Fellow Sailors

As basic groundwork for further Newbery posts, I’ve laid out some Newbery trends decade by decade.

1920s

The Newbery award was first awarded in 1922, and perhaps because the award was still finding its feet, the decade is a bit of an outlier in many respects. It’s the only decade where there were years when no runners-up were selected, and it has the highest percentage of male awardees. In 1928, Dhan Gopal Mukerji is the first author of color to win a Newbery with a story about a pigeon that I read as a child and remember as extremely dull. Lots of nonsense books of the Alice in Wonderland type, as well as many folktales.

1930s

A big swing in the opposite direction with runners-up: sometimes in the 1930s there were as many as eight. A precipitous drop to a single nonsense book by Anne Parrish, and a slightly less precipitous drop in folktales. The first appearance of non-nonsense fantasy. (Technically you could argue that Grace Hallock’s 1929 The Boy Who Was also counts, but I would argue that the magic is merely a device to explore history.) Big themes of the decade include tomboys and coming of age, sometimes at the same time. A lot of books that would probably be classified as YA today on the basis of the narrator’s age and responsibility level, but also wouldn’t be published as YA today because the romance is in the background rather than front and center.

1940s

The tomboys peter out. (In fact, in the 1940s they’re solely represented in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books.) Again a single nonsense book. You might expect World War II to have a big effect but in fact it’s most evident in post-war stories about rebuilding.

1950s

The Cold War definitely had a big effect, though. The Newbery goes hard for American history (especially biographies), liberty, and God. American history and liberty were already popular in previous decades, but before and after the 1950s religion tends to appear as a cultural detail rather than a theological argument. Anne Parrish keeps the nonsense flame alight with a single winner.

1960s

American gender politics are finally starting to catch up to where the Newberys ended up after the Decade of Tomboys. A sprinkling of folktales, last seen in the 1920s and 30s. The definitive triumph of fantasy over nonsense books. At the end of the decade we begin to see the impact of the Civil Rights Movement.

1970s

A fantastic decade for fantasy. Nonsense makes a last dying gasp in Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms. A big shift in attitudes toward predatory animals: in earlier decades they’re usually just Bad, but now there’s more nuance in their portrayal. Dogs, friendly badgers, friends in general, and relatives start dropping like flies. By the end of the decade, the Newbery embraces ownvoices (although not under that name just yet). Awkwardly, one of these ownvoices authors is later discovered to be a fraud, which doesn’t stop him from getting hired as the Native American consultant for Star Trek: Voyager two decades later.

1980s

The Newbery enters its grimdark phase. Friends and animal companions kick it. Two separate genocide memoirs. There have always been some dysfunctional families in the Newberys, but now it becomes a definite theme. A drift away from ownvoices. As in all decades, there were some individual books I really liked (including some of the dark and deathy ones!) but overall there’s a lot of doom and gloom.

1990s

A hint of dawn. Some fantastic fantasy and historical fiction books. (I am of course probably biased because this was the decade when I reached prime Newbery age.) An oscillation back towards ownvoices. Fewer dead animals, more dead relatives. The Newbery has always had individual books with disabled protagonists, but now it Discovers Disability, which sounds like it should be a good thing but actually, at this point, seems to indicate a shift away from disabled protagonists and towards the protag watching someone else fight their disability and lose.

This is where my neat decade categorization really breaks down, because there’s sort of a Long Nineties that lasts until about 2014. All these trends continue. There are a couple of unexpected returns to the outer borders of nonsense territory.

2015-today

From 2015 onward, the Newbery went all in on ownvoices (and this is where the term really began to be used) in all categories: race, disability, and gender/sexuality, this last one gingerly at first but with increasing forthrightness in the 2020s. Dead relatives remain a reliable theme. There have always been a smattering of Newbery picture books, but now graphic novels appear in increasing numbers.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Ruth Goodman is always a good time, and her book How to Behave Badly in Elizabeth England: A Guide for Knaves, Fools, Harlots, Cuckolds, Drunkards, Liars, Thieves, and Braggarts is no exception to the rule. It does what it says on the tin, except for “Elizabethan England” read “England from the time of Elizabeth up to the Civil War (with brief excursions before and after),” but I suspect that the publishers believed, correctly, that their title would sell more books.

A fun fact: quoting Shakespeare would have been seen as proof of boorishness, as it showed that you spend time at the theaters down by the bear-baiting pits and the whorehouses, like a COMMONER. I also very much enjoyed the advice manual for young noblemen in service, which begged them to “try not to murder people.” You might think that goes without saying, but nope!

Jacqueline Woodson is also always a good time, although often in a mild to moderately heart-wrenching kind of way. Peace, Locomotion is an epistolary novel, told as a series of letters from a 12-year-old boy (nickname Locomotion) to his younger sister. They’re both in foster care following the death of their parents in a fire a few years ago. A book with sad moments but not overall a sad book; I particularly enjoyed Locomotion’s journey as a poet and his poetry. (There’s a companion novel-in-verse. Woodson is one of the few authors I trust with a novel-in-verse.)

Warning: you will walk out of this book with the song “Locomotion” stuck in your head.

Jane Langton is much more up and down than either Goodman or Woodson, but I’m happy to say Paper Chains is one of the ups. Evelyn has just started college, and the novel alternates between traditional narration and Evelyn’s never-to-be-sent letters to her PHIL 101 professor, on whom she has a swooning freshman crush. A good mix of college hijinks and intellectual discovery. Just kind of stops rather than having a real ending, but it works well for the story, which is very much about beginnings.

What I’m Reading Now

Onward in Gaskell’s Gothic Tales! We just had one of Gaskell’s trademarked “three people of three different faiths get together to deal with a problem, and it’s good for them all!” scenes. (Okay, I’ve only run across this twice in her work, once here and once in North and South, but it’s an unusual recurring theme.)

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve decided it’s time for another Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. I’ve already read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and all three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago. What should I read next?