From: uma at cyberport.com <uma>
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 08:29:45 -0700

Mary Connor writes:


Still, despite the joyful precedent of Bud Not Buddy, it's not necessary for the CSK and Newbery choices to overlap. They are separate committees charged with making selections based on different criteria.

Personally I find it refreshing to see a simple, graceful book like Shard win the Newbery. It's been a year where, IMHO, form has overshadowed content and book after book has reached for cleverness in structure rather than Just Telling the Story. LS's book is direct, quiet and (dare I say it?) wholesome -- a term alas too often used in criticism rather than praise.

Tangential to all this, one error has gone publicly uncorrected. No doubt some on this list know (but the host of the Today Show and more surprisingly the ALA President did not) that Linda Sue Park is not the first Asian-American to win the Newbery. The first was Dhan Gopal Mukerji, a writer of Indian origin who won the prize in 1928 for his novel about a boy and a WW1 carrier pigeon. Of course, in an ideal world no one, even sticklers and storers of factoids like me, would feel the need to stickle over such things.

And finally a housekeeping point -- please, please, may I ask that when people post to the list they not append the entire message they're responding to? It's very annoying to have to scroll through yards of old posts.

Uma

Uma Krishnaswami uma at cyberport.com http://www.childrensbookguild.org/Krishnaswami.html
==========================================Truth is a matter of the imagination.
[Ursula K. Le Guin]
Received on Wed 23 Jan 2002 09:29:45 AM CST