The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau
By Michelle Markel
Illustrated by Amanda Hall
Eerdmans Books for Young Readers
$17.00
ISBN: 978-0-8028-5264-6
Ages 4-8
On shelves now
I’m not ashamed to say it, though perhaps I should be. Still, it’s true. Though I grew up in the middle class with a good education and a stint at a liberal arts college there are huge gaping gaps in my knowledge that have consistently been filled in over the years by children’s books. I know that I am not alone in this. When I worked in NYPL’s Central Children’s Room we had any number of regular adult patrons that would come in seeking children’s books on a variety of different topics so that they could learn about them in a non-threatening fashion. At its best a children’s book takes a complex subject and synthesizes it down to its most essential parts. Simple enough. But if you’re dealing with a picture book biography, it then has to turn a human life in a cohesive (child friendly) story. No mean feat. So when I saw this picture book bio of the artist Henri Rousseau I was immediately arrested by its art. Then I sort of came to realize that when it came to the man himself, I knew nothing. Next to nothing. I may never win a Jeopardy round or a game of Trivial Pursuit but thanks to great books like this one I may someday attain the education of a seven-year-old. There are worse fates in the world. These days, seven-year-olds get all the good stuff.
Your everyday average forty-year-old toll collector doesn’t usually drop everything to become a painter, yet that’s exactly what one did back in the 19th century. His name was Henri Rousseau and though he never took an art course in his life (art lessons aren’t exactly available on a toll collector’s budget) he does his research, looks at art, sits himself down, and begins to paint. He’s incredibly excited after his first big exhibition but his reviews say mostly “mean things” about his art. Still, he clips them, saves them, and continues to paint. Over the years he meets with very little success but is inspired by greenhouses and the lush topiary found inside. He can’t afford to ever see a jungle of his own so he makes them up. Finally, after decades and decades, the new young crop of artists takes note of his work. At last, he is celebrated and appreciated and his naïf style is seen for what it truly is; Simultaneously ahead of its time, and timeless.
As far as I can tell the picture book biography can go in a certain number of directions when it comes to its interior art. It can seek to emulate the original artist, mimicking their style with mixed results. Or it can eschew the original artist altogether and only show their paintings as images on walls or in the notes at the book’s end. Artist Amanda Hall takes a slightly different take with her art, inserting Mr. Rousseau into his own works. As she says at the end “Instead of my usual pencil crayon and watercolor technique, I used both watercolor and acrylics for the illustrations, as I wanted to get close to the feel of Rousseau’s own paintings. I decided to break the rules of scale and perspective to reflect his unusual way of seeing the world. For some of the illustrations I drew directly on his actual paintings, altering them playfully to help tell the story.” That right there might be the book’s difference. I think that for many of us, the joy of an Henri Rousseau painting lies not in the composition necessarily (though that is a plus) but the sheer feel of the piece. Rousseau’s jungle scenes do not look or feel like anyone else’s and Hall has done a stellar job capturing, if not the exact feel, then a winning replica of it for kids. The endpapers of this book are particularly telling. Open the cover and there you find all the usual suspects in a Rousseau landscape, each one creeping and peeking out at you from behind the ferns and oversized blossoms.
A poorly made picture book bio will lay out its pictures in a straightforward dull-as-dishwater manner never deviating or even attempting to inject so much as an artistic whim. The interesting thing about Hall’s take on Rousseau is that while, yes, she plays around with scale and perspective willy-nilly, she also injects a fair amount of whimsy. Not just the usual artist-flying-through-the-air-to-represent-his-mental-journey type of stuff either. There is a moment early on when a tiny Rousseau pulling a handcart approaches gargantuan figures that look down upon him with a mixture of pop-eyed surprise and, in some cases, anger. Amongst them, wearing the coat and tails of gentlemen, are two dogs and one gorilla. Later Hall indicates the passing of the years by featuring three portraits of Rousseau, hair growing grey, beard cut down to a jaunty mustache. On the opposite page three critics perch on mountains, smirking behind their hands or just gaping in general. It’s the weirdness that sets this book apart and makes it better than much of its ilk. It’s refreshing to encounter a bio that isn’t afraid to make things odd if it has to. And for some reason that I just can’t define . . . it definitely has to.
But to get back a bit to the types of bios out there for kids, as I mentioned before Hall inserts Rousseau directly into his own painting when we look at his life. Done poorly this would give the impression that he actually did live in jungles or traipse about with lions, and I’m sure there will be the occasional young reader who will need some clarification on that point. But in terms of teaching the book, Hall has handed teachers a marvelous tool. You could spend quite a lot of time flipping between the paintings here and the ones Rousseau actually created. Kids could spot the differences, the similarities, and get a good sense of how one inspired the other. Near the end of the book Hall also slips in a number of cameos from contemporary artists, and even goes so far as to include a key identifying those individuals on the last few pages. Imagine how rich an artistic unit would be if a teacher were to take that key and pair it with the author bios of THOSE people as well. For Gertrude Stein just pull out Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude by Jonah Winter. Pablo Picasso? A quick look at The Boy Who Bit Picasso by Antony Penrose. Lucky kids.
Just as the art of a picture book biography can go any number of directions, the storytelling is in the same boat. You want to tell the life of a man. Fair enough. Do you encompass everything from birth to death, marking dates and important places along the way? Do you synthesize that life down to a single moment and then use your Author’s Note at the end to tell why that person is important at all (many is the Author’s Note forced to do the heavy lifting). Or do you just zero in on what it is that made that person famous in the first place and look at how they struggled with their gift? Author Michelle Markel opts for the latter. A former journalist, Markel first cut her teeth on the author bio with her lovely Dreamer from the Village: The Story of Marc Chagall. Finding that these stories of outsider artists appealed to her, the move to Rousseau was a natural one. One that focuses on the man’s attempts to become an artist in the face of constant, near unending critical distaste. Markel’s gift here is that she is telling the story of someone overcoming the odds (to a certain extent . . . I mean he still died a pauper an all) in the face of folks telling him what he could or couldn’t do. It’s inspirational but on a very gentle scale. You’re not being forced to hear a sermon on the joys of stick-to-itativeness. She lands the ending too, effortlessly transitioning from his first successful debut at an exhibition to how he is remembered today.
I remember having to learn about artists and composers in elementary school and how strange and dull they all seemed. Just a list of dead white men that didn’t have anything to do with my life or me. The best picture book bios seek to correct that old method of teaching. To make their subjects not merely “come alive” as the saying goes but turn into flesh and blood people. You learn best about a person when that person isn’t perfect, has troubles, and yet has some spark, some inescapable something about them that attracts notice. A combination of smart writing and smarter art is ideal, particularly when you’re dealing with picture book biographies. And The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau is nothing if not smart. It typifies the kind of bios I hope we see more of in the future. And, with any luck, it will help to create the kinds of people I’d like to see more of in the future. People like Henri Rousseau. Whatta fella. Whatta book.
On shelves now.
Source: Final copy sent from publisher for review.
Like This? Then Try:
Other Blog Reviews:
Professional Reviews: Kirkus
Interviews: With Michelle Markel at I.N.K. (Interesting Nonfiction for Kids)
Misc: Read what Ms. Markel has to say about the book herself when she writes the guest post at Cynsations.
Videos:
A nice little book trailer exists as well.
There’s even a director’s cut.
Since it’s apparently football season (or at least that’s what the trending topics on Twitter seem to imply) think of this as a kind of post-game recap of what went on yesterday in the land of ALA Media Awards. Each year I like to look at what I got right, what I got wrong, what I got horrendously wrong, and what I got so wrong that it’s a miracle I’m even allowed to blog anymore. And because I believe in eating my cake before my dinner, we’ll start at the top and work our way down (metaphorically speaking).
First up:
Newbery Winners: I Got Them Moves Like Gantos
When I posted my review of The Great Cake Mystery yesterday and happened to include at the end an image of Dead End in Norvelt: British Edition (called just plain old Dead End and shown here) I hadn’t even considered the possibility that the darn book was poised to win the greatest honor in the field of children’s literature. Why had I recovered from my Gantos fever? Well, I think Jon Scieszka put it best yesterday when he tweeted his congrats to Jack and applied the hashtag #afunnybookfinallywins. Ye gods. He’s right. I ran over to ye olde list of past Award winners and while some contain elements of humor, none of them have been as outright ballsy in their funny writing as Gantos was here. I mean, you can make a case for Despereaux or Bud Not Buddy if you want, but basically even those books drip of earnestness. And on some level I must have figured the funny book couldn’t win. I had forgotten myself the moniker I had applied to this year. The Year of Breaking Barriers. Well if giving a big award to a funny title isn’t breaking a barrier here or there, I don’t know what is.
It’s really funny to read my mid-year and fall predictions in regards to the Gantos title. In the middle of the year I mentioned the book as a possibility but even then I wasn’t putting too much hope there. I wrote:
This is undoubtedly wishful thinking on my part. Gantos has never gotten the gold, and he deserves it someday. This book, of course, has a weird undercurrent to it that may turn off a certain breed of Newbery committee member. Not everyone is going to find Jack’s constant brushes with death as interesting as I do. Still, I hold out hope that maybe this’ll be a Gantos-luvin’ committee year. Stranger things have happened.
Stranger indeed. By the fall I was mentioning it, but only in passing and with the feeling that it was an unlikely bet so that by my last prediction it had fallen off the radar entirely.
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Betsy Bird,
on 10/23/2011
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Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans
By Kadir Nelson
Balzer and Bray (an imprint of Harper Collins)
$19.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-173074-0
Ages 9-12
On shelves now
Humans tend to be a highly visual species. When folks tell you not to judge a book by its cover, that’s an optimistic sentiment rather than a rule. People like to judge by covers. Often we haven’t time to inspect the contents of all the books we see, so the jackets bear the brunt of our inherent skepticism. With this in mind, Kadir Nelson has always had an edge on the competition. If the man wants to get you to pick up a book, he will get you to pick up a book. You often get a feeling that while he doesn’t really care when it comes to the various celebrities he’s created books for over the years (Spike Lee, Debbie Allen, Michael Jordan’s sister, etc.) when it’s his own book, though, THAT is when he breaks out the good brushes. Nelson wrote We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball a couple years ago to rave reviews. Now he’s dug a little deeper to provide us with the kind of title we’ve needed for years. Heart and Soul gives us a true overview of African Americans from start to near finish with pictures that draw in readers from the cover onwards. This is the title every library should own. The book has heart. The pictures have soul.
An old woman stands in front of a portrait in the Capitol rotunda in Washington D.C. Bent over she regards the art there, recounting how it was black hands that built the Capitol from sandstone. “Strange though . . . nary a black face in all those pretty pictures.” Looking at them you would swear black people hadn’t been here from the start, but that’s simply not true. With that, the woman launches into the history of both our nation and the African Americans living in it, sometimes through the lens of her own family. From Revolutionary War soldiers to slavers, from cowboys to union men, the book manages in a scant twelve chapters to offer us a synthesized history of a race in the context of a nation’s growth. An Author’s Note rounds out the book, along with a Timeline, a Bibliography, and an Index.
Kadir Nelson, insofar as I can tell, enjoys driving librarian catalogers mad. When he wrote We Are the Ship some years ago he decided to narrate it with a kind of collective voice. The ballplayers who played in the Negro Leagues speak as one. Normally that would slip a book directly into the “fiction” category, were it not for the fact that all that “they” talk about are historical facts. Facts upon facts. Facts upon facts upon facts. So libraries generally slotted that one into their nonfiction sections (the baseball section, if we’re going to be precise) and that was that. Now “Heart and Soul” comes out and Nelson has, in a sense, upped the ante. Again the narrator is fictional, but this time she’s a lot more engaged. The Greek
By:
Betsy Bird,
on 9/2/2011
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Witches!: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem
By Rosalyn Schanzer
National Geographic Children’s Books
$16.95
ISBN: 978- 1426308697
Ages 10 and up
On shelves September 13th
Sometimes I wish I could sit down with my 10-year-old self and have a conversation. We’d chat about the improvements that will come to fashion someday (I think 10-year-old me would really appreciate knowing that 1988 was America’s low point), the delight to be found in School House Rock and eventually I’d turn the conversation to books. From there we’d give praise to good Apple paperbacks like The Girl With the Silver Eyes or pretty much anything with a ghost in it (does anyone even remember Ghost Cat?) but eventually I’d have to start pushing myself. “So what,” I might say, “would it take to get you to read nonfiction?” Even from a distance of twenty-three years I can feel the resistance to such a notion. Nonfiction? You mean like the latest edition of The Guinness Book of World Records, right? Nope. I mean like straight up facts about a moment in history. And not any of those Childhood of Famous Americans books either, missy thang. Then I’d pull out my secret weapon: Witches!: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem. The cover? Enticing. The subject? Not off-putting. The overall presentation? Enthralling.
When 9-year-old Betty Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams began to twist and turn in the home of the Reverend Samuel Parris there was only one possible reason for it: witchcraft. And why not? This was Salem, Massachusetts where the Puritan populace knew anything was possible. What they didn’t know was that the afflicted girls would be joined by fellow accusers and launch the town, and even parts of the state, into a series of witch trials the land of America had never seen before. Rosalyn Schanzer tells it like it is, recounting many of the details, giving information on what happened to all the players when the dust settled and things got back to normal. Notes, a Bibliography, an Index, and a Note From the Author explaining how she abridged, updated, and clarified some of the original texts follow at the end.
I’ll admit it. I’m not ashamed. Here I am, thirty-three years of age with a Masters degree to my name and if you had asked me to recount exactly what happened during the Salem Witch Trials I’d have been hard pressed to come up with anything I didn’t just learn from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Okay . . . so I’m a little ashamed. And I didn’t even know how much I didn’t know until I started reading Schanzer’s book. The author lays out her book chronologically. It’s like watching an episode of Law & Order. You see the “crime”, the characters, and the endless strange courtroom scenes (Note: Teacher’s wishing
The Incredible Life of Balto
By Meghan McCarthy
Alfred A. Knopf (an imprint of Random House)
$16.99
ISBN: 978-0-375-84460-7
Ages 4 and up
On shelves August 9th
I’m not a dog person. Like ‘em fine. Don’t see much particular need to interact with them on a regular basis. Sometimes, though, I’ll feel like my life as a children’s librarian would have been easier if I had been a canine fanatic. A large swath of children’s literature each year is dedicated to man’s best friend. This year alone I’ve seen dogs traveling vast distances to be reunited with their loved ones (A Dog’s Way Home), convince kids that they are transformed accountants (The Ogre of Oglefort), and even appear as gallons of orange juice (When Life Gives You O.J.). Nonfiction doggies proliferate as well but I can usually steer clear of them. Unless Meghan McCarthy is involved, of course. Then I’m going to have to see what all the fuss is about. In this particular case, Ms. McCarthy has taken what at first appears to be a well-known story then finds the lesser known tales lurking inside of it. The result is a biography that’s bound to please dog lovers and dog neutrals (like myself) alike.
The year: 1925. The place: Nome, Alaska. The problem: An epidemic of diphtheria was imminent and yet a horrible blizzard was preventing all incoming planes from delivering the much needed serum. The solution: Balto. Sled dogs, you see, were dispatched with the serum on board and Balto was at the head of one of these teams. When Balto’s group missed the next team at the next checkpoint, they were lead onward by Balto until they got to Nome themselves. That’s the story lots of people know. What is less well known is what happened next. Balto was celebrated throughout the States, appearing in movies, on dog food cans, and even earning a statue in Central Park. Sadly, he and his team went on the vaudeville circuit and ended up underfed and neglected. Yet surprisingly the good people of Cleveland banded together to purchase the brave dog and his sled mates. As a result he spent the remainder of his days running around the Brookside Zoo where he, “could relax and enjoy the rest of his life.”
The queen of the amusing nonfiction picture book for young readers, McCarthy’s titles are always remarkable because they cover ground no one else does. Whether it’s the invention of bubble gum or a false report of an alien invasion, McCarthy’s titles are always wholly new. That’s why I was so surprised by her choice to tackle Balto next. As real
The Many Faces of George Washington: Remaking a Presidential Icon
By Carla Killough McClafferty
Carolrhoda Books (a division of Lerner)
$20.95
ISBN: 978-0-7613-5608-0
Ages 10 and up
On shelves April 1st
Forensic anthropology meets the guy on the one dollar bill. That’s one way of putting it anyway. Walk into many a classroom and tell the kids “Look! I’ve a book here on George Washington! Who wants it?” and prepare to be buried in groans. An alternative take: Walk into many a classroom and show the kids pages 8 and 9 of Carla Killough McClafferty’s The Many Faces of George Washington. There they will see an array of Washington portraits so diverse that you might as well be looking at five different men. Now ask the kids, “How do you figure out what a dead person really looked like?” The cannier amongst them might reply that you need only locate the person’s skull and a forensic artist. Nod sagely. Then ask, “And what if you don’t have a skull to work from?” That right there is the premise behind McClafferty’s newest, and it’s a fascinating point of discussion. The question is, can you reproduce a man as he was at three different points in his life without photographs or bones? The result is one of the more enjoyable points of nonfiction out this season. One of the more creative too.
Recently The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association had a problem. Thirty years ago your average American knew more about President George Washington than folks today. What to do? In an interesting twist, the Association placed much of the blame on the image of George found on the dollar bill. I mean seriously, who can relate to that guy? It would be great if you could find a way to discover what the man actually looked like. So Jeffrey H. Schwartz, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Pittsburgh, and a whole team of experts were brought in to try to create life-sized reproductions of Washington at ages nineteen (young surveyor), forty-five (General), and fifty-seven (President). As we watch the reconstruction of a man long dead, the text is interspersed with information about Washington at each of these ages, telling the story of the man as well as the body. A Timeline, Source Notes, Index, Bibliography, and section for Further Reading (including websites) are all included at the end.
The book packs a two-fisted whammy of a punch. For the history buffs you’ve the history of Washington himself. But for the forensic scientists (a.k.a. C.S.I. fans) you’ve the fascinating story of how a person goes about reconstructing someone’s body without having something as essential as a skeleton to work with. The solutions found here (getting measurements from death masks, clothing, eye-witness accounts, locks of hair, etc.) are as inventive as they are fascinating. One cannot help but marvel at the meticulousness of the professionals at work. Their attention to detail is so precise that you find yourself poring over details that explain the red lines in Washington’s eyeballs or how they recreated his horse. Best of all, McClafferty avoids a problem I&rsqu
By:
Betsy Bird,
on 1/14/2011
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Queen of the Falls
By Chris Van Allsburg
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
$18.99
ISBN: 978-0-547-31581-2
Ages 4-9
On shelves April 4th
The word “daredevil” conjures up different images for different people. Speaking for myself, when I hear it I instantly picture someone like Evel Knievel leaping over cars on a motorcycle. I do not picture sixty-two year old charm school matrons climbing into barrels. The name “Chris Van Allsburg” also conjures up a variety of interesting images. A person might think of his books The Mysteries of Harris Burdick or The Sweetest Fig (or, my personal favorite, The Stranger). And until now, they also would probably not picture sixty-two year old charm school matrons climbing into barrels. Yet now both the word and the author/illustrator have become inextricably linked to one another, and it is all because of a little old lady who died nearly one hundred years ago. For the first time, Chris Van Allsburg has put aside the fantastical for something infinitely more intriguing: Real world history with just a touch of the insane. And it all begins with the first person to ever go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.
The facts about the Niagara Falls are well known. “The water drops from a height that is as tall as a seventeen-story building.” Fact of the matter is, you’d have to be nutty to even consider going over such falls. Yet that was the idea that appealed so much to Ms. Annie Edson Taylor. A former charm school teacher, Annie was sixty-two years old and in real need of money. In a flash it came to her: Go over the edge of Niagara Falls in a barrel and reap the rewards that come. Efficient, Annie commissioned the barrel she would travel in, and found folks willing to help her carry out the plan. When the time came, everything went without a hitch and best of all Annie lived to tell the tale. Unfortunately, fame and fortune were not in the cards. Folks weren’t interested in hearing an old woman talk about her death-defying adventure, and on more than one occasion she found her barrel stolen or folks taking credit for her own deed. Ten years later a reporter found her and asked for her story again. Annie confessed that she didn’t become rich like she wanted to, but as she said, “That’s what everyone wonders when they see Niagara . . . How close will their courage let them get to it? Well, sir, you can’t get any closer than I got.”
This is not the first time I have encountered Ms. Taylor’s story. I’m a fan of the podcast Radio Lab, which makes science palatable to English majors like myself. One such podcast told the story of Annie Taylor, and it was a sad tale. So sad, in fact, that when I picked up Queen of the Falls I naturally assumed that Van Allsburg would sweeten, cushion, and otherwise obscure some of the difficulties Annie faced after her fateful trip. To my infinite delight, I found the man to be a sterling author of nonfiction for kids. He doesn’t pad the truth, but at the same time he finds that spark in a true-life story that gives it depth and meaning. On the surface, what could we possibly learn from the depressing reminder of
As far as I can tell the picture book biography can go in a certain number of directions when it comes to its interior art. It can seek to emulate the original artist, mimicking their style with mixed results. Or it can eschew the original artist altogether and only show their paintings as images on walls or in the notes at the book’s end. Artist Amanda Hall takes a slightly different take with her art, inserting Mr. Rousseau into his own works. As she says at the end “Instead of my usual pencil crayon and watercolor technique, I used both watercolor and acrylics for the illustrations, as I wanted to get close to the feel of Rousseau’s own paintings. I decided to break the rules of scale and perspective to reflect his unusual way of seeing the world. For some of the illustrations I drew directly on his actual paintings, altering them playfully to help tell the story.” That right there might be the book’s difference. I think that for many of us, the joy of an Henri Rousseau painting lies not in the composition necessarily (though that is a plus) but the sheer feel of the piece. Rousseau’s jungle scenes do not look or feel like anyone else’s and Hall has done a stellar job capturing, if not the exact feel, then a winning replica of it for kids. The endpapers of this book are particularly telling. Open the cover and there you find all the usual suspects in a Rousseau landscape, each one creeping and peeking out at you from behind the ferns and oversized blossoms.
But to get back a bit to the types of bios out there for kids, as I mentioned before Hall inserts Rousseau directly into his own painting when we look at his life. Done poorly this would give the impression that he actually did live in jungles or traipse about with lions, and I’m sure there will be the occasional young reader who will need some clarification on that point. But in terms of teaching the book, Hall has handed teachers a marvelous tool. You could spend quite a lot of time flipping between the paintings here and the ones Rousseau actually created. Kids could spot the differences, the similarities, and get a good sense of how one inspired the other. Near the end of the book Hall also slips in a number of cameos from contemporary artists, and even goes so far as to include a key identifying those individuals on the last few pages. Imagine how rich an artistic unit would be if a teacher were to take that key and pair it with the author bios of THOSE people as well. For Gertrude Stein just pull out Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude is Gertrude by Jonah Winter. Pablo Picasso? A quick look at The Boy Who Bit Picasso by Antony Penrose. Lucky kids.
Once again, the Caldecott award proves it is nothing more than a lottery. If you told me that these four books were not even considered for an award yesterday, I would not have blinked an eye. They all have some nice things going on, but it seems so unfair that these books will go on to launch the illustrators careers to another level, when there are many many other illustrators who don’t even seem to get a sniff from the committee who are just as deserving.
There is no answer, I guess they just have to wish and hope that their number gets pulled someday.
Jefferson’s Sons?
I share your disappointment in AMELIA LOST. Such a shame. However, as you pointed out, the reason I love these awards so much is their unpredictability. Can’t wait to get my hands on BREAKING STALIN’S NOSE, DRAWING FROM MEMORY, CAZUELA, and SOLDIER BEAR. On SOLDIER BEAR particularly as I was convinced PRESS HERE was a lock for the Batchelder.
To be fair, Chaz, last year the Caldecott went to an unknown debut illustrator. And certainly on the Newbery two newbies got Honors. I think of it less as a lottery and more as a litmus test of professional opinions. Or maybe an experiment in consensus.
Oh, and yes. Jefferson’s Sons. Would have loved to see it get something, but at least it got a lot of debate and attention early on. Still, disappointing.
Elizabeth, I really like the “experiment in consensus” phraseology. That helps put the results in a better light.
Thanks.
I finished Breaking Stalin’s Nose and Under the Mesquite this weekend (snow, ice, and a wicked cold gave me plenty of time for reading!), so I was very happy to see that they were recognized. Do read Under the Mesquite; it’s well worth it.
I am very sorry that Amelia Lost did not win anything. I was quite happy that The Running Dream won the teen division in the Schneider Family award. Personally, it was a good day for local pride: Virginia author Maggie Stiefvater was a finalist for the Printz (I knew that already, though), and Printz and Morris winner John Corey Whaley is from Louisiana, my home state!
So happy to hear the NYPL ordered more copies of A Ball for Daisy. I had put it on hold a while ago and the status indicated it was “on order.” Then it changed to “in library use only.” I hope some will be available for borrowing soon!
Oh yes, pearls were clutched at the announcement of the Schneider picture book non-decision! Library scandal!
The Horn Book should be pretty pleased with the Newbery results. Breaking Stalin’s Nose wasn’t even on my radar until it made their Fanfare list.
On the topic of funny Newbery winners – what about A Year Down Yonder? Sure, there’s some earnestness, too, but that one had me howling at times. I would call Bud Not Buddy a funny book, too, and also Holes. I haven’t read Dead End yet so I can’t compare relative humor, but still.