Caldecott & Newbery Best Bets

 Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets!

           

Like so many other children’s literature lovers, I enjoy the annual game of trying to predict the winners of the Caldecott Medal (given to artist of “the most distinguished picture book”) and the Newbery Medal (given to the author of “the most distinguished contribution to American literature to children”).

In my last 10 or so years as the Scripps Howard children’s book reviewer, I did an annual column looking at some of the best possibilities. It's such a lot of fun that I've decided to continue the tradition. My guesses are based on two main ingredients:

 __ the results of the various mock Caldecott and Newbery discussions around the country; and

__ the opinions of a duo of hugely-knowledgeable children’s literature experts: Amy Kellman, a Pittsburgh children’s literature consultant, and Anita Silvey, children’s book publisher, editor and author of several books, including the book & website, "Children's Book-a-Day Almanac."

I also try to keep up with the blogs – Calling Caldecott and Heavy Medal that spend months discussing the merits of possible winners. 

Stirring this stew of information, here’s a list of a few good bets for each medal:

Caldecott Medal top possibilities:

“Journey,” written and illustrated by Aaron Becker

“Mr. Tiger Goes Wild,” written and illustrated by Peter Brown

“Locomotive,” written and illustrated by Brian Floca

“Mr. Wuffles,” written and illustrated by David Wiesner

Other possibilities include: “The Mighty LaLouche,” illustrated by Sophie Blackall and written by Matthew Olshan; “Knock Knock: My Dad’s Dream for Me,” illustrated by Bryan Collier and written by Daniel Beaty; “The Dark,” illustrated by 2013 Caldecott Medalist Jon Klassen and written by Lemony Snicket; and “Nelson Mandela,” written and illustrated by Kadir Nelson.

Newbery Medal top possibilities:

“The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp” by Kathi Appelt

 “Zebra Forest” by Adine Gewirtz

“The Year of Billy Miller” by Kevin Henkes

“The Thing About Luck” by Cynthia Kadohata

Other possibilities include: “Doll Bones” by Holly Black; “Ghost Hawk” by Susan Cooper; “Flora & Ulysses” by Kate DiCamillo; “Counting By Sevens” by Holly Goldberg Sloan; “The Real Boy” by Anne Ursu; and “P.S. Be Eleven” by Rita Williams-Garcia.

If you forced me to pick, I’d lay my bets on “Journey” for the Caldecott Medal and “The Thing About Luck” for the Newbery Medal. But who really knows? It could be something totally out of blue! It’s just fun to discuss the possibilities and anticipate the actual award announcements, which will be broadcast livelive.webcastinc.com/ala/2014/live/ on Monday, January 27 at 8 a.m. For even more fun, tune into School Library Journal’s first-ever “Youth Media Awards Pre-Game and Post-Game Show."

Tales From the Library: Our Library’s “Mock-Mock” Caldecott

As the time grows near for the January 27^th announcement  of the 2014 Caldecott Medal winner, libraries all over the country are choosing their own “mock” Caldecott winners. There are even blogs like Calling Caldecott and A Fuse # 8 Production  that are tracking the mock winners as a way of trying to predict just what might actually win.

            

My library certainly isn’t immune to this “mock fever” and we recently chose our own “mock-mock” 2014 Caldecott Medal winner for 2014. (Read on for why it’s a “mock-mock”). Our choice was “Mr. Wuffles,” written and illustrated by David Wiesner. (His brief video on the making of the book is well worth watching). Meanwhile, we had three “mock-mock” 2014 Caldecott Honor books: “Little Santa,” written and illustrated by Jon Agee; “Big Snow,” written and illustrated by Jonathan Bean; and “The Day the Crayons Quit,” written by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers.

So, why do I call our program a “mock-mock” Caldecott? Unlike most libraries where it’s mostly adults who spend hours seriously discussing potential winners in a mock Caldecott program, the voters at my library are as young as three years old. Crazy? Yes, but it’s also hugely entertaining, and the program has been such a big draw among library patrons of all ages that we’ve started subtitling it “a family book club.”  Young participants, and their parents, tell me they learned how to really look – and analyze – the illustrations in a picture book, a key skill in our highly visual world. And the program also has been a great way to focus on books in an entertaining way for various ages. As one parent told me, “It’s so wonderful to do something literary with my kids.”

            

This is the third year our library has done its own version of a mock Caldecott program. When I decided to start the program, I had fond visions of arguing amicably for hours with other adults or older kids over details in an illustration and discussing whether a particular book met a key Caldecott criterion. It just sounded like a heck of a lot of fun for anyone who loves children’s books (yes, we can be a weirdly-focused bunch).

             

But the participants at our first meeting of what I termed the “Caldecott Club” turned my carefully-laid plans upside down. Instead of lots of adults eager to nitpick over Caldecott criteria, our Caldecott Club participants were parents and their children, including many preschoolers. These patrons all were fascinated by the idea of reading and discussing together some of the best new picture books being published.

            

Who was I to argue with success? So I decided to call our group a “mock-mock” Caldecott, and just go with the flow. To help our youngest participants understand what we were trying to do, I asked my talented library colleague Dave Burbank to develop a list of “kid-friendly” Caldecott criteria. Dave broke down the key points into language that even preschoolers could potentially grasp, and which certainly could be understood by elementary students on up. We have used that criteria as the framework for our monthly discussions since then although, truth be told, it still can be quite challenging to keep a preschooler on track to discuss illustrations in a book when they really want to talk about the story! But that’s all part of the fun.

            

For the first year, we offered our Caldecott Club once a month from October through February. Each month, from October through January, we read several books (using our “ELMO” overhead projector and a big screen so everyone could really see the illustrations). At each of those meetings, we chose a winner and then in January, we took those four monthly winners (including the January pick) and voted on our choice for the mock Caldecott Medal. The other three books were our mock Caldecott Honors. Then, in February, we gathered once more to read the actual Caldecott Medal and Caldecott Honor books.

            

Last year, we added another dimension to celebrate the 75^th birthday of the Caldecott Medal. Instead of just meeting for five months, we went almost year-round and, in addition to potential new Caldecott Medal winners, we read some classic Caldecott winners from each decade.

            

This year, we went back to the initial format and will conclude our current Caldecott Club in February, when we read the actual 2014 winners. From October through our early January meeting, we read and discussed 16 picture books, all chosen from the booklist developed by the Calling Caldecott blog. Of course, we couldn’t read everything on the list and, in choosing what we did read, I tried to think of our audience, which obviously skews pretty young. That means we didn’t read some terrific, but longer, potential 2014 Caldecott Medal winners like “Locomotive” by Brian Floca. But every family at our meetings got a copy of the “Calling Caldecott” list, and many parents used it as a guide for reading the books we didn’t get to discuss in our get-togethers.

            

Now it’s the time that we all get to wait until the actual 2014 Caldecott Committee members make their choices behind closed and locked doors. (Although one committee member recently gave Calling Caldecott a peek into what it’s like in the weeks leading up to the panel’s final discussions; it’s definitely worth a read.) Meanwhile, all of our library’s “mock-mock” Caldecott participants are full of questions. Will “Mr. Wuffles” really win and make David Wiesner the first person to win four Caldecott Medals? Or will the winner be “Journey,” written and illustrated by Aaron Becker or “Mr. Tiger Goes Wild,” written and illustrated by Peter Brown – two of the top choices of many library “mock” groups.? Or will the winning book be something completely out of the blue? Check in on January 27^th for the answer!

Caldecotts and Caldenotts

People who love children’s literature often enjoy trying to guess who will win the winners of the biggest awards given annually to the best children’s books: the Caldecott Medal, given to the best-illustrated children’s book, and the Newbery Medal, given to the best-written children’s book. The winners of the medals are announced in January at the American Library Association’s Midwinter conference and it’s a Big Deal since the medals are considered the Academy Awards of the kid lit world. Hundreds of librarians – including me -- will be on hand early on the morning of January 27 in a conference hall in Philadelphia to watch the award announcements in person, and thousands of others will watch via the Internet. While the Caldecott and Newbery medals are the big kahuna awards, there also are lots of other great children’s literature awards, including the Sibert Medal, given to the best non-fiction book for kids, the Printz Award, given to the best book for teens, the Geisel Award for the best beginning reader, etc.

Before the award announcements, however, there’s always a lot of buzz in librarian circles about the possible Caldecott and Newbery winners. I’m gathering up some of the possibilities now and will post on them in a couple of weeks. It’s important to note, however, that the awards process is top-secret. The choices are made by  committees of librarians – one committee for each award – and the committees meet literally behind closed doors.  In fact, members of the awards committees are forbidden from ever – I mean, ever! – revealing what goes on behind those doors.

But that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t have a lot of fun guessing about what some of the medal-worthy possibilities might be. In fact, many libraries hold their own “mock” Caldecott and Newbery medal discussions (look for an upcoming Tales from the Library on my library’s Caldecott Club, a kind of “mock-mock” Caldecott discussion group). And there are some great blogs out there in which people have serious yet entertaining discussions about the literary and artistic merits of books that might be Caldecott or Newbery possibilities. Two of my favorites are Heavy Medal: A Mock Newbery Blog  and Calling Caldecott. They’re both worth peeking at; if nothing else, you’ll learn about what librarians and other children’s literature experts consider some of the top kids’ books that were published this year. Heavy Medal’s discussion shortlist for their mock 2014 Newbery has a great mix of books, as does the Calling Caldecott list.

One more thing to add to the mix: to win the Newbery or Caldecott medal, the author or illustrator has to either be American or live here, and the books also must be published in the United States. So there’s always a whole bunch of books that are fabulous, but are ineligible for either award because they weren’t published here or weren’t written by an American or U.S. resident. One of my favorite picture books from last year, for example, was “Press Here,” written and illustrated by Herve Tullet; he’s French, and lives in Paris, so the book wasn’t eligible for the Caldecott Medal. In a recent Calling Caldecott blog post titled “Ineligible Internationals,” school librarian Robin Smith discussed this issue, and also pointed to an effort designed to highlight some of the ineligible picture books. It’s called a “Mock Caldenott” and it is a truly creative idea. We might try it at our library next year!