Newbery Books (unpublished from yesterday)

Newbery Books

Yesterday, Kara emailed to say things were slow at work, so she found herself looking through the list of Newbery Award winners and honor books. I, too, looked over the list of Newbery Winners and, like, Kara, was surprised at how many I have read. Here they are, all my newly entered titles. It was a fun stroll down reading memory lane:


I really shouldn't have been so surprised at the length of the list. I mean, in college, for our adolescent literature class we had to read 20 YA books. Then I worked at an elementary school, and at Evil Big Book Store in the children's department, then as a high school teacher, then library asst, so why it surprised me that I could enter 40 more titles into my LibraryThing library really is surprising. (Groan. Why am I so lame?)

I had a sliver of time to kill yesterday (between getting dropped off at home from work by Al icia, only to be picked up by Vaness 35 minutes later after which we picked up Alicia. Honestly.) So, what better way to fill up time then by thinking about books from back in the day?

So, do you remember any of these? Did you hate them? Love them?

I think my favorite are the Konigsberg ones - View from Saturday first and Mixed Up Files second. Then Winn Dixie and Walk Two Moons. After that, Holes, the medieval tales Catherine Called Birdie and Midwife's Apprentice, and the Ramona books. Loath: Witch of Blackbird, Charlotte Doyle, When the Legends Die (and I had to teach that thing, too. Painful.) Too sad to ever re-read: Bridge to Terabithia, The Giver. Kinda boring: Sarah Plain and Tall.

stargirl

Stargirl and Love, Stargirl - Great books for the soul, mind and heart




I know that Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli is considered a young adult novel, but that book, and its sequel, Love Stargirl, are too wonderful to just stick with the younger among us. Sometimes you just need one of those altruistic, simple, beautiful "Young Adult Book" stories to make you feel better. Stargirl, and its new sequel Love, Stargirl, by Jerry Spinelli, have both managed to find me precisely when I needed them.

The History:

After September 11, I read Sharon Creech's "Walk Two Moons" and Kate DiCamillo's "Because of Winn Dixie". Both are sweet, tender, thoughtful books (attached in some form or another to the Newberry, too) which I loved loved loved. I highly recommend them. After reading those two books, I craved more quality YA books.

At the time I found the first Stargirl, I was working at my first job after graduating from college at the Best Elementary School in the World helping . (One of the toughest PITAs to work with, to say the least. The poor thing.)

I was also working at evil Borders in the children's books department. Those two things gave me ready access to YA books.

The Set-Up:

It was dreary, frigid February in 2002. A stupid, fat, ugly, shoe salesman with bad skin and a receding hairline had tragically, embarrassingly broken up with me. Ugh. I was house sitting a big old black lab for a family I knew from the school. They'd gone on a skiing vacation. The house was idyllic, set in the middle of an open field on a rolling hill in quintessentially Maine Freeport. And that's when I first opened up Jerry Spinelli's "Stargirl."

The Story:

And there wasn't a better balm for a freshly dumped girl of independence than a YA novel about one of the most independent, albeit far kinder than me, freshly dumped girls in a story, the lovely Stargirl.

The narrator of Stargirl is the dumpee boyfriend, a regular old kid named Leo who gets flabbergasted by the presence of homeschool turned new kid Stargirl at his high school. She teaches him so much about life, love, learning, being a person, being a teenager. He falls in love, falls out of love and then she just disappears.

The Sequel:

And that's where "Love, Stargirl" picks up. It's letters Stargirl writes - but doesn't send off right away - to Leo from her new town in Pennsylvania.

I found it while I was looking for books for grad school at the bookstore on Monday. Instead of buying anything for school, I saw Love, Stargirl in hard cover and decided instead to buy it. (Kind of a splurge but I'll donate it to a high school library after, I figure.)

I'm halfway through. It's just as charming as the first one and has made me feel better during this crap time. Also, it gives me a catalyst for crying, which I haven't done a ton of simply because that's how we roll in this house.

I recommend both; they're easy reading but very good.