A Certain Slant of Light

I first read Katherine Paterson’s Jacob Have I Loved at eleven or twelve, and I hated the protagonist Louise with such an incandescent rage that it blotted out just about everything else about the book. But nonetheless a few scenes stuck with me for years, along with a gnawing sense that there was more to the book than I could see around my rage, so I’ve always meant to reread it.

And I finally have reread it, and I’m glad I did because there is indeed more to the book than I noticed the first time. Both place and time are beautifully evoked: a fishing village on a small island that is crumbling away as successive hurricanes wash it into Chesapeake Bay, during the years of World War II. The sea, the weather, the process of making a living catching crabs and oysters - these things are all described in lovely and compelling detail.

The character work is also well done, and the decision to make our heroine Louise a sulky, self-centered girl who is cripplingly jealous of her sister Caroline who genuinely is better than her in every way is certainly a bold one. However, the reason that certain artistic decisions are described as “bold” is because they may alienate the audience, and let’s face it, I still feel pretty darn alienated from Louise.

This time around, I did feel somewhat sorry for her. It really has to be hard to have a twin sister who is a beautiful musical genius with good people skills, when you yourself are a girl of average looks, average musical talent, and the people skills of a particularly sullen barracuda. However, my ability to feel sorry for Louise frayed in the face of Louise’s boundless capacity to feel sorry for herself without, at any point, even trying to make her own life less miserable.

Perhaps the peak moment comes when Louise’s twin Caroline is offered a scholarship to go to mainland for boarding school to further her musical gifts. Louise (understandably) is jealous, and her loving mother suggests that perhaps, with scrimping and saving, she and Louise’s equally loving father might save enough money to send Louise to boarding school in the nearby town, which incidentally has been Louise’s secret goal for years…

(Side note: despite Louise’s determined years-long pity party, even she has to admit to herself that her parents have always loved her, just as much and perhaps in some ways more than they love Caroline.)

Where were we? Louise’s mother has just offered to undergo great sacrifice to give Louise the chance to fulfill her dream of going to boarding school in Crisfield. In return, Louise bitterly accuses her mother of trying to get rid of her. She orders her mother to leave her alone, then feels extremely sorry for herself when her mother, in fact, goes away.

For God’s sake, Louise, go to boarding school at Crisfield and be happy. But no. Instead Louise quits school to work on her father’s boat, which she describes as the happiest time in her life, not because she was actually what anyone else might describe as “happy” but because she was too worn out to feel anything.

This part in particular made me scream because the conceit of the book is that Louise is writing the book retrospectively, as a young mother who has found a loving husband and also has a thriving career as a nurse. You might imagine that the life she built for herself might be the happiest time in her life! Might in fact have helped heal some of the acid jealousy she feels toward Caroline!

But no. She’s left home (with the loving encouragement of her parents, I might add), she’s gotten a nursing degree, she’s married and made a career, but she hasn’t gained an iota of perspective on anything. She has her own husband now, but she’s apparently still outraged that Caroline married the boy who Louise never particularly liked in the first place. She always looked down on him, and never laughed with him because they had completely different senses of humor, and just generally considered him a second-rate sort of person. But she hung out with him before Caroline did and apparently felt she had dibs.

To be honest, I think the book might work better for me if it weren’t told retrospectively. If Louise were telling her story in real time, as it were, if she were a teenager reacting to her life in this laceratingly self-defeating way, I might find her less frustrating. I can understand a seventeen-year-old telling herself that she’d consider accepting this second-rate boy she doesn’t particularly like (after all, the island offers a pretty limited dating pool), and then exploding with rage when the second-rate boy doesn’t even ask her. And instead asks her sister! Who took her chance to go to boarding school and is now studying at Julliard and has presumably met MANY boys, but nonetheless ACCEPTS THIS ONE, which suggests maybe he was never second-rate in the first place?? Enraging. I get it. That is, I see why it’s painful, although if I were Call I’d definitely want to marry Caroline rather than Louise, because Louise treats him like dirt.

But the fact that Louise hasn’t gotten over it even after she has her own husband? Louise. Please. You didn’t even want Call. PLEASE. Please please please TRY to see things from anyone else’s point of view, ever, just for a couple of minutes. If you happened to meet yourself and Caroline as a stranger, I bet you'd like Caroline best too.

The Newbery Project is BACK, baby! Yesterday, the American Library Association announced the 2026 Newbery winners, which means I’ve got five hot fresh Newbery books to read.

After winning a Newbery Honor in 2018 for Piecing Me Together, Renee Watson went for gold this year with All the Blues in the Sky. I quite liked Piecing Me Together, so I’m hopeful I’ll enjoy this new one as well.

Daniel Nayeri is also a familiar Newbery name: he got an honor in 2024 for The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, which I thought was pretty mediocre to be honest. But perhaps I’ll be more impressed by The Teacher of Nomad Land: A World War II Story.

Although this is Karina Yan Glaser’s first Newbery, I’m familiar with her Vanderbeekers series, which is a sort of modern-day version of the Melendys. I read the first book and thought it was okay, but not so okay that I wanted to read on… so we’ll see how I feel about The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli.

Finally, two books by new-to-me authors: Aubrey Hartman’s The Undead Fox of Deadwood Forest, and María Dolores Águila’s A Sea of Lemon Trees: The Corrido of Roberto Alvarez. The title of the first is giving me flashbacks to Scary Stories for Young Foxes, which was perhaps the Newbery’s first foray into horror. Fox horror possibly its own genre now? Will report back as I learn more.

rachelmanija asked about the most peculiar Newberies. This list has a lot of overlap with my post about Nonsense in the Newberys, since nonsense books are by definition usually pretty peculiar, but also they’re peculiar on purpose which perhaps takes away some of the weirdness.

But the Newbery book that most sticks in my mind for sheer and possibly unintentional strangeness is Peggy Horvath’s Everything on a Waffle. I mentioned this book in the Nonsense post as perhaps nonsense-adjacent, but I’ve never made up my mind whether it’s meant to be or not.

It’s tonally very weird. Everything on a Waffle got a Newbery Honor in 2002, which was peak Grim Dead Relative era for the Newberys, and generally speaking these books are mired down with Grim Dead Relative Feelings. The protagonists grieve so hard that there’s no room for anything else in the story.

However, although Everything on a Waffle begins with our heroine losing her parents at sea, there is no Newbery Grieving Process. Our heroine is blithely convinced that her parents have merely been shipwrecked somewhere, and will return in good time, and meanwhile she’s enjoying life in her weird little town. There is, for instance, an award-winning restaurant where everything is served on a waffle, hence the title.

It’s been quite some time since I read the book, but what has stuck with me for years is the way that the heroine just keeps bopping along no matter what happens. It’s not that she’s Pollyanna-ish exactly. It’s more that she’s aware that she’s in some sort of picaresque tale and doesn’t take it too seriously when she comically loses appendages: a finger here, a toe there.

Eventually, social services decides that a competent guardian would do a better job keeping the child in one piece, and our heroine is removed from her kindly but inept relation and taken into care.

But then! Her parents reappear! Our heroine was right all along. They were alive, they have been rescued, and the family is whole again, minus of course a few of the heroine’s fingers and toes.

Simply a strange book! Very peculiar! It isn’t really a nonsense book, because unlike the true nonsense books there’s nothing technically impossible happening. But it all seems so improbable that it has something of that dream-like nonsense book feeling anyway.

hedgebird asked: Do you think the books generally are actually kid-friendly, if kids aren't put off by the dead dog rep?

Well, obviously I’m hugely biased, given that I started the Newbery project when I was eleven, so clearly they were friendly enough that I at least decided to try to read all of them. After I had read Out of the Dust, too, which doesn’t have a dead dog but does have pretty much everything else that a child could find off-putting in a Newbery book.

My impression is that for the first few decades of the Newbery, say 1920-1970, either the Newbery committee or American children’s publishing as a whole was committed to kid-friendly children’s books. This is not to say that nothing bad ever happens to anyone - in fact, I can think of two books off the top of my head where the ending is “Well, a volcano just blew up our civilization” - but I never finished any of those books with the feeling that the author had intentionally taken a crowbar to my soul just to watch me bleed.

This is not to say I would blithely give the books from these decades to children today, as some of them have other content (e.g. racism) that you might not hand to a modern eight-year-old. But with the sole exception of Old Yeller I don’t think any of these books are so sad that they’d make a kid want to forswear reading.

Then around 1970 Newbery committee and/or American children’s publishing discovered animal death in a big way, closely followed by relative death and general “something bad happened in my life and this whole book is going to be about my misery.” So after that point there are some books that are great which I loved as a child (Catherine Called Birdie, Ella Enchanted, The Thief) and some books that are scarring like Out of the Dust and Jacob Have I Loved.

Although I HAVE met some people who loved Jacob Have I Loved in their youth, so clearly “kid-friendly” can be quite subjective. Some kids love misery! I myself loved The Long Winter best of all the Little House books! It’s just a different kind of misery than Jacob Have I Loved’s “Waaaah everyone loves my twin sister more than me because she is better than me in literally every way and frankly even the reader can see it so shut up and stop whining and maybe people will like you more, annoying protagonist.”

cyphomandra asked about Newbery novels in verse, and friends, I have THOUGHTS. I have OPINIONS. Or actually I have neither of those things, I just have FEELINGS, feelings first engendered decades ago when I first read Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, which despite the lapse of time have yet to subside.

Out of the Dust won the Newbery Medal in 1998. It is about a girl named Billie Jo, so named because her dad really wanted a boy and apparently wanted his daughter to be reminded twenty times a day that she was a disappointment. It’s the Great Depression, and they live on a miserable Dust Bowl farm where Billie Jo’s only source of solace is playing her piano.

But then ONE DAY, someone leaves a can of kerosene on the stove. This kerosene catches fire, so Billie Jo grabs it with her bare hands to throw out the door! But she reaches the door just as her pregnant mother is about to enter, and thus accidentally hurls flaming kerosene all over her!

The mother dies a slow and agonizing death of her wounds. The baby IIRC is stillborn, but I can’t recall the details of this point because I was too busy obsessing over all the neighbors coming to Billie Jo’s dying mother’s bedside murmuring “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.”

Billie Jo’s mother is dead. Billie Jo can no longer play the piano because her hands are horribly scarred from the kerosene. Billie Jo jumps a train to get out of Oklahoma, presumably to escape to a place where no one knows “Billie Jo threw the kerosene.” But in the end she comes home, and there is I believe an attempt at a vaguely hopeful ending (Billie Jo is perhaps attempting to play the piano again?) but it is TOO LITTLE TOO LATE.

This was my first novel in verse. It was, I believe, also the Newbery’s first foray into novels in verse. (There are earlier collections of poetry, like A Visit to William Blake’s Inn and Joyful Noise, but a poetry collection is a different beast.) It has given me an abiding aversion to novels in verse, a prejudice that has proven ineradicable even though I loved Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out and Back Again (Newbery Honor 2012) so much that I’ve read all of Lai’s other work, AND ALSO loved Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming (Newbery Honor 2015) so much that I’ve been making a game stab at reading all her work as well, although as she has published approximately 500 books I haven’t managed it yet.

As I contemplated this fact, I wondered woefully if I would never learn to let go of this prejudice. But then I started totting up the other Newbery novels in verse.

Once Out of the Dust opened the sluice gates, an inundation of Newbery verse novels followed. Well, okay, more of a trickle, but if you are averse to verse novels it feels like quite a lot.

2002: Marilyn Nelson, Carver: A Life in Poems, actually a biography and not a novel, but includes a particularly scarring poem about lynching.

2009: Margarita Engle’s The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba’s Struggle for Freedom. You know how a lot of the earlier Newbery books were exciting adventure stories about the battle for freedom? This is not an exciting adventure story. This is a long, slow, bloody trek of misery to freedom.

2015. Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover. Dead father.

2018. Jason Reynolds’ Long Way Down. Dead brother.

2020. Jasmine Warga’s Other Words for Home. Refugees. Actually not super depressing, though.

2022. Rajani LaRocca’s Red, White and Whole. Dead mother.

2025. Lesa Cline-Ransom One Big Open Sky. Dead father.

So actually I think the numbers are on my side here. Newbery novels in verse have a 70% chance of being miserable! It is right and proper that I approach them with crushing dread.

rachelmanija suggested a list of Forgotten Newbery Books that Are Really Worth Reading, so I’ve compiled my top ten, listed here in order of year of publication. For obvious reasons, this list skews toward the older books, and I tried to pick ones that I felt have been really forgotten, although it turns out that it can be a bit hard to tell if a book has been truly forgotten or if I, personally, just hadn’t happened to heard of it before this project.


1. Marjorie Hill Allee's Jane’s Island, 1932. Come for an engaging story that also meditates on women’s place in the sciences and society, stay for lovely description of life around the Wood’s Hole research station, and also for the cranky German scientist who is VERY shell-shocked from World War I and FIRMLY intends to prove that nature is red in tooth and claw.

2. Dorothy P. Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus, 1932. FAIRIES put on a CIRCUS with the aid of WOODLAND CREATURES. What more could you want from a book!

3. Erick Berry’s Winged Girl of Knossos, 1934. Have you always wanted a retelling of the tale of Theseus and the minotaur crossed with Daedalus and Icarus with a genderswapped Icarus who is a tomboy in the tomboy-welcoming culture of ancient Crete? Yes you have.

4. Christine Weston’s Bhimsa, The Dancing Bear, 1946. Two boys (one English and one Indian) go adventuring across India in the company of their friend Bhimsa, the dancing bear. A fun adventure story.

5. Cyrus Fisher’s The Avion My Uncle Flew, 1947. An adventure story set in post-World War II France, featuring a glider and some secret Nazis in the mountains and the most impressive literary trick I’ve seen in a Newbery book, or indeed in pretty much any book ever. (I talk about it at more length in the review but don’t want to spoil it here.)

6. Claire Huchet Bishop's Pancakes-Paris, 1948. In post-war Paris, a young boy gets a box of pancake mix from some American soldiers, and makes pancakes for his mother and sister for Mardi Gras. That’s it! That’s the story.

7. Louise Rankin's Daughter of the Mountains, 1949. When a young Tibetan girl’s beloved dog is stolen, she chases him all the way across Tibet and into India to get him back. Super fun adventure story. No one is the least bit fazed at the idea of a girl having an adventure.

8. Jennie Lindquist's The Golden Name Day, 1956. Nancy spends a year with her Swedish-American relatives and they get up to all sorts of lovely escapades. Beautiful illustrations by Garth Williams, who you may be familiar with from the Little House series. There should be more books which are just about characters having a fantastic time.

9. Mari Sandoz's The Horsecatcher, 1957. A Cheyenne boy wants to become a horsecatcher rather than a warrior. I’m not planning a companion post to the Problem of Tomboys about Boys Who Don’t Want to Do Classic Boy Things, but if I were, this book would be on it. Fascinating evocation of our hero’s world.

10. Cynthia Rylant's A Fine White Dust, 1987. Kind of an outlier on this list, which is mostly adventure stories and people having good times stories. This one is a realistic fiction story about a boy growing up in the South who falls in love with a traveling preacher. VERY intense. EXTREMELY gay. Never admits to being gay but nonetheless one of the gayest books I’ve ever read. Very short. I read most of it in one lunch break and spent that entire lunch break internally keening because it is VERY STRESSFUL but in a good way.

I went into the Newbery Project expecting to see certain changes over the decades, but some of the most fascinating changes have been the ones that I didn’t know enough to expect at all, like the rise and fall of the nonsense book.

Now let me say at the outset that I don’t much enjoy nonsense books. Until recently I would have qualified this statement by saying “except Alice in Wonderland,” but then I reread Alice in Wonderland and I guess what I enjoyed as a teen was reading The Annotated Alice and discovering that Carroll’s verses were send-ups of moralistic Victorian poems and songs? In any case, I didn’t enjoy the reread.

As such, I’ve never sought out nonsense stories, and therefore my observations about the form are offered on the basis of nonsense books I’ve read more or less by accident. However, my impression is that Alice in Wonderland popularized nonsense as a form of children’s literature in the Anglophone world, and that popularity lasted until at least the 1920s, as evidenced by William Bowen’s The Old Tobacco Shop: A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure (posts here and here), Anne Carroll Moore’s Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, and Anne Parrish and Dilwyn Parrish’s The Dream Coach, all of which won Newbery Honors during the 1920s.

But after this point, nonsense books lost the critical favor of the Newbery committee. Nonsense books continued to be published, most famously and successfully Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth in 1961. (Palmer Brown also made a career of this sort of thing in the second half of the 20th century.) But the Newbery committee had largely moved on. After honoring three nonsense books in its first decade, it honored just three more in the rest of its long life: Anne Parrish’s Floating Island (1931) and The Story of Appleby Capple (1951), and Catherine Besterman’s The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Long-foot (1948).

That was the last Alice in Wonderland-type nonsense book to be so honored. At this point, I’m not sure new ones are being published, either. I have clocked a few more recent Newberies as nonsense-adjacent (Ellen Raskin’s Figgs & Phantoms (1975), Peggy Horvath’s Everything on a Waffle (2002), and Jack Gantos’s Dead End in Norvelt (2012)), but they differ from earlier nonsense books in that they technically take place in the real world and nothing exactly impossible happens… but at the same time the stories are absurd.

Given that I am, as aforementioned, not very fond of nonsense books, I can’t weep buckets over this development. But all the same, I do find something weirdly delightful about the prevalence of nonsense books in the first decade of the Newbery award, simply because they have no moral point - no point at all except the desire to delight.

As the Newbery Project draws to a close, I’ve been preparing some posts about my reading, and I thought I’d start out by answering a few… well, I can’t exactly call them “frequently asked” questions, as the only one people have actually asked is the one about dead dogs. But, anyway, these are questions with important background information.

What is the Newbery Award, anyway?

Every year since 1922, a committee of librarians has selected “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children” to receive the Newbery Award. The first prize winner gets the Newbery Medal, while the runner-ups have since the 1970s been called Newbery Honor books. It’s the most prestigious writing award for American children’s literature. (The counterpart award for illustration is the Caldecott.)

What’s the Newbery Project?

The Newbery Project started when I was about eleven and decided to read all the books that had won the Newbery Medal. (The Newbery is the highest award in American children’s literature. It was first awarded in 1922 and has been going strong ever since.) The project eventually fizzled out, as children’s projects do, but in my mid-twenties I resurrected it and completed it.

Then it occurred to me that I could extend the project to include all the Newbery Honor books, which is the name given to the books that are the runners-up to the big medal. A few years, there were no runners-up, and some years there were as many as eight. Most years there are three to five runners-up. I had read a pretty good number of them as a child, so I had about 240 Newbery Honors books left to read.

Two hundred and forty books! Who wants to read two hundred and forty books about dead dogs?

(For my non-American readers, the Newbery award is famous in America as the dead dog award, because there have been a few very famous winners featuring the tragic death of pets and/or best friends. Bridge to Terabithia may have been partially responsible for the fizzling of the first go-round of my Newbery project.)

Actually, the dead dogs are fairly recent. The first dead dog in a Newbery winner appeared in Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller in 1957, but that was an outlier. Until 1970, pretty much everyone lives, both dogs and relatives. After 1970 it’s open season on friendly animals and sickly grandparents until the 2000s, at which point the Newbery awards focused more intently on dead relatives.

Two hundred and forty books is still nuts. Why did you do this to yourself?

Because I love children’s books and history, and it turns out that reading the Newbery books are a fantastic way to explore both. The Newbery committee has consistently selected a lot of historical fiction and historical nonfiction (especially biographies) since the beginning, and of course the earlier books are fascinating historical artifacts in their own right at this point.

Are there any overarching themes among the Newbery books?

Beyond history in general, the Newbery awards are particularly interested in American history and more generally the construction of American identity. There’s also an ongoing interest in the history of liberty, the latter of which means, for instance, that two separate William Tell retellings have won Newbery Honors.

There’s also a strong and ongoing interest throughout the history of the award in tales of children from around the world. This reflects both children’s tastes (before children’s literature became its own category, travel narratives were a recognized favorite reading material for children), but also a reflection of the ideal of the “Republic of Childhood,” popularized in American literature by Mary Mapes Dodge in St. Nicholas Magazine, which argues that children in all times and all places are similar to and interested in each other, purely by virtue of their shared childhood.

Drumroll, please! On Saturday morning, I took Dorothy Lathrop’s The Fairy Circus along on my morning Starbucks run. I finished the book, and with it I have completed the Newbery project!

I spent the rest of the day in a whirlwind of festivity: a trip to the downtown library and downtown farmers market (with side trips to the card store, the artist’s gallery, and the bookstore), took a nap, went to the other library and to my favorite bookstore Von’s, and then returned home to throw myself a little tea party where I ate an entire salted caramel fudge mini-pie from the farmers market and read my new library book, Rachel Bertsche’s The Kids Are in Bed: Finding Time for Yourself in the Chaos of Parenting.

I read this partly because I’ve been a fan of Bertsche’s since her MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend, and partly because I enjoying parenting books, which is perhaps rather odd in a non-parent. Also this is really a parenting book but a book about how to find time for yourself in and around parenting. One tip I think is probably useful for anyone: Bertsche suggests making a short list of things you like to do, so that if you find yourself with some unexpected free time you can actually use it doing something you enjoy and find rejuvenating, rather than doing chores and/or mindlessly scrolling your most depressing social media feed.

And then I was off to one final bookstore for the evening! A wonderful day.

I still have reviews to write of my last couple of Newbery books, and then some wrap-up posts about the whole project. Right now I’ve got posts about the Newberys by the Decade, Nonsense Books in the Newbery, and SFF in the Newbery, and I’m planning that long-teased post about The Problem of Tomboys (actually probably two posts, one about the 1930s and one about the rest).

Are there any other Newbery posts people would be interested in seeing?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Another Newbery! Lois Lenski’s Phebe Fairchild Her Book, which is set in Connecticut in the 1830s and features Phebe Fairchild, sent from the port of New Haven to stay with her Puritan farming cousins upstate, where she has to hide her Mother Goose because the Puritan farming cousins do not approve of silly rhymes. Phebe learns some farming skills, the Puritan cousins learn to unbend a bit, and a good time was had by all.

I’ve vaguely meant to read Liz Kessler’s The Tail of Emily Windsnap for years, and then troisoiseaux posted about it, and then asakiyume decided to read it (and later posted about it too), so obviously its time had come.

Unfortunately, I think I just waited way too long on this book. I might have liked it better if I had read it back in 2003, when I was still reasonably young and impressionable, although I might equally have been even more annoyed by the fact that mermaid society is not a thoroughly worldbuilt society in its own right, but merely an underwater reflection of the land world. The court stenographer may be writing her report in squid ink, and the presiding judge may be the King of the Mermaids himself, but otherwise the court functions exactly like a law court on a TV show.

What I’m Reading Now

Nearing the end of Lord Peter. Read the MOST HORRIFYING story this week, in which ( spoilers )

What I Plan to Read Next

Two Newbery books left to go! The project is almost complete, a mere seven years after it began!