In the comments to a recent Heavy Medal post, there is a discussion about the eligibility and/or chances of The Hate U Give for Newbery discussion. (In case you're new here, The Hate U Give is receiving the 2017 Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for Fiction tomorrow night.) It was a Mr. H. who brought up the Newbery criteria, quoting the part about how any awarded or honored book "shall be a book for which children are an intended potential audience." Wait, what? "Intended?" When did that word slip in there? I didn't remember that being in the criteria when I served back in 1999 (Holes) but was I misremembering?

Nope. I emailed the master of all things Newbery K.T. Horning and she said that "intended" did not occur in that clause back in the 1982 committee manual  (that she had happened to have at hand; God, I love scholars); and back on Heavy Medal, Monica Edinger confirmed that it did not appear in the 2008 manual, either.

I'd love to know when and why it went. "Intended" by whom? The author? We can all think of examples, apocryphal and otherwise, of writers claiming not to know they had written a children's book until an agent or editor pointed it out. Intended by the publisher? Again, we can all think of examples where a publisher's named age-range for a book does not correspond with our own reckoning. I'm very curious to know how this intent is determined.

My fellow oldsters will remember my objection to the Printz Award going to American Born Chinese, not because of any deficiency in the book but because the award's rules insisted that any winner be published as a book for young adults, and that book was published without any such specification--a policy that at the time was true for all books from the First Second publishing imprint. But the Newbery committee, until 2008, anyway, was always charged with figuring out for themselves just what a children's book was--my favorite part of the discussion! The day we stop asking that question is the day we stop doing our jobs, in my opinion.

As far as I can tell, the biggest effect of this insertion is to limit the pool of eligible contenders to books from publishers who assign reading ranges to their books. This is common but not universal in American trade publishing, and potentially strikes for discussion books by publishers who don't follow the rules.. And it thus takes part of the selection decision out of the hands of the committee and into those of the marketing departments. I don't know if there's another Incident at Hawk's Hill or The Circuit out there, but both were published as adult books and received their definition (and award citations) as books for youth from the library community. I like to think we would want to keep ourselves open to those kind of surprises.