1939 Newbery Medal and Honor Books

Thimble Summer

By: Elizabeth Enright

Medal Winner
NOT REVIEWED

A few hours after Garnet Linden had found a silver thimble in the dried-up river bed, the rains came to end the long drought on the farm, and with the rain came safety for the crops and for the stock, and money for Garnet's father. Garnet couldn't help feeling that the thimble was a kind of talisman. It certainly brought excitement.

Garnet's friends are a lively assortment of country personalities and many of her adventures stem from the natural happenings of a farm summer; barn-raising and threshing and harvest.

But Garnet and Citronella have their own private escapades, as two girls will who own a tree house, and can go into town by themselves if Mr. Freebody will give them a lift in his truck. And all summer long Garnet is feeding her pig, Timmy, with cod liver oil and choice scraps, fattening him for the County Fair in September.

Miss Enright has spent many of her summers on a Wisconsin farm and is, therefore, well equipped to write and picture what happened to Garnet.

From the dust jacket

Hello, the Boat!

By: Phyllis Crawford
Illustrated by: Edward Laning

Honor
NOT REVIEWED

THIS is the story of an everyday family who fled the depression of 1817 by moving westward. Rafts and flatboats and Conestoga wagons moved slowly into the new territory beyond the Alleghenies, but the Doak family made the journey down the Ohio river from Pittsburgh to Cincinnati on a boat fitted out as a store, peddling pots and pans, hardware, bonnets, dry goods and Yankee notions. Responding to the call of "Hello, the boat!" from settlers along the banks, Mother, Father, the children, Old Pappy and his fiddle all helped to make the trip as profitable as it was adventurous.

Combining accurate information about those days of tall tales and tall language with a truly spontaneous story, "Hello, the Boat!" recreates the life of young people of another day in a humorously realistic fashion. Remote from great national events, the narrative is extremely simple yet vivid, absorbing because of its truth.

From the dust jacket

Leader by Destiny: George Washington, Man and Patriot

By: Jeanette Eaton
Illustrated by: Jack Manley Rosé

Honor
NOT REVIEWED

Here, for the first time, is a biography of George Washington for young people which makes him a compelling and charming person as well as a great man. The author, an expert writer and a sound scholar, has departed radically from the sentimental, conventional presentation of Washington. We first see the boy against the background of colonial Virginia; then his gradual development into the leader and molder of his times.

A youthful desire for glory, and later, a real devotion to principle pushed George Washington into activities which made him known in every colony. The story shows clearly his change from the Tory to the Revolutionary point of view. Dramatic scenes picture the highlights of the struggle against England and the critical period in which he serves as our first President.

Leader by Destiny treats both an individual and an era of history in a manner all the more accurate because the book is human and unbiased. At last young people may see an august marble statue come to life.

From the dust jacket

Mr. Popper's Penguins

By: Richard and Florence Atwater
Illustrated by: Robert Lawson

Honor
NOT REVIEWED

Mr. Popper was a house-painter. Winters he read books on polar exploration while Mrs. Popper swept around him. He yearned to be an explorer. He wrote letters to explorers. He wrote one to Admiral Drake in the Antarctic. Admiral Drake sent him an Antarctic penguin which he named Captain Cook. Mr. Popper, Bill and Janie Popper were overjoyed. Mrs. Popper was not quite so pleased, but even she got used to giving up the refrigerator for a nest and having the cellar flooded for a swimming pool in summer and an ice rink in winter.

The penguin drooped. An appeal to a great aquarium brought not a cure but another droopy penguin named Greta. Both penguins stopped drooping and before long there were ten more penguins. Mr. Popper had little money. Ice plants, penguin-sized, are expensive. It worried him. It worried the people who sold the ice plant.

Finally Mr. Popper had an idea. He would train his flock as a vaudeville troupe. It worked wonderfully and delighted everybody except perhaps Pullman porters, traffic squads and all other vaudeville performers.

From the dust jacket

Nino

By: Valenti Angelo

Honor
NOT REVIEWED

Nino and Julio watched Julio's papa, Signor Ditto, as he wrestled with the gypsie's great bear, at the Fair. Which one would win? Would Julio's papa, who was so sure he could throw the bear? No matter how the match turned out, that was an exciting day.

Nino would have said it was the most exciting of all his days, if it hadn't been for the adventure of the storm, when he and his family were marooned and had nothing but pop-corn to eat. How delicious the Signora Ditto's wonderful Christmas feast tasted in contrast to that!

But even leaving all these things could not mar the great surprise that came so unexpectedly to Nino and his mother. You will not blame Nino for being happy, when you read here about the letter from America and all that followed its arrival. 

From the dust jacket

Penn

By: Elizabeth Janet Gray
Illustrated by: George Gillett Whitney

Honor
NOT REVIEWED

At twenty, William Penn seemed destined for a brilliant military or diplomatic career.  For this handsome, cultured, witty youth, life held the worldly and social success that usually awaited the talented son of a famous seventeenth-century English admiral.

But one day he attended a meeting of the Friends of Truth—called Quakers by the unconvinced—and became a follower of this persecuted, peaceful, and "unfashionable" religion.  Ignoring his father's threats of disinheritance, heedless of the inevitable loss of his social position, Penn became a devoted leader of the Friends.

Frequently imprisoned because the Quaker principles of peace, democracy, and freedom directly opposed the prevailing English concepts of Church and State, Penn came to be a defender of all the oppressed, defying the courts, whose justice was administered only when convenient.  In one of the highly dramatic scenes, richly portrayed by Miss Gray, Penn's resistance established once and for all the right of trial by jury.  But despite this and other triumphs, Penn and the Quakers realized that religious toleration could be firmly established, on a permanent basis, only in a new land, and to America they came to set up a new order where freedom and liberty should prevail. 

As governor of the new colony of Pennsylvania, Penn put into practice the principles for which the Quakers had struggled so long.  His treaty of peace and friendship with the Indians remained unbroken until after his death.  His colony's constitution, with its guarantees of civil liberties, served as a model for the Constitution of the United States.  Despite many reversals of fortune, both in the New World and in the Old, he lived to see his colony grow and thrive, a monument to his courage and faith.

Penn's life emerges from Miss Gray's narrative with the clear, concise strokes of an etching.  It is an inspiring story, dramatically rendered against the background of the stormy seventeenth century.  Amid England's religious and political conflicts, William Pen stands forth like a lighthouse of courage, honesty, and faith.  He was a great and good man, whose fight for right and freedom is all the more significant in this day when the very principles for which he fought are being threatened.

From the dust jacket