Improbably, Brian Selznick won the 2008 Caldecott Medal for THE INVENTION OF HUGO CABRET, and now his latest novel in words and pictures should give the Newbery and Caldecott committees fits all over again.  Our sister blog, Calling Caldecott discussed this book from their angle here, and we had a brief preliminary discussion of its [...]

What is the trouble? Holm’s latest has gotten some play here in various posts already…early in the year, and at Girl’s Club, and I alluded to it at Setting the Table, as indicative of one of The Proclamations advertised in the Horn Book: “It is right that anything a child sees, feels, or thinks be [...]

For the most recent July/August issue of the Horn Book Magazine, Roger Sutton asked various people to list a book that had been completely passed over (i.e. it was not even an Honor book) for the Newbery or Caldecott.  Surprisingly, four people–Betsy Hearne, Pat Scales, Terri Schmitz, and Illene Cooper–identified the same book on the [...]

Just to drag out the Poetry discussion a little more before we return to some of our shortlist titles…let’s look at the difference in evaluating poetry collections versus novels in verse for the Newbery.  In a non-novel collection of poems, examples of previous Newbery winners show us that the bar is high for the level of craft of each individual [...]

We’ve already discussed a couple of poetry books (SWIRL BY SWIRL, NEVER FORGOTTEN) and a couple of verse novels (INSIDE OUT & BACK AGAIN and EDDIE’S WAR) and I think they stand the best chance of Newbery recognition in their respective genres, but there is actually a rich, diverse field of books published this year [...]

Jonathan and I have put up posts now for half of the titles on our shortlist, and we hope you’ll continue to post on Sir Gawain, The Money We’ll Save, The Penderwicks, A Monster Calls, Heart & Soul, and Amelia Lost, as you catch up (or your thoughts do). We’ll continue to post on the [...]

Well, it’s mid-December and that means that the Newbery committee trades its final two nominations.  With the three in October and the two in November, it’s a total of seven nominations.  Those seven nominations help the committee narrow their focus from several hundred books to several dozen books. The last time we talked about nominations [...]

We discussed AMELIA LOST a month ago, just before we announced our shortlist, but it does seem relevant to bring it up now as we’re also discussing HEART AND SOUL.  While these two bear easy comparison being the two nonfiction titles on our shortlist, for the purposes of our Mock discussion they really each have [...]

In WE ARE THE SHIP, the focus of the book was much narrower and thus when the voice shifted registers from authoritative and scholarly to personal and intimate it did so much more seamlessly than it does here.  In WE ARE THE SHIP, the narrator spoke from personal experience.  In HEART AND SOUL, she typically [...]