Newbery Gold for Girls

Sorry guys, but you will have to wait till next week for your special edition. This week I would like to speak to the girls about some Newbery winners that they might enjoy.

A couple of early winners that I really enjoyed when I was growing up are Miss Hickory and Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. Both of these books are about dolls made from wood, but they had very different lives. Miss Hickory, by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey, is a doll made of twigs and a hickory nut for a head. She lives in a neat little house made of corncobs glued together and placed under a lilac bush. When her neighbor Crow warns her that the coming winter will be a hard one and the two-leggers (humans) are moving to the city, she stamps her foot and refuses to leave her little house. This charming fantasy follows Miss Hickory and her survival that winter along with her friends Crow, Bull Frog, and Ground Hog. Besides the danger from the winter Miss Hickory must also defend her head from animals who want to eat it.

Hitty, the doll in Hitty, Her First Hundred Years by Rachel Field, is a tiny doll carved of ash-wood from Ireland. She tells her own story of all the people and creatures who owned her or took care of her. While Hitty is a lady and always tries to be proper, I see many connections to a modern book, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, by Kate DiCamillo. Both dolls go on sailing journeys and have many adventures. If you have already enjoyed reading about Edward Tulane, take a look at Hitty's story.

Thinking about Edward Tulane brings me to another book by Kate DiCamillo that won the Newbery - The Tale of Despereaux. This fantasy follows the adventures of a mouse who is in love with a princess. When his princess is kidnapped, Despereaux makes it his quest to save her. There are side stories about a servant girl who wants to be a princess and a rat's longing for soup which has been banned when the queen died because a rat fell in her soup. Humor and fairy tale blend in this story of love.

And the Winner Is...

Join me on a journey across time to the years when I was growing up and reading books. Although I didn't know it then, many of the books I really enjoyed at that time had won Newbery Gold or Silver. The Newbery Award - gold for winner and silver for runners-up - is presented to living authors each year for books that show excellence and uniqueness in their stories and craftmanship.

You may not believe this, but I was not born when the first Newbery Medal was awarded in 1922. I know I have been around for a long time, but not that long. I was reading avidly in the 1950s and 1960s. You already know many of the my favorites from those years. Books like The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and A Wrinkle in Time. Those were all gold winners. I bet you also know these runners-up -- Charlotte's Web, Old Yeller, It's Like This, Cat, and The Cricket in Times Square. If you haven't had a chance to enjoy these, take some time to try them out and tell me if you think the stories have stood the test of time. I would love to hear your opinions.

However, some of the Newberys I did not discover until I was in library school and I can't imagine how I missed them. Here are a couple of examples. The Golden Goblet by Eloise Jarvis McGraw is a mystery that takes place in ancient Egypt (mystery and historical -- my favorite combination). Ranofer, a young slave boy, finds a golden goblet that was obviously stolen from one of the great tombs in the City of the Dead. He must keep the goblet hidden until he can prove who really stole it or he will be blamed and killed.

In The Gammage Cup by Carol Kendall, the land of the Minnipins have a contest to see which town will be the best and win the Gammage Cup. The town of Slipper-on-the-Water decides to redecorate all of the houses in the same color scheme to impress the judges. When five people refuse to follow this idea, they are banished from the town to the mountains beyond. While the story could end here, it doesn't. The people banished to the mountains are the first to see danger coming their way and must decide if they should warn the town that threw them out.