1967 Newbery Medal and Honor Books

Up A Road Slowly

By: Irene Hunt

Medal Winner
NOT REVIEWED

When her mother died, seven-year-old Julie Trelling was sent to live in the country with her maiden aunt.

Living with the austere and inflexible Aunt Cordelia was a difficult adjustment to make, but gradually Julie began to understand her aunt and the values she lived by—integrity, compassion, and strength of character.

Up a Road Slowly is the story of a girl growing to maturity and of the people who influenced her life along the way; Uncle Haskell, the weak-willed dilettante who taught her tolerance; Laura, the beautiful sister who taught her to share love; Aggie, the retarded, unkempt schoolmate who taught her compassion; and Brett, the high school hero who taught her to be wiser with her heart.

This is a sensitive and perceptive book which will be welcomed and appreciated by those who are now experiencing or who have already experienced the sometimes painful often beautiful years of adolescence. It is the story of one girl, Julie Trelling, but it could be the story of many.

Ages 12 and up

From the dust jacket

The Jazz Man

By: Mary Hays Weik
Illustrated by: Ann Grifalconi

Honor
NOT REVIEWED

This is the story of a boy named Zeke. He lived on the topmost floor of a big, old brownstone house in Harlem, U.S.A.

Every day Zeke's Mama ran down the five long flights of stairs to go to work. His Daddy went down to work, too, but not the kind of jobs Zeke's Mama liked.

Zeke himself seldom went down. The children teased him because one leg was shorter than the other. So he just stayed in the apartment and looked out the window. He knew all the people across the court, but he kept special watch on empty room with warm yellow walls. It was a place just waiting for something wonderful—maybe even a man with a monkey!

What did come was the Jazz Man, whose music was the real business. His piano was a kind of magic that built dreams out of a mixed-up world. But even the Jazz Man couldn't help when Zeke's real troubles began.

From the dust jacket

The King's Fifth

By: Scott O'Dell
Illustrated by: Samuel Bryant

Honor
NOT REVIEWED

There were seven of them when they left the summer camp of Coronado's army and struck out into that unknown land, which now our great Southwest, to find the golden cities of Cibola.

Of the seven, Captain Mendoza and his three soldiers were drawn by their greed for treasure; Father Francisco went for the love of the souls he hoped to save; Esteban de Sandoval, whose story this is, thought only of the maps he would draw of the countries still unseen and scarcely dreamed of in the courts of Spain; and Zia, the Indian girl, their guide and interpreter, who saw more clearly than the others the hazards of the dangerous journey.

For Esteban it was all a glorious adventure until that moment when he held in his hand a piece of the gleaming metal and for the first time felt its awful alchemy. As one city after another — Chicilticale, Hawikuh, Nexpan City of the Abyss, Tawhi  the City of the Clouds — is conquered by the conquistadors in their search for the shining hoard, this alchemy seizes upon the expedition until all is sacrificed to the lust for gold — blood, honor, sanity — life itself.

But even as Esteban survives the hardships of mountains and desert, the evil of ruthless men, so does he make his way across the country of the mind. The two journeys follow parallel courses, and for each it seems that a maker of maps, no matter what his skill with cross staff and astrolabe or knowledge of the stars, still needs a guide to find his way.

In this deeply affecting novel Scott O'Dell envelops the reader in the heroic world of the conquistadors — a world that is at once somber and many-colored. Ruthless they may have been, these steel-helmeted young men of Spain, but they lived their lives on the very edge of eternity with style and uncommon courage.

From the dust jacket

Zlateh The Goat and Other Stories

By: Isaac Bashevis Singer
Illustrated by: Maurice Sendak

Honor
NOT REVIEWED

The seven tales in this book had their beginnings in middle-European Jewish folklore and legend—a world where the cruel hardships and wry misunderstandings of everyday life could be offset, as often as not, by wondrous visits from angels and demons. Isaac Bashevis Singer first began to perceive the magical shapes and rustlings of that world of imagination in the year prior to World War I, as a small boy in Poland, listening to his mother's bedtime stories.

Now, in his first book for children, he gives enduring form to all its inhabitants: to its children, its lovers, its scolding wives and henpecked husbands, to the amiable fools of Chelm (the fabled town where not but fools dwell), to its devils and goblins, to all the memories that come crowding in from his boyhood.

In each of Maurice Sendak's seventeen pictures, this same world of heavenly visions and tumbledown hamlets, of patient animals and hardworking men is perfectly captured, perfectly portrayed.

Bernard Malamud writes: "I think very highly of I.B. Singer's book of children's stories. They uniquely combine elements of fantasy, comedy, love. . . .Mr. Singer enriches children's literature."

All children will agree, for in this book Isaac Bashevis Singer and Maurice Sendak have conspired to give them a masterpiece.

From the dust jacket