Friday, January 11, 2008

Newbery Buzz

Did you know that this year the American Library Association is announcing its awards like the Newbery and Caldecott early? It's happening on January 14th! I can't wait. What are your predictions?

I know Hugo Cabret its quite a mix of illustrations and text so I hope that it won't be left out because it doesn't quite fit in any category. Wednesday Wars and Elijah of Buxton seem like shoe in to me to they do like to reward newcomers and I would love to see A Crooked Kind of Perfect Win (and who knows about Elijah of buxton because there are some historical inaccuracies there causing some controversy and then there's also the Coretta Scott King Award to condsider). I also wouldn't be surprised to see Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian or Emma Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree make the list, but I haven't read those two so I can't add my two cents there.

So what do you think?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Stephanie,
It's my first time on your blog: I'm following all the Newbery predictions I can find. I feel I should comment on the idea that seems to be coming up in a lot of places, that there are historical inaccuracies in Elijah of Buxton. I don't know what claims you are aware of: the main one that I know of is the idea that Kamau arrived relatively recently (evidence: his limited English and his cultural orientation), but the slave trade became illegal back in 1808. A preliminary search led me to the information in Grolier, Encyc. Americana and a thoroughly footnoted article in Wikipedia, which all agreed that enslaved people were brought into the US well into the 1850s. (Encyc. Americana figures are that there were 700,000 enslaved people in 1790, and more than 3 million in 1860: I've seen this figure estimated elsewhere at 4 million.) Just wanted to set the record straight.
I'm looking forward to the 14th too!