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2011 National Book Awards

Horn Book — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 15:54:40 +0000

2011 National Book Award Winner

Inside Out and Back Again has won the 2011 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The prize was presented on November 16, 2011, at the National Book Foundation’s annual dinner and ceremony in New York City. Marc Aronson chaired the judging committee, which also included Ann Brashares, Matt de la Peña, Nikki Grimes, Will Weaver.

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai (Harper/HarperCollins) review

2011 National Book Award Finalists

Chime by Franny Billingsley (Dial) review

My Name Is Not Easy by Debby Dahl Edwardson (Cavendish) review to come

Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy by Albert Marrin (Knopf) review

Okay for Now by Gary D. Schmidt (Clarion) review

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>No, I have not twatted,

Roger Sutton — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 14:13:00 +0000

>unlike Stephen Colbert, but I see from Monica that SLJ has set up a Twitter feed for their Battle of the (Kids’) Books. As you will see there, I am a first-round judge for this thing but I’m not allowed to tell you anything else just yet. Okay, let me just say this: Girls, you’re both pretty.

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>Palin/McCain for peace and quiet

Roger Sutton — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:02:00 +0000

>Patrick Ness’s The Knife of Never Letting Go has won the Guardian’s children’s fiction prize. The book was published this month in the U.S. by Candlewick and will be reviewed in the November issue of the Horn Book Magazine. It’s an SF novel about a society where people can hear each other think. Like that dude on Heroes!

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>The New Laureate

Roger Sutton — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 15:46:00 +0000

>Sometime Horn Book contributor Madelyn Travis interviews Britain’s new children’s laureate Michael Rosen, he of the funny verse and the very sad book. We love Madelyn here because it was her since-third-grade friendship with our Jennifer Brabander that brought Bridget Jones’s Diary to the Horn Book long before the rest of you had heard of it.

And if the CBC, LC and Mrs. Cheney et al are listening, I’d love that new “national ambassador for children’s literature” gig. Sure, I’m not a famous writer, but I’d know what I was talking about, and I’m a good talker. Plus you wouldn’t have that little Jack Prelutsky problem, whose assumption of the Poetry Foundation’s “Children’s Poet Laureate” position seems to have more effect on his jacket designs than on anything else. Besides, who died and left them God? Oh, that’s right.

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>Being an American Can Be Fun

Roger Sutton — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 16:53:00 +0000

>SLJ this month runs a short, vague article on possible changes to ALSC book awards criteria. Fuse8 has a pretty good discussion on it going; over here I’d like to consider the larger implied question about American children’s literature. SLJ attributes to K.T. Horning, 50, the idea that the Newbery and Caldecott have “accomplished their mission . . . to encourage U.S. publishers to seek out high-quality literature and picture books for children by American authors and illustrators.” Like this is something that gets finished? The Newbery and Caldecott are among the shiniest, sharpest prods we have to encourage U.S. publishers to keep seeking out “high-quality literature and picture books.”

The decision to limit the awards to Americans, of course, is of course worth discussion. Nationalism in literature is something we tend to value only when other nations do it, but I think the questions are worth asking: do we have and do we nurture children’s literature that speaks to “being an American”? There is Munro Leaf’s Being an American Can Be Fun, and Lynne Cheney’s various droppings, but I’m wondering more along the lines of contenders for The Great American Children’s Novel–books that speak to the theme of how being an American is different from not. In my recreational reading, I’m on something of a Turkey kick right now, reading novels and histories by and/or about Turks, and always lurking in my head is “oh, so this is what it’s like to be a Turk.” (You already have my take on Canadians.)

So what children’s book could you give to an outlander that conveys a sense of Us? I’ve argued for Sachar’s Holes as a G.A.N., steeped as it is in the American tall tale tradition, and placing the roots of its story in our mythic Wild West. It seems, too, that a lot of the recent immigrant literature, by presenting a protagonist “settling” in a new land while carrying along the old (usually in terms of parents and grandparents) does a sort of microcosmal version of the idea of America as a nation of pioneers, while Louise Erdrich’s Birchbark House and Game of Silence provide a “we were here all along” corrective to Wilder’s Little House books, themselves indisputably G.A.N.s in my view. If somebody asked you for a children’s book that “tells what it’s like to be an American,” what would you give them?

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>A correction and a repeated complaint

Roger Sutton — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 17:34:00 +0000

>Re the Printz Award: I posted a while back about how I thought American Born Chinese, published by First Second Books, was not exactly eligible for the award, since it did not seem to me to be expressly published for young adults, an explicit criterion. But I have since heard from the award Chair Cindy Dobrez, who explained to me all the evidence the committee took into account in deciding the book’s eligibility. I’m convinced.

But while I’m again on the subject, let me whine just one more time about how wrongheaded this criterion is. By limiting the eligible pool to books designated by their publishers as being young adult books and specifically announcing that “adult books are not eligible,” YALSA puts the job of determining what a young adult book is into the hands of publishers rather than those of librarians. It essentially limits eligibility to books published by juvenile publishing houses or divisions, as they are the only ones to give age designations to their books. It rewards a very specific (read: large) kind of trade publishing, as a small press does not have the kind of resources that would allow it to designate a book as young adult if it thought the book could reach an adult market as well.

What has always interested me about library work with young adults is the way it blends materials for children and those for adults in service to an audience poised between the two. But YALSA–which derives a lot more financial support from children’s publishers than it does adult–has become too beholden to the juvenile end of things. The annual Best Books list became so disgracefully bereft of adult books that the organization had to add a whole new award program, the Alex Awards, to make up for it–rather than making Best Books the kind of “best of both worlds” list it should be. (It seems that whenever ALA’s youth divisions are called out for overlooking one kind of book or another, the solution is found in creating yet another award.)

I think teens want to read adult books. Why don’t we want to honor that?

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