Except for the fashions, the annual announcement of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals is for me what the Academy Awards are for just about everybody else. Every year I get excited, eager to hear what the librarians at ALA Midwinter have deemed the best illustrated book (Caldecott) and “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” (Newbery). I love the imagination of this year's Caldecott committee—but at least half the time I am disappointed in the Newbery. My favorites almost never win. The odds-on favorites never seem to win either. Why?
It is hard for me to shake two suspicions about the Newbery. One, applicable to many awards given by committee, is that the prize tends to go to a compromise choice. As I see it, truly “distinguished” works of literature often provoke controversy, and members of the awards committee are likely to take different positions on them. When this occurs, the committee winds up agreeing on a book that is nobody's first choice.
My second suspicion is that the committees end up judging the messages of the books, even though the guidelines for the Newbery state that the award is not for “didactic intent.” But consider how often the Newbery winners are didactic or “worthy”: how many take up literacy, civil rights or freedom of speech; how many Newbery-winning characters are inspiring or crusading teachers (or librarians); how many make a case for classics or poetry? How many of these books are “good”—meaning good for you, as opposed to a good read? I have often wished Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone had been eligible for a Newbery (only books originally published in the U.S. and written by a resident of the U.S. qualify), if only to find out if it would pass the worthiness test. (The award is explicitly not for “popularity.”)
Imagine if the message mattered quite so much in prizes awarded to distinguished fiction for adults—for example, if the judges who gave the 1960 National Book Award considered message when they chose Goodbye, Columbus or if the NBCC decided in 1985 that The Accidental Tourist wasn't weighty enough. Why are children's books so often treated differently?
The answer, I think, has to do with those of us who work with children's books. (Writers know how to award prizes: look at the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, chosen by authors, and you find works of literary merit that are also great reads.) In my mind, children's professionals cluster around two camps: the Sweets and the Subversives. The Sweets look at children as innocents to be guided, at times protected, and taught reverence; the Subversives see young readers as mini-Subversives, to be helped to slough off convention. The camps overlap, of course, and virtually everyone will fiercely defend free speech and the use of the word “scrotum” on page one of a children's book, but one side leans heavily toward “worthiness” while the other sometimes forgets that the books are directed to an audience other than themselves.
It's a pity when either side dominates. It's children that books should serve, and no one set of ideas about children fits all children. Neither does one vision of a “distinguished” work of literature. This year's Newbery winner, Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!—a beautifully made book about life in a medieval English village, told from many perspectives and originally written for performance by students—deserves a place in every middle school library; and if I were awarding a prize for book design, by the way, I would want to give this book close consideration. But I'm pretty sure that when children's booksellers greet the Newbery winner with skepticism, as some did this year (see Children's Bookshelf at www.publishersweekly.com/booksellersreact), it's a sign that school libraries have been best served, not the child reader.
