< 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!
The Slave Dancer
By: Paula Fox
Illustrated by: Eros Keith
Medal Winner
NOT REVIEWED
Jess Bollier was thirteen when he was kidnapped, bound in canvas, and carried across the ocean to the coast of Africa.
One day in 1840, Jessie was living with his mother and sister in New Orleans, where he earned pennies playing his fife on the docks. The next day, he with his fife was on board The Moonlight, a slave ship, with a hateful duty awaiting him. The making of music seemed to Jessie to have no rightful place in the business of trading rum for black men, women, and children; of driving them through the dangerous heaving surf to a long boat; of chaining and bringing them to a waiting ship, and carrying them to a place where if they survived, they would be sold like cloth. But Jessie—his heart sinking—played his fife. He had to, for Captain Cawthorne would have the slaves "danced," to keep their muscles strong, their bodies profitable.
And the men of the ship accepted the custom. They would get their share of the profit, and so did not heed the horrors of the trade which every day grew more vivid, more inescapable to Jessie.
The Slave Dancer is Jessie's story of this voyage, of four months of his life and near death, in the unforgettable company of Purvis, Grime, and Stout of the crew and young Ras of the cargo.
From the dust jacket of the 1975 printing
The Dark is Rising
By: Susan Cooper
Illustrated by: Alan E. Cober
Honor
NOT REVIEWED
On the Midwinter Day that is his eleventh birthday, Will Stanton discovers a special gift—that he is the last of the Old Ones, immortals dedicated throughout the ages to keeping the world from domination by the forces of evil, the Dark. He is plunged at once into a quest for the six magical Signs that will one day aid the Old Ones in the final battle between the Dark and the Light. Thereafter, for the twelve days of Christmas while the Dark is rising, life for Will, although outwardly normal, is strangely wonderful as he is drawn through terror and delight.
The book is a rare act of creative imagination in which the reader will be equally moved by the warm happy village life Will shares with his large family and the nearly overwhelming danger he encounters, often in other centuries and places, while he seeks the Signs and learns their power. Interweaving ancient Celtic and English traditions with the legends of Buckinghamshire hills and valleys where she grew up, Susan Cooper has written a superlative dramatic fantasy of the eternal conflict between good and evil out of which all myth is made.
From the dust jacket
