I chose to read through Heavy Medal‘s Newbery shortlist again this year, and I figured I’d give some brief thoughts on them. I planned ahead this time and spent a month or so over the summer reading books that were leading on the blog’s straw polls, which also means I read a few that didn’t end up on the list, but I’ll mention them as well.
I’ll admit I have a bias towards preferring prose novels over the other formats on the shortlist, but to be fair, it seems like the Newbery committee does too. I’ll start with them.
Quagmire Tiarello Couldn’t Be Better and The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman might be my two favorites from the list, and interestingly, they have very similar premises. Others have pointed this out, but this year had more books about moms disappearing than you’d expect – I read And Then, Boom! and Olivetti because they were doing pretty well in the Heavy Medal straw polls, but they ultimately didn’t make the cut, but they also fell into this category. Tenth Mistake starts out more heartbreaking, with Hank and his little sister just trying to survive, while Quagmire acts out and self-sabotages as a result of the stress, so the road to stability has different stakes and different character arcs. Both have their mothers reappear and take them away on a misguided trip, and ultimately both protagonists find stable father figures to stay with. Tenth Mistake led Heavy Medal polling by the end of the year and I really enjoyed it when I read it this summer, but Quagmire has some recency bias for me, so it’s hard for me to pick which I preferred.
Two more books I read in December were Magnolia Wu Unfolds it All and A Strange Thing Happened in Cherry Hall. Both were fun, quick reads – Magnolia Wu seems to be targeted a little younger than the other prose novels on the list – but I’d recommend both. Magnolia Wu tackles issues of being an immigrant’s child and feeling like you fit in on the backdrop of New York City and a small cast of colorful characters. Quirky and enjoyable. Cherry Hall is a mystery with supernatural elements that probably isn’t in serious contention for the medal, but I really enjoyed it.
There are the two Color novels, which I also liked. The Color of Sound goes a little overboard with its reliance on music and color metaphors (okay, it’s in the title, but still), but looking past that, it’s a nice novel with magic realism elements that explores the role of family history and Jewish identity. Mallory in Full Color is all about identity, in traditional ways (I’m a tween and who am I?) and in more progressive ways (what is gender and sexuality?). The tension grows as Mallory builds up smalls lies about who she is, what she wants, and the webcomic she writes, and it builds to a breaking point where the truth comes out, and once everything is sorted there’s a happy ending for everyone.
The remaining three prose novels I was cooler on. The First State of Being is a sci-fi novel by Erin Entrada Kelly, who also wrote 2018 Newbery winner Hello, Universe (which I liked a lot). This one seemed weaker – the sci-fi elements felt stale, Michael was insecure to the point of being difficult to connect with, and the end fit together a little too perfectly. Not Quite a Ghost feels like a few different plots mashed together that don’t quite link up. The ghost doesn’t really even appear until near the end, it’s over quickly, and doesn’t get solved with the power of friendship like it seems like would wrap up the other narrative thread. Max in the House of Spies might have been my least favorite. For one thing, it’s the first in a series, and it just ends. I get having plot lines that run over the course of the series, but it did not seem like being accepted to be a spy was the primary task of this first installment, so it didn’t seem like there was an arc to justify this as a standalone book. Also, Berg and Stein, the two little magic creatures only Max can see, actively detract from the book. They’re not very funny, they chime in with comments that undermine “show, don’t tell,” and the big scene at the end of Max getting final approval to be a spy should have gotten solved by something he learned over the course of the book, but instead, it’s a deus ex machina of one of them knowing a secret.
These didn’t make the shortlist, but I read Lois Lowry’s Tree. Table. Book. and Kate DiCamillo’s Ferris and liked both a lot. Both authors have won a couple Newberys already, who knows, maybe those could too. I also read Allie Millington’s Olivetti, and did not like it very much.
So again, I tend to prefer prose novels. I’ve never spent the time to get into poetry, and don’t feel like I have a good grasp of how to read it and enough experience to tell if it’s outstanding or not. Picture books – none of which made the shortlist this year, but did last year, and have won the Newbery – seem so different (and so short!) compared to novels that trying to judge them relative to each other seems futile. Graphic novels and non-fiction I can get into, although they’ve been relatively limited in representation the two years I’ve read through the shortlists.
That leaves novels in verse. So far, these have been very hit and miss for me. I liked Eb & Flow from last year a lot, and Mid-Air from this year is probably in my top five from the short list – it tackles some deep material on race and identity, but also makes it universal in being about a kid trying to figure himself out. When verse novels are bad, though, it seems like there’s no value added from not just writing the story as a standard prose novel, to the point where it feels like a trick an author uses when they write a story that doesn’t quite make it to 25,000 words and they need to pad out the page count. The more I read of them, the more I dislike the cliched gimmicks, like having the text “fall down” the page when a character falls, or spreading out the words in a sentence when a character feels emotionally distant.
This year, that’s Kareem Between. It’s a novel in verse that has gotten a lot of buzz – it won the National Book Award for young people’s literature. This is the quintessential example for me of what I don’t like about novels in verse, and on top of the verse gimmicks, it also was over-the-top gimmicky on drawing metaphors with football. Every single chapter at least had a title with a football term, and a lot of them explained how Kareem felt like some football position in some football scenario. The problem with disliking this book is that the story itself is important: Kareem is the son of Syrian immigrants, and his mother is traveling back home when Trump’s travel ban goes into place in 2017. It’s valuable for kids to learn about this, and to get a firsthand account from a character affected by it, but it then goes over the top on that, too – Kareem literally gives a political speech to the public explaining what’s happening and why it’s bad. It was the middle grade book version of a stand up joke that gets clapter instead of a laugh.
The other novel in verse was Louder than Hunger, which hit some of the same pet peeves as Kareem, but actually won me over by the end. I also read And Then, Boom!, and thought it was cheap in the lengths it abused its main character to make the ending even happier.
Black Girl You Are Atlas was the only book of poetry on the list, and again, I don’t know how to judge these things. I enjoyed the poems. Plain Jane and the Mermaids was the only graphic novel, and I liked it a lot. Funny, an art style I enjoyed, a cute message. Definitely worth checking out. Enigma Girls was the only non-fiction, and it was fine. An interesting subject, but I don’t think it lent itself to producing a compelling narrative, so it was a bit dry.
To summarize, there were a handful of books this year that I thought were very good, but none stood out as great to me. I would be happy with any of the first four prose novels I discussed winning, Mid-Air, or Ferris or Tree. Table. Book. which weren’t on the shortlist. With that said, I have no idea which will win, if it’s even one of the ones on the shortlist. Like I mentioned, the Newbery seems to go to prose novels, but maybe in the absence of a standout, there’s a chance for something like Black Girl You Are Atlas to be the first poetry collection to win in awhile. We’ll see!
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