News
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Book Corner: Children’s Book Awards
Forget the Grammy’s and the Oscars; it’s time for the annual Children’s Book Awards. In addition to the Caldecott Award (for the best-illustrated picture book) and the Newbery Award (for the best chapter book), winners have been announced for the Belpre, Batchelder, and the Wilder awards. And the envelope, please...
Newbery Award
The Newbery Medal was named for eighteenth-century British bookseller John Newbery.
The 2008 Newbery Medal winner is Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz, illustrated by Robert Byrd, and published by Candlewick.
In Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, thirteenth-century England springs to life using 21 dramatic individual narratives that introduce young inhabitants of village and manor; from Hugo, the lord's nephew, to Nelly, the sniggler. Schlitz's elegant monologues and dialogues draw back the curtain on the period, revealing character and relationships, hinting at stories untold.
Caldecott Award
The Caldecott Medal was named in honor of nineteenth-century English illustrator Randolph Caldecott. The 2008 Caldecott Medal winner is The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic)
From an opening shot of the full moon setting over an awakening Paris in 1931, this tale casts a new light on the picture book form. Hugo is a young orphan secretly living in the walls of a train station where he labors to complete a mysterious invention left by his father. In a work of more than 500 pages, the suspenseful text and wordless double-page spreads narrate the tale in turns. Neither words nor pictures alone tell this story, which is filled with cinematic intrigue. Black and white pencil illustrations evoke the flickering images of the silent films to which the book pays homage.
Book summaries provided by the American Library Association.
For a complete list of winners see:
www.ala.org/ala/alsc/awardsscholarships/literaryawds/literaryrelated.htm