Library Notes
January 30th 2009
Dara L. Cain
Newbery News
The suspense and excitement leading up to the announcement of the winner of the Newbery Award came to fruition at 7:45 a.m. Mountain Standard Time on Monday, January 26. The Graveyard Book by author Neil Gaiman was chosen by the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the American Library Association as the 2009 Newbery Medal award winner for providing the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children published in the previous year. The “contribution to American literature” refers to the text of a book for which all forms of writing shall be considered and for which children up to age fourteen are the potential audience. “Distinguished” is defined as a book noted for significant achievement encompassing excellence in quality and individual distinctness.
The Newbery Medal became the first children’s book award in the world and was named for the eighteenth-century English bookseller John Newbery. The criteria the ALSC committee members took into account when deciding to select The Graveyard Book included interpretation of the concept, presentation of information, development of plot, delineation of characters, description of setting, and the appropriateness of style.
The Graveyard Book is about an orphaned child named Nobody Owens, otherwise known as Bod to his friends. Bod lives an extraordinary life as he grows up to become a teenager while living in a graveyard where he is raised and educated by ghostly residents who have adopted him. If you enjoy adventure, danger, and the supernatural this is the book for you. Neil Gaiman made the New York Times bestseller list for the children’s book Coraline. He also wrote the picture books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls.
Honor books are runner ups to the Newbery Medal books. This year four diverse honor books were selected. The Underneath by Kathi Appelt is about the unlikely friendship between a calico cat and a hound who ultimately become a family. This book is recommended for fans who have enjoyed reading Sounder, Shiloh, and/or The Yearling. In the book Savvy by Ingrid it is the eve of Mibs’s big day when she will turn thirteen and discover her “savvy” – a special supernatural power. To find out if Mibs’s new power can save her father you will have to read the story. The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom by Margarita Engle creates a lyrical description of 1896 Cuba during her struggle to fight for independence after having already fought in three wars. Jacqueline Woodson’s book After Tupac & D Foster takes place in 1996 where three girls living in Queens, New York bond over their mutual love of Tupac Shakur’s music and the unreliable world they live in.
To obtain a complete listing of Newbery Medal winners, honor winners, and other literary award winners visit the American Library Association website at http://www.ala.org.
