John Newbery Medal 2009
Awards
John Newbery Medal 2009
The John Newbery Medal honors the author of the year's most outstanding contribution to children's literature. Presented every year since 1922, the Medal is named for 18th-century British bookseller John Newbery. Henrik Van Loon won the first Newbery Medal in 1922 for THE STORY OF MANKIND. Receiving the Newbery Medal virtually guarantees that the winning book will remain in print and on library and bookstore shelves for years to come.
2009 Winner
THE GRAVEYARD BOOK
HarperCollins Children’s Books
ISBN: 9780060530921
Ages 10-up
320 pages
September 2008
Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place --- he's the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians' time as well as their timely ghostly teachings --- like the ability to Fade. Can a boy raised by ghosts face the wonders and terrors of the worlds of both the living and the dead? And then there are things like ghouls that aren't really one thing or the other.
2009 Honors
AFTER TUPAC & D FOSTER
Putnam Juvenile
ISBN: 9780399246548
Ages 10-up
160 pages
January 2008
The day D Foster enters Neeka and her best friend’s lives, the world opens up for them. D comes from a world vastly different from their safe Queens neighborhood, and through her, the girls see another side of life that includes loss, foster families and an amount of freedom that makes the girls envious. Although all of them are crazy about Tupac Shakur’s rap music, D is the one who truly understands the place where he’s coming from, and through knowing D, Tupac’s lyrics become more personal for all of them.
The girls are 13 when D’s mom swoops in to reclaim D --- and as magically as she appeared, she now disappears from their lives. Tupac is gone, too, after a fatal shooting. As the narrator looks back, she sees lives suspended in time and realizes that even all-too-brief connections can touch deeply.
SAVVY
Dial Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780803733060
Ages 9-11
352 pages
May 2008
For generations, the Beaumont family has harbored a magical secret. They each possess a “savvy” --- a special supernatural power that strikes when they turn 13. Grandpa Bomba moves mountains, her older brothers create hurricanes and spark electricity…and now it’s the eve of Mibs’s big day.
As if waiting wasn’t hard enough, the family gets scary news two days before Mibs’s birthday: Poppa has been in a terrible accident. Mibs develops the singular mission to get to the hospital and prove that her new power can save her dad. So she sneaks onto a salesman’s bus…only to find the bus heading in the opposite direction. Suddenly Mibs finds herself on an unforgettable odyssey that will force her to make sense of growing up --- and of other people, who might also have a few secrets hidden just beneath the skin.
THE SURRENDER TREE: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom
Henry Holt Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 9780805086744
Ages 12-up
176 pages
April 2008
It is 1896. Cuba has fought three wars for independence and still is not tree. People have been rounded up in reconcentration camps with too little food and too much illness. Rosa is a nurse, but she dares not go to the camps. So she turns hidden caves into hospitals for those who know how to find her.
Black, white, Cuban, Spanish --- Rosa does her best for everyone. Yet who can heal a country so torn apart by war? Acclaimed poet Margarita Engle has created another breathtaking portrait of Cuba.
THE UNDERNEATH
Atheneum/Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 9781416950585
Ages 8-12
320 pages
May 2008
A calico cat, about to have kittens, hears the lonely howl of a chained-up hound dog deep in the backwaters of the bayou. She dares to find him in the forest, and the hound dares to befriend this creature he is supposed to hate. They are an unlikely pair, about to become an unlikely family. Ranger urges the cat to hide underneath the porch, to raise her kittens there because Gar-Face, the man living inside the house, will surely use them as alligator bait should he find them. But they are safe in the Underneath...as long as they stay in the Underneath. Kittens, however, are notoriously curious creatures. And one kitten's one moment of curiosity sets off a chain of events that is astonishing, remarkable and enormous in its meaning.
