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Local library youth services staffers like 'Saving the Buffalo' enough to make it one of their two Sibert honor books.
The book 'Once Upon a Banana' has earned quite a following.
Powerful illustrations highlight Carole Boston Weatherford's 'Moses, When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom.' |
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!"
"Night Boat to Freedom" by Margot Theis Raven tells a story recorded by the WPA from a former slave at the age of 97. Granny Judith, who has raised John Christmas from a baby, asks the boy to row fellow slaves to freedom across the Ohio River. He rows many people to freedom, until it's too dangerous to continue, and John insists that this time Granny must come with him for his final trip.
Colors are a powerful symbol throughout the story, starting with the red cloth that lured Granny from her home in Africa onto to slave ship when she was a young woman. On John's final journeys, he wears a red shirt that Granny has woven, dyed and sewed for him. E.B. Lewis' watercolor illustrations highlight each color, most strikingly in the nighttime scenes, where touches of red are blurred and muted but still distinct.
Other books garnering attention include Jennifer Armstrong's "Once Upon a Banana," with illustrations by David Small, which starts with a monkey and a banana and ends in a joyous collision of a truckload of bananas and a crowded, hilarious street scene.
On a very different note, Kadir Nelson's illustrations for Carole Boston Weatherford's "Moses, When Harriet Tubman Led Her People to Freedom" are among the most powerful of the year.
To watch streaming video of the award announcements, log on to unikron.com/ala-webcast on Monday at 10:45, or check the results at KidsPoint.org.
You can phone CAROLINE PARR, coordinator of children's services for Central Rappahannock Regional Library, at 540/372-1160 or e-mail her at
Email: cparr@crrl.org.
