I hope that the lovely librarians at my local branch aren’t annoyed at all the times I send them searching for my latest book request. My most recent kick has been Newbery winners, and of the dozen or so I have checked out, so far, I’ve made it through five. The grand total of Newbery winners is 102, I believe (though I’m not sure if the 2024 winner was announced yet), and there are scads of Newbery Honor books. (I tried to count them but kept getting lost. It might be somewhere in the 300s.) Personally, I’ve read 30 of the winners (well, 35, but five of those have been in the last few months) and 43 of the honors. Thirty is an unacceptable number — not even halfway through the full list — so I’m working to remedy that in the coming months.
Newbery winners (and honors books) are a fascinating genre. Well, actually, they’re quite the mix of genres, and winners have included everything from historical fiction to poetry to a nonfiction work on the making of the atomic bomb. Many of the winners on this list (and plenty in the honors section, too) deal with tough topics and do so with varying levels of skill. Johnny Tremain, the 1944 winner by Esther Forbes, covers disability, pride, rejection, and even death. Katherine Paterson’s 1978 winner, Bridge to Terabithia, also focuses on death, as well as bullying and poverty. There are some books that I believe shouldn’t even be in the honors section, such as Stephanie S. Tolan’s Surviving the Applewhites, and I just generally have an aversion to everything written by Scott O’Dell (four of his books appear on this list). For those wondering, I wrote about Tolan’s book in the July 2024 edition of the Washington Review of Books. You can read my whole tirade there, but suffice it to say, “It was a serious letdown from the beginning, unfortunately, as weak characters and absurd plotlines poured across the page.” As for Scott O’Dell, well, I’ve had it out for him ever since I read The Spanish Smile as a teen; it’s ostensibly your typical coming-of-age story — if typical coming-of-age stories involve luxurious private islands, controlling fathers, and gruesome murders. Fair or not, I’ve loathed his books ever since.
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