< 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!
Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village
By: Laura Amy Schlitz
Illustrated by: Robert Byrd
Medal Winner
Reviewed by: Deanna Knoll
Recommended age: 12 and up
Also read and recommended by: Sandy Hall
What this book is not is a romantic tale of the Middle Ages. It IS a Canterbury Tales reader's theatre for middle schoolers and I love it. Each of the 20 monologues/dialogues explores the realities of medieval village life from the perspective of children—the gritty day-to-day life including bedbug bites, lambing, ridicule for being a hunchback, dung heaps in the middle of the street, and prejudice against outsiders. With the spare, first-person writing, the middle school reader has the opportunity to look through the eyes of someone their own age for a few minutes. In addition, the footnotes and six "A Little Background" sections are fascinating and expand on the stories shared by the characters in this story.
Sometimes I briefly consider the thought of enjoying a "simpler" life in times long ago, but books like this remind me that the creature comforts that allow me time to think about that wouldn't have even existed and I would likely have died young in childbirth or suffered losses from the plague or owed our entire year's earnings to the lord of the castle, etc.
The author originally wrote this when she worked as a librarian in a middle school and wanted her students to actually care about history. I think she was successful and I found this book to be insightful, intriguing and compelling, leaving me wanting more, not less.
Elijah of Buxton
By: Christopher Paul Curtis
Honor
Reviewed by: Sherry Early
Also read and recommended by: Terri Shown
Elijah is an eleven year old boy living in a settlement for free (escaped or bought out of slavery) Negroes in Canada just across the border from Detroit, Michigan. The year is 1860, and the name of the settlement is Buxton. (It’s a real place, by the way. A little of its history is recounted in the author’s note at the back of the book.)
In the first few chapters, Elijah gets into all sorts of scrapes because of his fragile constitution or because of his typical boylike mischief. The story reads like a typical boyhood adventure story, with a bit of an atypical setting.
About midway through the tone and plot turn serious as Elijah learns to get past being fragile in order to help a friend redeem his family from slavery. There’s also a great discussion of why it’s inappropriate for even black people among themselves to use the n-word.
The entire book is written in first person from Elijah’s point of view, and it’s all written in dialect. Some kids may have a little trouble with the dialect, but after I got used to it I thought that it gave the book a sense of history and transported the reader back in time as well as or better than any other device the author could have used.
As I said, the ending turns serious and pretty much heart-rending. This is not a book for younger readers, and older ones (grades 5-8) may have some challenging questions about what happens in the book and about the dark side of U.S. history. That’s a good thing, but be prepared for the discussion.
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Feathers
By: Jacqueline Woodson
Honor
Reviewed by: Sarah Kim
Recommended age: 12+
This is an understated story that draws you in to the everyday life of the narrator, Frannie, an African American 6th grade girl, during the winter of 1971. We enter into her school life where she navigates friendships, faith, a class bully, race, and a new boy in class that the kids call "Jesus Boy". At home Frannie muses about her older brother who is deaf and her mother who is tired and has suffered two miscarriages. There's a lot for Frannie to think about but nothing much actually happens in the story.
★
REVIEW TEAM FAVORITE
The Wednesday Wars
By: Gary D. Schmidt
Honor
Reviewed by: Sara Masarik
Recommended age: 13+
Also read and recommended by: Christine Kallner, Diane Pendergraft, Sarah Kim, Sherry Early, Tanya Arnold
This book is brilliant and hilarious while also being poignant and tender. The story is not merely set in the early 1960s, but the war in Vietnam, the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, Atomic Bomb Awareness, and baseball with the Yankees are all real and vibrant aspects of the story. As a mama, I find that the 1960s is a difficult period of time to teach to my children. I would say that this exciting and thoughtful story has been very helpful in introducing that tumultuous time to my children.
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