Greetings from Aidan Library!
The 2019 Caldecott and Newbery awards were just announced! The Caldecott and Newbery are the most well-known awards that the American Library Association gives annually to children's literature published in the United States.
Sophie Blackall won the Caldecott Medal for Hello Lighthouse, a story set in an earlier time when a lighthouse keeper works and lives in an isolated remote environment and performs interesting tasks such as polishing the lighthouse lens, painting the round rooms, and keeping a daily logbook. There are exciting events too: rescuing shipwrecked sailors and welcoming the lighthouse keeper's wife and new baby. Blackall's illustrations are in pen and watercolor and are "a mix of homey details and spectacular scenery." (Horn Book review)
Blackall also won a Caldecott in 2016 for Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear, and she illustrated Rukhsana Khan's wonderful Big Red Lollipop, a very popular book with our primary students here at Aidan!
Meg Medina won the Newbery Medal for Merci Suárez Changes Gears, about a plucky Cuban-American girl attending an elite school in South Florida on a scholarship. Merci navigates school challenges such as mean comments from a classmate and having to be a buddy in the Sunshine Buddies program. Her family all live close together on one street so there is lots of family activity and interaction; when her grandfather starts to behave erratically Merci is directly affected. As a Kirkus reviewer notes, the author "writes about the joys of multigenerational home life (a staple of the Latinx community) with a touching, humorous authenticity."
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I want to note a few other American Library Association children's book awards for 2019:
The Season of Styx Malone by Kekla Magoon is an honor book for the Coretta Scott King Book Award for an African-American author. During one summer, brothers Caleb and Bobby Gene meet a funny, cool, charismatic boy named Styx Malone, and the three of them go on some exciting (and sometimes scary, if you are Bobby Gene) adventures. There are also wonderful supporting characters in this story: the boys' parents, Styx's foster sister Pixie, and a former foster father of Styx's.
Minh Lê and Dan Santat won the Asian/Pacific American Award for a picture book for Drawn Together, a semi-autobiographical story in which a boy and his grandfather can't understand each other because they don't speak each other's language, and they find a way to communicate through drawing pictures for each other. Their artistic styles are very different and it is fun and interesting to look at a book with two such distinct styles. You can get an idea of this in the beautiful book cover pictured below - the boy's drawing is on the upper left and the grandfather's is on the upper right.
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Hope you enjoy all these wonderful books! We have most of them here at Aidan and they are all available at local public libraries.
Librarian