| From
the March/April 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
The World in 534 Pages
 ike
Jonathan Hunt (see the “Borderlands”
column in this issue, pages 141–147), I was betting that
the Printz Award for young adult literature would go this year to
either Markus Zusak for The Book Thief or M. T. Anderson
for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, and I was
as surprised as anyone when it went instead to Gene Luen Yang’s
American Born Chinese, a graphic novel.
And so another genre finally becomes recognized
by a major children’s-book prize. (And so once again we learn
there are no sure bets, either.) While the ALA award committees
are charged with choosing the “best” or “most
distinguished” rather than the most novel or pioneering, it
is a happy confluence when a committee’s choice also serves
to expand the boundaries of its prize. When it stretches, so must
we.
As I write on page 173, I hope that Brian Selznick’s
The Invention
of Hugo Cabret gives our prize committees a workout. A
book whose story is told through both pictures and words, where
neither is comprehensible without the other, Hugo Cabret
might seem perfectly eligible for Caldecott consideration —
but at more than two inches thick, it’s no “world in
thirty-two pages,” Barbara Bader’s apt summation of
the picture book form. And because the Newbery committee must look
just at the words (pictures being relegated by the rules to distractions),
Hugo Cabret will look even more puzzling than it means
to be. Not to add yet another prize to the burgeoning roster of
book awards, but Hugo Cabret makes me wish we had a medal
for page-turns, for a book whose canny use of its own limitations
becomes part of the storytelling itself. A page-turn can be a surprise
sprung by the reader, a powerful narrative element that physically
involves us in the story. It tells us what power is particular to
books. As far as I can figure, the printed book is the only medium
that requires such a manipulation of gravity and that asks us, repeatedly,
to go on.
From the March/April 2007 issue of The
Horn Book Magazine
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