“Nevertheless”

The weeks leading up to the end of November are always hectic ones at the Horn Book; we have to take into account not only upcoming vacation and holiday plans among the staff but also speeded-up deadlines at our printers — not to mention the seasonal crush at the post office. We find ourselves in the interesting but fraught position of deciding, at the same time, not just which books reviewed in the January issue are going to receive stars for their noteworthiness, but which of those books — as well as all those previously reviewed during the year, sometimes starred, sometimes not — will find a place in Fanfare, our annual pick of the previous year’s best. How do we decide which books are star-worthy but not Fanfare fare? (To be sure, the determination of varying degrees of excellence is a luxurious dilemma: chocolate is always chocolate.)

Whenever library school students e-mail us to ask about our book-eviewing criteria, my answer always starts the same way: we have none. Each book makes its own rules. To say that a picture book (novel, biography, etc.) must . . . is self-defeating, because a book should surprise us.

Another misapprehension both producers and consumers of “best” lists often labor under is the idea that only flawless books — or movies, or barbecue sauce — can be admitted. Just as a book can make its own rules and still make mistakes, a book can be a “best” despite its flaws, the whole being greater than the parts. As a recalcitrant Katharine Hepburn says to an intransigent Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Never . . . theless.”

My nevertheless book this year is Diane McWhorter’s A Dream of Freedom. Written with passion, intelligence, and respect for young readers, this history of the civil rights movement has everything — except source notes and a decent bibliography. This is more than a niggling, by-the-way criticism. Back when Hazel Rochman started all the ruckus about source notes in juvenile nonfiction, she wrote: “Lack of documentation is not only a bad role model for students’ own writing; it also crushes curiosity and independent inquiry” (Booklist, December 15, 1986). For a lively exchange on the importance of source notes, see this issue’s letters column, but also note that this year’s Fanfare list indeed includes A Dream of Freedom.

While I can’t help but feel that I’m letting my old friend Hazel down, I think we need to be careful in applying inflexibility to genres unequally — what is the equivalent, for fiction, of “it doesn’t have footnotes”? While Russell Freedman’s Voice That Challenged a Nation, also on our Fanfare list, demonstrates that important and engrossing nonfiction can be scrupulously referenced, and there is no doubt in my mind that McWhorter’s book is the poorer for its lack, Dream of Freedom is still the book I keep buttonholing people to read. So while I want to say to McWhorter, “Show your work,” I’m not prepared to dismiss a great book for even a significant flaw. (I’m also reminded of another Hepburn riposte: “If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”) The Fanfare horn commands attention, not perfection.

• • •

We note with sadness the death of Trina Schart Hyman last November. Trina had a long (and sometimes contentious — see her letter to the editor in the November/December 1986 issue) relationship with the Horn Book, and we will miss her wit and her honesty, not to mention her spectacular draftsmanship. Lois Lowry offers a tribute on page thirty-seven.