< 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 Last Cuentista
By: Donna Barba Higuera
Medal Winner
NOT REVIEWED
There lived a girl named Petra Peña, who wanted nothing more than to be a storyteller, like her abuelita.
But Petra’s world is ending. Earth has been destroyed by a comet, and only a few hundred scientists and their children—among them Petra and her family—have been chosen to journey to a new planet. They are the ones who must carry on the human race.
Hundreds of years later, Petra wakes to this new planet—and the discovery that she is the only person who remembers Earth. A sinister Collective has taken over the ship during its journey, bent on erasing the sins of humanity’s past. They have systematically purged the memories of all aboard—or purged them altogether.
Petra alone now carries the stories of our past, and with them, any hope for our future. Can she make them live again?
Pura Belpré Honor-winning author Donna Barba Higuera presents us with a brilliant journey through the stars, to the very heart of what makes us human.
From the publisher
Red, White, and Whole
By: Rajani LaRocca
Honor
Reviewed by: Deanna Knoll
Recommended age: 12+
Also read and recommended by: Christine Kallner
While I don't fully understand a novel written in free verse (the literary form just doesn't make sense to me), this book is quite good if I can overlook that.
This is a coming of age story with a twist; Reha's parents are Indian and she feels pulled in two different directions—she wants to be fully American, and she wants to please her more traditional Indian parents. And then her mom is diagnosed with leukemia. While Reha navigates many of the challenges facing teenage girls, she does so through the lens of an immigrant—trying to fit in with the culture without fully understanding it or how that affects her parents. Once she is faced with the reality of a very sick mother, those cultural issues are less important to her than her love for her mother. I appreciate the strong message of connection with parents conveyed in this story. So often modern books tend to demonize parents who want their children to act a certain way or think the same as they do. This one doesn't do that; instead it brings them together through hardship.
Too Bright to See
By: Kyle Lukoff
Honor
NOT REVIEWED
A ghost story. Coming of age. Gender identity.
It’s the summer before middle school and eleven-year-old Bug’s best friend Moira has decided the two of them need to use the next few months to prepare. For Moira, this means figuring out the right clothes to wear, learning how to put on makeup, and deciding which boys are cuter in their yearbook photos than in real life. But none of this is all that appealing to Bug, who doesn’t particularly want to spend more time trying to understand how to be a girl. Besides, there’s something more important to worry about: A ghost is haunting Bug’s eerie old house in rural Vermont…and maybe haunting Bug in particular. As Bug begins to untangle the mystery of who this ghost is and what they’re trying to say, an altogether different truth comes to light–Bug is transgender.
From the publisher
★
REVIEW TEAM FAVORITE
Watercress
By: Andrea Wang
Illustrated by: Jason Chin
Honor
Reviewed by: Deanna Knoll
Recommended age: 6+
Also read and recommended by: Christine Kallner, Sandy Hall
This book is remarkable. The author truly wrote what she knew and shared this beautiful story of memories. Alternating between her mother's present-day love for watercress and her daughter's subsequent disdain for eating something from a ditch with the remembrance of her mother's childhood and starvation, it's a powerful reminder of how food itself is connected to some of our deepest fears. After reading this book, I was immediately transported back to my own childhood breakfast table, slurping cantaloupe and listening to my dad talk about eating these same melons—one of the foods he and his sisters scavenged from the nearby produce processing center in central CA to stave off hunger yet another day.
This book speaks to every child whose parents embarrass them with their old ways and the importance of appreciating where we've come from and how it makes us who we are today.
