My Love/Hate Relationship with the Newbery Awards

It’s that time of year, when children’s literature aficionados all over America beginning panting in anticipation of the Association for Library Service to Children’s announcement of its awards for children's literature, most famously the Newbery and Caldecott Awards – so that we can spend the rest of the year crowing or complaining about the results.

As a writer and academic (for lack of a better term) reader, I love the Newbery and Caldecott awards. As a public librarian and pleasure reader, I loathe them. Why the contradiction?

The Love

For credibility’s sake, every industry needs to recognize its gold standard. In a society whose popular conception of children’s literature is limited (it sometimes seems) to media tie-ins, books turned into blockbuster movies, and treasured classics, the Newbery and Caldecott remind not just children’s literature professionals but the reading public at large that there is better/more available.

Likewise, when the National Review announced its list of the 100 Best English-Language Novels of the 20th Century, there was outcry about the list's bias toward books published before 1950, as if nothing good has been written in the last half of the century. Big-name awards like the Newbery and Caldecott remind us that marvelous new literature is being published every year.

The Hate

There’s plenty of criticism of the Newbery and Caldecott in terms of the award criteria and judging. There are complaints about bias toward realistic fiction, serious fiction, historical fiction, fiction about girls, fiction about European-Americans, fiction in general. There are complaints about the awards going to books without obvious child appeal. There are complaints about the criteria, which limit winners to American authors and seem to eliminate books dependent on the marriage of text and illustration.

These criticisms are not baseless, but the method of judging is not the main source of my irritation. After all, there are tons of other children’s book awards (e.g., Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards, National Book Awards, regional kids' choice awards), albeit not as well-known and awe-inducing. No, what bugs me is how the public too often responds to those shiny gold and silver stickers on the winners’ covers.

I hate the perception, held by far too many, that Newbery and Caldecott winners are the best books, period. They are excellent books. They are some of the very best. Some are gems that will be loved 75 or more years down the line. But “best”, the superlative “best”, is a matter of human opinion. The gold medal can only be given to one book per year, and it's a difficult decision made by a different committee every year. It is not the decree of some great, all-knowing literary god.

To infer that these select few books are the only books worth reading from a given year is a tragic mistake. And a ridiculous one, I would think. But then why do I have adults coming to the library telling me they want their children to read Newbery and Caldecott winners above and before all others “because they are the best ones”? Because I have.

I’m also bothered by school assignments that send children to the library specifically for Newbery and Caldecott winners. Of course I want children to appreciate great literature along with whatever else they read. But teaching children that these winners are “the best” is a double-edged sword. Maybe they’ll gain appreciation for the craft of writing and illustration. Or maybe, when they struggle through one of the more difficult winners, they’ll wonder why they hate the “best” books so much. Maybe, they wonder, it’s because they’re bad readers. Maybe it's because they don't understand what makes a good book. Or maybe it's because adults just don't get it.

There are plenty of books on those award lists I don’t care for. I understand that it’s not because I am a bad reader or because the books shouldn’t have received the award, but because I just don’t like them. I know that as with any other book, “best” or not, it comes down to my personal taste. But I worry about children generalizing about those gold and silver stickers. Sometimes when I booktalk The House of the Scorpion or Princess Academy or Holes, I tell the child: “Don’t worry about these stickers on the cover. This book was so exciting/funny/fascinating, it kept me up half the night.”

The school assignment that has driven me craziest this season is a Caldecott-related assignment for a local school’s second grade reading classes. Students were to choose a Caldecott book to read. The problems as I see them:

1. Since the Caldecott Medal is for illustration, not every Caldecott-winning book has words! (Case in point: 2007’s winner Flotsam, by David Wiesner.)
2. Even though every Caldecott winner is a picture book, not every one is appropriate for a second grader to read independently. Parents saw Kitten’s First Full Moon and told their children they must pick something harder, until I hopped up and down and begged them to understand the nature of the Caldecott. Meanwhile, St. George and the Dragon is too difficult for many second graders to read on their own.
3. “Because the Caldecott Medal is for illustration, students will design a new cover for their chosen book” (I quote the assignment to the best of my recollection). After all, what better way to appreciate great illustration than to – not imitate it – but redo it entirely.

If we’re teaching kids to appreciate Caldecott-winning books, shouldn’t we follow the award committee’s example and focus primarily on the art? At best, it leaves me scratching my head. At worst, I want to knock heads together.

That’s enough complaining. All I can do as a librarian is help my patrons understand that the Newbery and Caldecott Medals are not the be-all and end-all. All I can do is help them understand what the awards mean, and what they do not.

Moving On to Predictions...

I’m rarely able to predict Newbery and Caldecott winners, in part because I don’t read new books exhaustively enough. For example, while I predicted Flotsam as last year’s Caldecott winner, I hadn’t read any of the Newbery Medal winner/honors at the time of the awards.

The only book I have a strong feeling about this year is Elijah of Buxton. Once again, Christopher Paul Curtis has beautifully written a story of equal parts humor and deadly seriousness, a work of historical fiction I think has real child (not to mention, adult) appeal. I fully expect it will have one of those gold or silver stickers gracing its cover come Monday morning. Fuse #8 has a nice review of it here.

Wizard’s Wireless is hosting this month’s Carnival of Children’s Literature on the topic of children’s book awards. You can submit your link at BlogCarnival.com. The deadline to submit an entry is January 18, with the round-up to be posted January 21.