< Newbery Medal and Honor Books
Given the Newbery Award's prestige it would be easy to assume that the award winners are all excellent books for children. The Biblioguides Team has not found this to be the case. We always want to provide parents with the information they need to make the best book decisions for their families. With that goal in mind, we've put together a complete list of all medal winners and honor books since inception, and the Biblioguides Review Team is working together to read our way through the winners and to provide a review. Where we have not yet reviewed a book, a description directly from the dust jacket or from the publisher has been provided. In some cases, we have shared a brief synopsis from The Newbery and Caldecott Awards: A Guide to the Medal and Honor Books (1999).
Reviews are the thoughts and opinions of the particular reviewer and do not necessarily represent all members of the team. Reviews will continue to be added as the team reads more of the Newbery books. We hope this list will help you familiarize yourself with the various winners and provide the necessary information to determine which books would be a good fit for your family!
Call It Courage
By: Armstrong Sperry
Medal Winner
NOT REVIEWED
MAFATU was afraid of the sea. It had taken his mother when he was a baby, and it seemed to him that the sea gods sought vengeance at having been cheated of Mafatu. So, though he was the son of the Great Chief of Hikueru, a race of Polynesians who worshipped courage, and he was named Stout Heart, he feared and avoided the sea, till everyone branded him a coward.
When he could no longer bear their taunts and jibes, he determined to conquer that fear or be conquered—so he went off in his canoe, alone except for his little dog and pet albatross. A storm gave him his first challenge. Then days on a desert island found him resourceful beyond his own expectation. This is the story of how his courage grew and how he finally returned home exhausted in body, but strong and fearless in spirit—truly Mafatu, the Stout Heart.
This is a legend. It happened many years ago, but even today the people of Hikueru sing this story and tell it over their evening fires.
From the dust jacket
★
REVIEW TEAM FAVORITE
Blue Willow
By: Doris Gates
Illustrated by: Paul Lantz
Honor
Reviewed by: Diane Pendergraft
Also read and recommended by: Diane Pendergraft, Sandy Hall
Between 1930 and 1940, Gates worked as a children’s librarian in Fresno, California, where she became familiar with many children of migrant workers during the Great Depression. One notable aspect of this book is that it is considered to be, if not the first, then one of the first realistic “problem” stories about a child. In 1945, author Howard Pease listed Doris Gates among only three children’s authors he knew of who had written “a story intimately related to this modern world, a story that takes up a modern problem and thinks it through without evasion.”
What I find important about this story is the peek into a time that may seem like ancient history to many of us, and certainly will to our children. I frequently struggle with the seemingly impossible – communicating to my students that the lifestyle we take for granted in America exists only in a small part of the globe in a tiny slice of human history. How can I make this real to them? Stories!
I can’t contrive a situation where young children can experience moving to a new town with only what possessions will fit in their car, taking up residence in a one-room shack where they must hope no one will notice they’re living before it’s time to move on. Few parents are likely to allow me to pull the back seat out of their car and use it for their child’s bed indefinitely. I don’t know any ten-year-olds who have to hang out the laundry before they can go play, and I’ve never been acquainted with a child who longed to go to school because the opportunity of regular attendance has been denied them. Doris Gates knew these children. Her story can do this impossible task for me.
Read full review
The Long Winter
By: Laura Ingalls Wilder
Illustrated by: Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle
Honor
NOT REVIEWED
One fall about sixty years ago, in Dakota Territory, it looked as though the coming winter would be a hard one. So Pa decided that it would be wise to move in from the claim to the little town of two hundred persons. If blizzards were really coming it would be better to be near neighbors than alone on the prairie.
No sooner had the little family moved than the snow and bitter cold started. For days Laura and Carrie couldn't even get down the road to the schoolhouse. Then the train couldn't come through any more, and supplies became dangerously low. Christmas was as cheerful as the Ingalls family could make it, but as January passed the food situation became acute. Young Almanzo Wilder then set out on a search for wheat. It was a dangerous journey but he made it.
At last there came a night when Laura awoke to hear dripping on the roof. The winter, that hard winter of 1880-81, was over. The sun came out, the snows melted, the trains came through again. And in May when the Ingalls Christmas barrel finally arrived they had the best, the happiest celebration they had ever had.
From the dust jacket
Nansen
By: Anna Gertrude Hall
Illustrated by: Boris Artzybasheff
Honor
NOT REVIEWED
Fridtjof Nansen died in 1930, ending a life full of honor and accomplishment all too soon, for there were still things left unfinished for others to carry on. His name is one of the greatest among all our contemporaries, and it is one of the ironies of fate that he himself should not be alive today and still continuing, with all his boundless energy and initiative, his great work for science and humanity.
"He was scientist, then explorer, scientist again, and lastly statesman," the author writes. "Possibly there was no plan, but certainly there was a purpose in Fridtjof Nansen's life, something within him that urged him always to use all the powers he had. If he seemed to change his course, it was in every case to do a greater thing, not a smaller."
The qualities of fearlessness, concentration, discipline, so apparent in him even as a young boy, grew with the man throughout his life as explorer, scientist, statesman. This book is adventure of the most exciting kind: the life of a man who will grow into a greater and greater hero as you read.
From the dust jacket
Young Mac of Fort Vancouver
By: Mary Jane Carr
Illustrated by: Richard Holberg
Honor
NOT REVIEWED
Just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon, is the city of Vancouver, Washington, and there, before there was any state of Washington, or any state of Oregon, in territory which both the United States and England were claiming, stood Fort Vancouver, the principal western post of the great fur trading company, the Hudson's Bay Company of England. Here Dr. John McLoughlin, a man big in soul and body, ruled as chief factor. He governed not only the fort and fur traders, but the thousands of Indians who made up the population of the then uncivilized country. They called him Great Tyee, Great Chief.
It was to this fort that Henri LeGrand, the voyageur, brought young Donald MacDermott to place him under the guidance of the great White-headed Eagle. Donald's fear that at heart he was only a tenderfoot was conquered when he won the feather of the Northmen.
Although he missed his mother, White Cloud of the Crees, he lived by the voyageur creed: "Keep a high heart!" He didn't like school, but he went—to the first school west of the Rockies; he had wonderful rides on Bluebelle; he went with George Allen on his rounds to visit the sick Indians; he rescued Mia from the tribe that held the little girl captive; and then he, himself, was seized by Three Gulls, the medicine man with the tomaniwas eye. It took a great deal of courage to be worthy of the Northman feather, but Young Mac was worthy.
This is a story about the typical sons of the fur trade, whose fathers were traders and whose mothers were Indian woman. It is their story—these boys!
From the dust jacket
