The Latest Newbery And Caldecott Award Winners

Here is an article reporting on this year's winners of the Newbery and Caldecott Awards. An excerpt:

Rebecca Stead's "When You Reach Me" and Jerry Pinkney's "The Lion and the Mouse," two highly praised books for young people that draw upon famous stories, have received the top prizes in children's literature.

Stead's intricate, time-traveling narrative set in 1970s Manhattan, which was inspired in part by Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time," won the John Newbery Medal for best children's book. The Randolph Caldecott prize for picture books was given to Pinkney's wordless telling of the classic Aesop fable.

The awards were announced Monday in Boston at the American Library Association's annual midwinter meeting.

The Newbery and Caldecott, both founded decades ago, bring prestige and the hope of higher sales to children's authors. Previous winners such as "A Wrinkle in Time" and Louis Sachar's "Holes" have become standards, but more recent picks have been criticized by librarians as being too difficult ("Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village," by Laura Amy Schlitz) or for having inappropriate content (Susan Patron's "The Higher Power of Lucky").

This year's winners were considered leading contenders.