The Newbery May Dampen Kids' Reading

Taken from The Bibliophile Stalker, this link: The Newbery May Dampen Kids' Reading. An excerpt:

The Newbery Medal has been the gold standard in children's literature for more than eight decades. On the January day when the annual winner is announced, bookstores nationwide sell out, libraries clamor for copies and teachers add the work to lesson plans.

Now the literary world is debating the Newbery's value, asking whether the books that have won recently are so complicated and inaccessible to most children that they are effectively turning off kids to reading. Of the 25 winners and runners-up chosen from 2000 to 2005, four of the books deal with death, six with the absence of one or both parents and four with such mental challenges as autism. Most of the rest deal with tough social issues.

I found this related article, Has The Newbery Lost Its Way? An excerpt:

Book critics and reviewers offered the harshest critiques. “Recent Newbery committees seem dismissive of popularity, a quality which should be an asset,” said one reviewer. “They appear to be hunting for a special book—one with only a few readers, rather than a universal book,” offered another. “They search for a book that makes the committee powerful, because they were the only ones to think of it,” reasoned a critic. When asked what she didn’t like about these titles, one reviewer responded, “There is so little right about these completely forgettable books.”

Booksellers told me that selling a Newbery winner during the 1990s was as easy as picking an apple off a tree, because the choices usually excited them. But “in the past few years,” explained one veteran, “we haven’t sold a single copy of the Newbery.” While a young bookseller conceded it was a snap to sell a classic like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to 9 out of 10 of her customers, only 1 in a 1,000 seemed intrigued by the recent Newbery winners. Today’s kids are just as discerning. Until a few years ago, said a chair of a book award selected solely by children, whenever the Newbery medalist was added to the master list, librarians complained because it was a shoo-in to win. Not anymore. These days, the Newbery winners “get very few votes from children.”

I grew up on many Newbery Medal and Honor books: Call It Courage, The Black Cauldron, The High King, Mrs. Frisby And The Rats of NIMH, The Cricket In Times Square, Dear Mr. Henshaw, Charlotte's Web, A Wrinkle In Time, to name some. I haven't read many of the latest ones, but maybe I should so I can see for myself what's making the critics speak up.

Here's a last excerpt from the first article above:

"The criterion has never been popularity," said Pat Scales, president of the Association for Library Service to Children, a division of the American Library Association. "It is about literary quality. We don't expect every child to like every book. How many adults have read all the Pulitzer Prize-winning books and the National Book Award winners and liked every one?"

"Quality and popularity are not mutually exclusive concepts," said Anita Silvey, editor of several books, including "Children's Books and Their Creators," an overview of 20th-century children's books. "They can be found in the same book. . . . If you don't think of children at all in the equation, what you get are books that work for adults."

Yet Deborah Johnson said she is reluctant to criticize the quality of recent Newbery winners: "To choose books that people feel are going to stretch a young person's mind is not a bad thing."