Adam of the Road by Elizabeth Janet Gray

This was purely a Newbery read and I kind of struggled through it. But I think this could have been a book I actually enjoyed when I was a kid. It tells the story of a boy in medieval times who follows his dad who is a minstrel--and ends up getting lost and losing his dog and needing to find his way back to his dad and his dog. It is a journeying story and I think it was a great book about medieval times and what it was like back then--probably the least depressing of the medieval books I've read. But it still felt a little like a slog to me at times. I thought that Adam was a great character who found joy and determination at good times and I would be happy for my kids to read this one. \]

King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian by Marguerite Henry

I read this because it was a Newbery winner--but honestly, I did not enjoy it all that much. A lot of the reviews on Goodreads are from people who loved it as children because they were horse girls who were obsessed with horses and horse books. I honestly read Black Beauty as a child and loved it, but not really any other horse books, and I also have a hard time imagining any kid that would like this book. It was the story of a horse who became a famous racer and winning many races against long odds and not being favored. I kind of struggled through this and was glad to finally check it off. 

Dicey's Song by Cynthia Voigt

This book is the 2nd in a longer series about the Tillerman family, and our library didn't have the first book available. I usually like to read at least the books that lead up to a book in a series, but since I didn't have that option here, I just read this one by itself and still was able to appreciate it. It tells the story about a girl, the oldest in her family, who had to help her siblings find their grandma to take care of them after their mom abandoned them. The story starts with them living in their grandma's house and adjusting to their new life and figuring out how to trust and love again and live normal lives as children. I loved Dicey's character--so proud and independent and caring for her siblings. I thought this was a great choice for the Newbery and I think this is one I would have liked also as a kid. 

The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera

This book won the Newbery Award for 2021, and as soon as I heard it had won I checked it out from the library to read it. Petra and her family get on one of the only three spaceships to leave earth before a comet hits the planet, and they are supposed to stay in hypersleep for something like 500 years until they reach the new planet where they are going to live. But when she wakes up, her family is all gone and the people who are running the ship have gone rogue and are not following the plans, so Petra has to figure out how to fool the people on the ship and escape safely. It was kind of a creepy and scary dystopian novel, which I think was totally fine, but I bet it would be hard for Dane to read, especially with the family disappearing. I think he'd probably be fine but we'll see. I really liked it and I thought it raised some interesting questions about what makes us human and what makes each of us "us" in a kid-appropriate way. 

The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley

This book is the prequel to The Blue Sword which I read first, and this book won the Newbery Award. I loved this book as well and I liked how it was also focused on an amazing female protagonist who was pretty normal but determined and gritty and ended up saving her kingdom from dragons and war and lots of stuff. I think this is again one that I want to buy for our kids to have on our bookshelves. 

Shen of the Sea: Chinese Stories for Children by Arthur Chrisman Bowie

I couldn't think of anything else other than "cultural appropriation" the whole time I was reading this. It feels like a book that would never in a million years be published today: fake "folktales" about a culture that the author does not belong to. Many of them were just perpetuating false stereotypes about Chinese people. Several of the stories were cute, but it was just not a great read. It's easy to see how much the Newbery Award (and our own culture) has evolved since this time. 

It's Like This, Cat by Emily Cheney Neville

I wasn't super excited to read this book, at all, but it's one of the Newbery winners so I thought I'd chug through it. And it turned out to be surprisingly pleasant. It really didn't seem like anything earthshaking, but I really enjoyed the story and the many adventures that our main character, Davey, got into with his Cat. I liked how much freedom Davey had and how he just roamed around New York City and got to know all sorts of people. It was very easy to read and quick to get through, which made it very enjoyable, and there was a great cast of characters, like Aunt Kate, the crazy cat lady, Mary, the girl that Davey meets who he can talk to not just like a girl, and Tom, the college dropout who gets into trouble and needs help from Davey and his dad. 

Secret of the Andes by Ann Nolan Clark

This is a Newbery winner from the 1930s--it beat out Charlotte's Web for the Newbery Medal, which is still hotly contested to this day. And I can see why--after reading it, I think it's pretty obvious that Charlotte's Web is better. This was a nice story set in Peru, which setting I actually really liked since it was original and different (and I'm guessing that's why it won the Newbery). But it was definitely slow-moving, plus by today's standards it seemed super culturally insensitive (the boy referred to himself and his caretaker as Indians throughout the whole book, which is completely inaccurate these days). I was surprised by the big reveal of a treasure at the end of the book--I guess that was the "secret of the Andes" from the title, although I clearly didn't see it coming. I kind of felt like there was a lot that wasn't clear or wasn't explained as the story went on, so I was kind of confused a lot of the time. This definitely wasn't my favorite, but it wasn't super terrible either. 

A Gathering of Days by Joan W. Blos

This was a fictional diary account of a girl in Massachusetts in 1830. That's basically all you need to know to imagine what this book was like--there were no major twists or turns or unexpected events, but I really loved books like this when I was younger and I still enjoy them now. (I always love diaries and epistolary novels and books made up of fake emails to each other and whatnot.) So I really enjoyed this one and thought it was a fun read. 

A Visit to William Blake's Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers by Nancy Willard

I just read this because it was a Newbery winner, and since it was a book of about sixteen poems, it went super fast--and I don't know that I got enough out of it. It is kind of a book of tribute poems to William Blake and written in his style, but since I haven't read much of William Blake's poetry since graduating from college, I don't remember much about what and how he wrote. The poems were sweet and fantastical and fun to read, with absolutely beautiful illustrations (the book won the Newbery award and a Caldecott Honor), but I kind of felt like I usually do with poetry--that I probably missed something and didn't understand it very well. 

Ginger Pye by Eleanor Estes

Like I've said before, I'm not a dog person, and many of the Newbery winners seems to be about dogs. (What is that about?) I kind of put off reading Ginger Pye after I got it and saw the cover and saw, yep, it's a dog book. It had been sitting on my bedside stand for forever. But I finally plowed through it, and it was actually much cuter than I expected it to be. It had the episodic, small-town, old-timey, feel-good feel of the books my grandma would have had at her house when I was a kid, and it was really a sweet story about a family who gets a puppy and falls in love with him, until he gets stolen and they can't find him. They spend at least half of the book looking for Ginger and missing him before he's miraculously found again. This is one I probably would have loved a lot more when I was younger, but it was sweet enough that I didn't hate it reading it now as an adult. 

Rabbit Hill by Robert Lawson

I grabbed this one off my stack of Newbery winners that I have by my bedside stand because it was the shortest and looked like the quickest--and it was incredibly quick; it only took me about one and a half hours to get through. But I actually really enjoyed it as well. This is one that I feel like I would buy to keep on our shelves because it was so cute and sweet. The story is about a community of small animals that live on a hill with a vacant house, and they learn that a family of humans is moving into the house, and they're worried that they are going to be humans who use traps or guns or dogs to get them. All of the animals have such distinctive personalities and funny ways of talking, and it's just a really cute story about all the things the animals hope the humans will be like, and how they end up exceeding all of their wildest dreams. The illustrations were really well done as well, and the ending was very sweet. Definitely a fun one and I'm glad I found it.

Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer

I almost really liked this one. I feel like this had the feel of many children's books I loved back when I was a kid--kind of Betsy-Tacy ish, Five Little Peppers, etc. The book follows Lucinda, who has been left behind while her parents travel in Europe for a year for her mother's health, and who lives in New York City with her teacher for a year. She goes everywhere on her roller skates, which represent her freedom and her ability to go fast like she wants, and she has this year filled with great experiences getting to know people everywhere around the city, and doing things she was never allowed to do when she was stuck with her governess and her parents. The one part that was shocking and weird was this random murder scene that Lucinda stumbled across and which she was never allowed to talk about because it might be dangerous for her--definitely too dark and creepy and should have been cut from the book, haha. But the rest was perfectly sweet, and made New York City in the 1890s sound like a perfect playground filled with perfectly safe and kind people just waiting to adore this little girl. (Now that I think of it, it was basically like a rose-colored glasses version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where the little girl is rich and has whatever she wants.)

Joyful Noise and I Am Phoenix: Poems for Two Voices by Paul Fleischman

These are two different collections of poetry, written for two voices. Joyful Noise was the Newbery winner in 1989, but the library had both of these put together in one audio collection, and TOTAL they were 32 minutes of listening--so of course I listened to them both. This definitely was a collection to listen to on audio--I feel like the meaning of it would have been lost by just reading them without hearing them performed, as they were meant to be. Similar to Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, which was also a poetry collection written to be performed. Joyful Noise was poems about insects, and I Am Phoenix was poems about different types of birds. I loved several of the poems, particularly the one about the bumblebees. They were really cute, fun to listen to, and definitely worth half an hour of my time. I don't have anything else deep to add to it, since I was listening and not reading and didn't take any notes... but I thought they were both sweet collections.

Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson

I am having a hard time figuring out how much I liked this book. On the one hand, it was kind of depressing and hard to read, and I didn't exactly want to seek it out to spend more time reading it. I wasn't rushing back to get to it. But on the other hand, the emotions and the feelings in this book felt so real and hard and strong. This book is about Sara Louise, who is eaten up with jealousy of her twin sister Caroline, and feels like she isn't loved or cared about as much as her. I felt like Caroline was easy to hate if she would have been your peer like she was Sara Louise's. I would have been just as upset as she was. Sara Louise was not an easy-to-love narrator herself, though--she was grumpy and unfriendly and filled with anger a lot of the time, which only pushed people more and more towards Caroline. But I thought those emotions and Sara Louise's over-the-top reactions made this book the gripping story that it was. When Sara Louise threw her bottle of lotion at the wall because Caroline was using it without asking her, and when she refused her parents' offer of paying for her boarding school because she was so upset that Caroline was getting to go to a nicer school in Baltimore--those are exactly the irrational, unrealistic things that an upset teenager might do. So although it was not the most fun book to read, I really felt Sara Louise's feelings of disappointment and anger over and over again. (I also really liked the setting and the imagery of the island and the crabbing and everything they did there as well. And the ending with Sara Louise all grown up as a midwife in the mountains--that was unexpected and I loved that.)

Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins

I feel like I've got a good run going with two really good Newbery winners in a row! I really liked Criss Cross and I felt like it was an actually realistic representation of what it is like to be a young teenager. There were no big dramatic events for any of the kids in this book, but the book really understood what it felt like to be a kid, but also just what it's like to be a teenager. The conversations were real, but also, the way that people thought was real. I loved several of the quotes in here, about how people just miss opportunities without even knowing it:

"So often in books, or in movies, one character looks at another character and understands in a precise way what that person is feeling. So often in real life, one person wants to be understood, but obscures her feelings with unrelated words and facial expressions, while the other person is trying to remember whether she did or didn't turn off the burner under the hard-boiled eggs."

It felt so applicable and believable for me even today, but especially for teenagers as well. I loved this, especially by the end. It was really sweet. 

The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

After just reading Sounder for my Newbery project and really not liking it, it was such a pleasant experience to read The Graveyard Book and to look forward to coming back to it every time I had to put it down. I am surprised that I hadn't heard more about this book (although maybe I would have if I had been reading middle-grade books when this came out 13 years ago) and I think I would have loved this as a child. I would definitely recommend this for my boys. 

This book is about a live boy who is raised in a graveyard by the ghosts who live there. Just that once sentence sounds macabre and creepy, but this book has such a sweet feeling and definitely gives a sense of coziness and contentment throughout most of it. The boy is named Nobody and called Bod--and Bod grows up wanting to know who he is and why he lives there, and as he slowly learns and decides he wants to avenge his family, he has to learn how to protect himself and his home before he can go out into the world. I thought the ending was so bittersweet, when he leaves and has to say good-bye to all of his ghost friends and family, and they have to say good-bye to him and watch him go. In the interview in the back, Gaiman talks about how he had to learn how to parent and how to help his children go off and leave, and that was what he had to learn in order to write this book. 

The only thing I didn't like about this book was the beginning, when the murderer is at the house and kills Bod's parents and sister--it was too dark and creepy and sad for me. I guess it was a lot like the beginning of Harry Potter, but much more graphic and disturbing to have it described in front of you. But that didn't match the rest of the book.

Sounder by William H. Armstrong

I read this just because it was a Newbery winner and I am SHOCKED that so many of the reviews on Goodreads are of people who love this book and cried while reading it. I basically hated the whole thing. How many dog books win the Pulitzer anyways? I am clearly not a dog person and clearly not a dog book person... but I just really didn't connect with this book. It's a story of a family of sharecroppers in the South probably in the early 1900s, and the father steals some ham to feed his family and gets caught doing it. He is sent to jail and hard labor for years, and his family is left to fend for themselves. His loyal dog Sounder gets shot when he is being arrested, and ends up disfigured but doesn't die, and waits until his master comes home. 

I feel like that summary I just wrote didn't really encapsulate the feeling of the book. It felt really dark--really black and gray and hopeless, except for the boy being able to go to school after a while. I did not like how none of the characters in the book had names, not even the main boy. The one redeeming thing about this book for me was that it was pretty short and I was able to read it in an hour or two. I wouldn't have wanted to spend any more time on this book.

Up a Road Slowly by Irene Hunt

I knew literally nothing about this Newbery winner and I loved it so, so much. I guess it shows my old-fashioned ways, but it reminded me a LOT of the books I loved so much as a child, like Anne of Green Gables and so many others, books that were slow and more about the character development of the main character than about any exciting plot twists. I guess I love a good old-fashioned coming-of-age story, emphasis on the "old-fashioned" part--because this was definitely old-fashioned. It was published in 1966, so it definitely espouses some 1966 values, like the woman needing to take care of the home and that a woman isn't complete until she has loved a man and stuff like that. But I really enjoyed the book anyways. It just felt really familiar and homey to me, just like the books I would find and read on my grandma's bookshelf in San Diego. I can see a lot of modern readers turning their noses up at this, but I loved it and definitely plan on buying it to read it again. 

When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller

This was the 2021 Newbery winner, and it was available on audiobook from our library, so I snapped it right up. I actually really enjoyed this story, about Lily and her Korean grandmother. I loved its focus on stories and the power they have for us, and the influence of Lily's Korean heritage on her life and the story itself. I thought Lily was a determined and strong heroine, but not unbelievable, because she makes mistakes and obviously doesn't think as clearly as an adult, so she would be relatable for a kid. It seemed like it was going to be more magical than it was--there is an invisible-to-everyone-else tiger that talks to Lily, after all--but the book was really more about Lily and her relationship with her grandmother, her mom, and her sister, all of whom have important moments in the book both by themselves and with Lily. I loved that we got to know all of the characters and see them grow. I did feel confused by what Lily and the magical tiger were accomplishing--like, how did this actually happen?--but it was balanced out by the beauty of the rest of the story.