Local library youth services staffers like 'Saving the Buffalo' enough to make it one of their two Sibert honor books. View More Images from this story Visit the Photo Place

Library staff names its 'best of the best'

Local librarian shares results of unofficial awards contest for best books

Date published: 1/16/2007

A ND THE winner is

The official winners of the

national youth book awards won't be revealed until Monday, but in the meantime, libraries around the country are holding mock awards discussions in anticipation of the announcement.

At the Central Rappahannock Regional Library, our youth services staff discussed and voted for our winners last week.

After lively discussion of five books, we chose "Team Moon: How 400,000 People Landed Apollo 11 on the Moon" by Catherine Thimmesh as our Sibert Medal winner. We also chose two honor books: "Saving the Buffalo" by Albert Marrin and "Pompeii: Lost and Found" by Mary Pope Osborne.

Our top Caldecott choice was "Dizzy" by Jonah Winter, illustrated by Sean Qualls. This picture book biography tells how Dizzy Gillespie grew from a fight-happy kid, to a show-off musician fired for goofing off, to an internationally known jazz musician who invented bebop.

Winter's theme--that a boy who broke the rules in anger grew up to break the rules and create a new musical form--is perfectly supported and extended by Qualls' swinging, swooping collage illustrations. His thick lines of paint have a raw power that reflects Dizzy's emotions, while the scenes of New York, made up of angular lines, have an energy all their own. Most kids won't know who Dizzy was, but they'll be drawn into his story by this jazzy book.

"An Egg is Quiet" by Dianna Aston was one of two Caldecott honor books chosen by the group. In elegant script, with detailed watercolors set against expansive white space, illustrator Sylvia Long shows readers eggs of every shape and size, from a ladybug's tiny egg to the enormous ostrich egg that can weigh eight pounds and takes two hands to hold. An egg is quiet through most of its life, but in a marvelous double page spread, the gaping mouths of chicks show that once it hatches, "It's noisy!"

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Date published: 1/16/2007