillow; 1985 Special Citation)
A Drop of Water: A Book of Science and Wonder written and illustrated with photographs by Walter Wick (Scholastic; 1997 Nonfiction Award)
Red-Eyed Tree Frog written by Joy Cowley, illustrated with photographs by Nic Bishop (Scholastic; 1999 Picture Book Award)

Q: What BGHB Award–winning book was originally published as an adult book?

A: The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child by Francisco Jiménez (University of New Mexico Press), which received the 1998 Fiction Award, was originally published for adults.

Q: What beloved author/illustrator won a BGHB Honor but never received a Caldecott?

A: Bernard Waber received a BGHB Picture Book Honor in 1971 for A Firefly Named Torchy (Houghton) but was never honored by the Caldecott committee.

The post BGHB trivia appeared first on The Horn Book.

Danielle J. Ford reviewed

The conversational text tells how Berger, a paleontologist, used Google Earth satellite images to discover a group of collapsed caves in the area of South Africa known as the Cradle of Humankind — an area previously rich in hominin fossils. Berger believed the Cradle to have been totally picked over by paleontologists; he had already explored the region himself for seventeen years, finding little. Now armed with new information, Berger, accompanied only by his postdoc assistant Job Kibii, his son Matthew, and his dog, began exploring the cave locations. It was Matthew who literally stumbled upon a fossil jawbone at one of these sites.

Berger’s excavation uncovered nearly an entire skeleton of a previously unknown hominin he named Australopithecus sediba. He found a second partial skeleton nearby. The two skeletons (a juvenile male now known as “Karabo” and an adult female), with a mixture of human and ape features, have given paleontologists a better understanding of the evolutionary steps between “Lucy” (Australopithecus afarensis) and our more immediate ancestor Homo erectus.

Berger’s concept of human evolution as a “braided stream”

In April, National Geographic released an interactive e-book edition of The Skull in the Rock, which adds few bells and whistles to the presentation of this information. What is added is high in value, enriching the content and enhancing the user’s understanding.

Here the “illustrative material” Danielle praises in her review of the print version (including “photographs of Berger; the research site from which the fossils were extracted; the fossils themselves, both in situ in the rocks and later reconstructed in skeletal form; and striking facial reconstructions of these ancient ancestors”) is expanded with additional zoom-able photos and maps. The design is a bit cleaner than the book’s, surrounding the clear photographs and sans-serif text with plenty of white space. A video introduction narrates animated Google Earth views of the Cradle, allowing users to see what Berger saw when he found the caves. Even more interesting is the reconstruction of Karabo’s skull, created with a composite of X-rays and presented with a 360-degree view.

Karabo’s digitally reconstructed skull

Tapping a highlighted word brings up its glossary entry, along with a link to the full glossary index and one to an online dictionary definition. As with many other e-books, users can also highlight or annotate the text as they read.

Those interested in learning more about sediba and the ongoing research on this hominin ancestor should visit www.scimania.org, the site maintained by Berger and Aronson to keep Skull in the Rock readers up to date on developments. I hope that the authors and National Geographic will integrate some of these breaking findings into the e-book’s bibliography in future updates.

Available for iPad; $9.99.

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Katie:
One of my own fond childhood memories is listening to my dad read aloud with funny, nuanced voices for each character. Picture books and short chapter books with plenty of dialogue allow father and child alike to engage in this kind of reader’s theater. The kooky cast of Mo Willems’s Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, 2012) makes it a fantastic read-aloud — it was recently test-driven with great success by my own father for Read Across America Day. With their call-and-response format, Bob Shea’s energetic Dinosaur Vs. books published by Hyperion would also be good choices (although probably not right before bedtime!).

Kitty:
A Day with Dad by Bo Holmberg (illustrated by Eva Eriksson; Candlewick, 2008) celebrates a loving father-son bond while quietly acknowledging the difficulty of divorce. After saying good-bye to his mom, Tim and his dad spend the whole day together, and everywhere they go Tim proudly introduces his father around. The colored-pencil illustrations clearly show the relationships between characters and reinforce the notion that while the grownups might not love each other, they love their son very much. The satisfying story offers comfort to children (and their parents) in similar circumstances.

Siân:
One Cool Friend by Toni Buzzeo (illustrated by David Small; Dial, 2012), beautifully showcases a somewhat strange but obviously loving relationship between a father and a son. And it also really focuses on the old adage, “like father, like son,” through its lovely twist ending.

Elissa:
I’m partial to the Leslie Patricelli board books with the gender-neutral baby published by Candlewick: Yummy Yucky (2003), Potty (2010), Tubby (2010), The Birthday Box (2009). Also very popular in my house is Higher! Higher! (2009) Even though it’s a girl and her father, my little boy doesn’t mind.

Shara:
Every Friday (Holt, 2007) by Dan Yaccarino, a beautifully simple story about a weekly breakfast ritual shared between father and son, captures the importance of one-on-one time spent between parent and child, even amidst the everyday hustle and bustle of life in a city.

Jen:
I’d recommend Donald Hall’s Ox-Cart Man (illustrated by Barbara Cooney; Viking, 1979), because the father is the main character, but it’s also about a family working together from year to year.

Martha:
Love suffuses every page of First Pink Light, Eloise Greenfield’s classic picture book about a little boy named Tyree who is determined to stay up all night in order to surprise his father, who’s been away for a whole month. Can he persuade his mother to skip bedtime and let him stay in his tricky hiding place under a wooden chair until dawn (“first pink light”)? Once he’s been convinced to move to the big soft armchair, all decked out with pillows and blankets, can he stay awake long enough to “hear his daddy’s car door slam, and hear his daddy’s hard shoes on the steps, and hear his daddy’s key clicking in the door”? Well, no, but it doesn’t matter: the reunion between father and son is plenty poignant anyway. Greenfield gets everything right, from the family dynamics to young Tyree’s perspective and the intensity of his feelings. The book has been illustrated twice, first by Moneta Barnett (Crowell, 1976) in soft, intimate pencil sketches, and later by Jan Spivey Gilchrist (Black Butterfly, 1991) in full color; both editions have their charms.

Cindy:
An oldie but a goodie: In Tomi Ungerer’s The Mellops Go Diving for Treasure (Harper, 1957; republished by Phaidon, 2011), Mr. Mellops and his four sons go on a sea voyage that yields little profit but leaves five pig tummies hungry for Mrs. Mellops’s cream cake. It’s a humorous adventure story involving, among other things, a treasure map, a merpig, and sunken ships, and it is just long enough for any father and son to cozy up and spend some quality time reading together before embarking on a treasure hunt of their own. And if you can’t get enough of the quirky Mellops father-sons team, Ungerer wrote four other Mellops books: The Mellops Go Flying, The Mellops Strike Oil, Christmas Eve at the Mellops (all republished by Phaidon, 2011), and Mellops Go Spelunking (republished by Roberts Rinehart, 1998).

Reading about frazzled fathers can be funny for kids, so I would also recommend two relatively recent father-daughter picture books (and Caldecott Honor Books) that are entertaining to read aloud together: Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein (Papa is continually interrupted while trying to read bedtime stories) and Mo Willems’s Knuffle Bunny (one daddy’s frantic search for a beloved missing stuffed animal).

Roger:
My Father’s Arms Are a Boat by Stein Erik Lunde (illustrated by Øyvind Torseter and Kari Dickson; Enchanted Lion, 2013) is a really sad book about grieving, but the eerily beautiful collage illustrations and hushed intimacy of the text provide an unforgettable portrait of love between a father and son.

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- more middle-grade family novels
- picture books
- folklore and fairy tales from around the world
- brand-new YA dystopian societies

You can read the issue online, but you’ll want to subscribe here to receive Notes from the Horn Book newsletter — and its supplement Nonfiction Notes — in your inbox. Browse the newsletter archives for more recommended books and author/illustrator interviews.

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It seems everyone’s falling for Fiction Award winner Eleanor & Park! Katrina recently blogged about E&P, calling it a “late addition” to her article with Rachel Smith, “What Makes a Good YA Love Story?” (from the May/June 2013 Horn Book Magazine). For more YA romance recommendations, read Elissa’s “Love, exciting and new” piece from April’s Notes from the Horn Book.

Both BGHB Fiction Honor books this year are fantasy novels. Can’t get enough fantasy? Roger discusses the boom in fantasy books for children and young adults in “What Hath Harry Wrought?” (from our May/June 2012 issue), and our new booklist recommends titles across a wide range of ages.

Fans of Jaclyn Moriarty’s Honor book A Corner of White will want to track down her other work. In Honor book Seraphina by Rachel Hartman, protagonist Seraphina navigates the treacherous political territory between humans and dragons. Click here for more dragon-centric fantasy novels.

Find reviews of all of the winners and honors here.

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