25th Annual Northern California Book Awards were announced on April 5, 2006. The winner for the Children's Literature category was Denys Cazet for The Perfect Pumpkin Pie, Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books. The other nominees were: Jorge Argueta for Moony Luna/Luna, Lunita Lumera, illus. by Elizabeth Gomez, Children's Book Press, Frances O'Roark Dowell for Chicken Boy, Atheneum, Gianna Marino for Zoopa: An Animal Alphabet, Chronicle Books, and Elizabeth Partridge for John Lennon: All I Want is the Truth, Viking. All books were published in 2005.
Lee and Low New Voices Honor Award named its sixth annual winners. Don Tate of Texas, and Zetta Elliot of Louisiana were chosen. Tate's story
It Jes' Happened: When Bill Traylor Taught Himself To Draw is the biography of the former slave who became a renowned artist. Elliot's novel
Bird is about a young girl dealing with her brother's drug addiction. The award was established in 2000 to encourage writers of color to submit their children's books for publication. For more information see
www.leeandlow.com/editorial/voices.html
Ezra Jack Keats New Writer and New Illustrator Book Awards: The New York Public Library and the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation are pleased to announce the 2006 winners. Mary Ann Rodman has been selected as an outstanding new children's author for her picture book My Best Friend (Viking), and Yunmee Kyong has been chosen as an outstanding new illustrator for Silly Chicken (Viking). The Ezra Jack Keats Awards recognize and encourage talented new children's book authors and illustrators, who, in the spirit of Ezra Jack Keats, create vividly written and illustrated children's books that offer fresh and positive views of the multicultural world inhabited by children today. Each winner receives a $1,000 cash prize and a bronze medallion.
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN AWARD:
New Zealand author Margaret Mahy has won the world's premier prize for children's writing, the Hans Christian Andersen Award. The announcement caps a remarkable year for Mahy, who recently celebrated her 70th birthday. Often called the "Little Nobel", the award is given biennially by the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) to honor an author who has made a lasting contribution to international children's literature. Previous winners have included English novelist Aidan Chambers (2005), the Irish writer-illustrator Martin Waddell (2004) and a galaxy of writers stretching back to 1956.
Her first two novels, The Haunting and The Changeover, won the prestigious British Carnegie Medal for 1982 and 1984. Many of her children's books have been translated, into more than 15 languages, and she has regularly appeared at international forums on children's literature since the early 1970s.
Winners of the 2006 Jane Addams Children's Book Awards were announced by the Jane Addams Peace Association. They are:
Delivering Justice: W. W. Law and the Fight for Civil Rights, written by Jim Haskins and illustrated by Benny Andrews, and published by Candlewick Press, is the winner in the Books for Younger Children category. Mr. Law, a mail carrier by trade and a courageous activist by conviction, catalyzed and led his community in the peaceful integration of all public facilities in Savannah, Georgia in the 1940s and well beyond. Haskins traces Law's impressive progress in succinct chapters, each accompanied by expressive oil-and-collage illustrations by Andrews.
Let Me Play: The Story of Title IX, the Law that Changed the Future of Girls in America, by Karen Blumenthal and published by Atheneum Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Simon & Schuster is the winner in the Books for Older Children category. Replete with photos, comic strips, and progress "score cards," the book provides exciting moment-by-moment political coverage of the 1971 bill that ensures equal education for girls. The book is splendidly executed in design and documentation.
Poems to Dream Together=Poemas Para Soñar Juntos, written by Francisco X. Alarcón, illustrated by Paula Barragan and published by Lee and Low Books, Inc., has been named an honor book in the Books for Younger Children category. In nineteen short and heartfelt poems in Spanish and English, Alarcón encourages and inspires us to dream alone and to work and dream together, as families and communities, in order to make our hopes for a better world come true. The stylized paintings of Paula Barragan colorfully extend and interpret the theme.
Two books have won honors in the Books for Older Children category, each written as a prose poem: The Crazy Man, by Pamela Porter, published by Groundwood Books/House of Anansi Press, and Sweetgrass Basket, by Marlene Carvell, published by Dutton Children's Books/a Division of Penguin Young Readers Group. The Crazy Man intertwines the emotional lives of an injured girl, a dazed mother, a runaway father, and a mental patient. Spare free-verse narration of twelve-year-old Emaline tells a story in which everyone is challenged to change in this 1960's Saskatchewan community. Porter touchingly captures both the wide, lonely prairies and the closed minds central to the tension in this book.
Sweetgrass Basket is told in the alternating voices of two young Mohawk sisters. Each describes leaving her beloved home to be schooled in the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in 1879. Devoted to each other and their father, but opposite in personality and outlook, the sisters experience their virtual imprisonment differently: Mattie, rashly defiant, and Sarah, fearfully obedient until it's too late to act.
Professional Reading
Reading is Fundamental. THE ART OF READING: FORTY ILLUSTRATORS CELEBRATE RIF’S 40 TH ANNIVERSARY. Dutton, 2005. $1999. ISBN 0-525-47484-6.
In celebration of Reading is Fundamental’s 40 th anniversary, 40 children’s book illustrators contributed an illustration and short essay in honor of their favorite children’s book from childhood. The 40 are all popular illustrators, currently working in the field in the United States, although several were born in other countries. They also represent cultural diversity.
Each spread has a black and white portrait photo of the illustrator, along with picture of the childhood book he or she is honoring. These two pictures accompany the essay, which explains why that book was chosen. The facing page is the original piece of artwork about the book; often in that artist’s favorite medium, but sometimes more in keeping with the original book illustration. For example, both Mary Azarian and Stephen Huneck offer a woodcut print, which is the medium they use for most of their work. But Richard Egielski created two black ink drawings to depict his favorite childhood book – the Classic Comics version of Moby Dick, although his children’s book illustrations are usually done in color.
The variety of the books chosen is interesting; many chose popular novels like Charlotte’s Web or Freddy the Pig. Others chose picture books like Babar the Elephant or Where the Wild Things Are. A few chose comic books, a few chose fairy tales, and a few chose books from other countries. Some quirky choices were “politically incorrect” books that were fondly remembered, like Little Black Sambo and The Five Chinese Brothers.
In many ways, this is a book for children’s librarians, not children, but it is an enjoyable browser and the profits go to support Reading is Fundamental.
Marcus, Leonard S., editor. THE WAND IN THE WOOD: CONVERSATIONS WITH WRITERS OF FANTASY. Candlewick, 2006. $19.99, ISBN 076362625-2.
Thirteen authors of fantasy novels for children are interviewed in this collection. Marcus is the editor of several books on children’s literature, including Dear Genius: the Letters of Ursula Nordstrom (1998), and A Caldecott Celebration (1999). This new book is just as exciting, offering a wide overview of experiences from authors renowned for their children’s fantasy. The only big name missing is J.K. Rowling.
The book design is very elegant, with b&w contemporary portraits of each author, as well as childhood photos, samples of their manuscripts (often filled with hand written revisions), and selected booklists. The interview format is very breezy, as if you are having a conversation with each subject, so it makes for a very quick read. Marcus does ask some of the same questions of each author (“What do you tell children who want to write?”), but also asks questions tailored to each person’s experiences, and follow-up questions.
Many authors mention J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis as influences; for example, Nancy Farmer’s The Sea of Trolls was her way of honoring Tolkien. Diana Wynne Jones describes hearing both men lecture while she was at Oxford. World War II also seemed to have a big impact on the authors old enough to remember the war, including Susan Cooper, who explains that Light and Dark, in Dark is Rising, is about how the good guys can do bad things.
Some attended college, some did not, many did not do well in school but a few did, some were encouraged to be writers by teachers or parents but most were not. For some, this is a second career, like Franny Billingsley who was a lawyer, or Brian Jacques who held a myriad of jobs including longshoreman, standup comic, and policeman.
Many were able to write successfully despite obstacles: Lloyd Alexander wrote the five Prydain novels in six years, while holding down a full time job! Both Farmer and Jones had dyslexia, and Tamora Pierce describes some of the negative influences of her childhood.
Even if you haven’t read the books by one of the authors, all of the interviews are engaging, and may lead you to some new series. Other authors included are Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine L’Engle, Garth Nix, Terry Pratchett, Philip Pullman, and Jane Yolen.
Penny Peck,
San Leandro Public Library
