Sydney Taylor Book Award

Starting on Sunday, and continuing throughout the week, there'll be a blog tour connected with the Sydney Taylor Book Award for Jewish children's and teen literature. This is an annual award by the Association of Jewish Libraries, for "outstanding books that authentically portray the Jewish experience." To see a schedule of the full tour, check out the Sydney Taylor Book Award blog, but here are some highlights:

Richard Michelson will be at The Well-Read Child on Monday, January 19
He had two books honored, but As Good As Anybody: Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom won the Gold Medal for younger readers.

Two very special clergymen, one a rabbi, the other an African-American reverend are raised in divergently different countries yet experience similar levels of persecution and bigotry that will one day bring them together. As colleagues in America’s struggle for civil rights, they march together from Selma to Montgomery in March 1965. Colon’s colored pencil and watercolor illustrations “offer a beautiful complement to the text, describing two unique paths from childhood to adult life – Martin’s in the rich, warm brown-tones of the American south and Abraham’s in cool blues and grays that reminded the illustrator of old World War II movies. When the two exemplary men join in their march for tolerance, the palettes merge in full color harmony,” comments Debbie Colodny, a member of the Award Committee. This book is recommended for grades 2-5.

Karen Hesse will be at Jewish Books for Children on Sunday, January 18
Hesse's Brooklyn Bridge received the gold medal in the Older Readers Category

While his family left the anti-Semitism of Russia to build the American dream, Joey Michtom’s dream is to visit the glittering Coney Island. “Crafting a story from the spark of a true event, the invention of the Teddy Bear in 1903, Hesse masterfully weaves multiple themes of hard-work, survival, homelessness, and familial dedication with interlocking and parallel stories of families who live reasonably well opposite those less fortunate living in the shadows below the imposing Brooklyn Bridge,” comments Rita Soltan, a member of the Award Committee. This book is recommended for grades 5-8.

Valerie Zenatti will be at Lori Calabrese Writes on Tuesday, January 20
Zenatti is a French Jew who spent her adolescence in Israel. Her required service in the Israeli armed forces was the fodder for her memoir, When I Was A Soldier. Her novel, A Bottle in the Gaza Sea won the Sydney Taylor gold medal in the Teen Readers Category

“This story about the relationship between an Israeli girl, Tal, and a Palestinian boy, Naim, via e-mail and instant messaging, is honest but hopeful. Well-written and compelling, the tale of their relationship conveys the confusion, anger, exhaustion, and depression felt by many young people during the 2003 intifada,” comments Susan Berson, a member of the Award Committee.

Also Jane Yolen will be at The Boston Bibliophile on Tuesday, January 20. Her book Naming Liberty was one of the runners-up in the younger readers category. I happen to admire both Yolen and Marie at The Boston Bibliophile, so I'll definitely be checking that out on Tuesday.

Kids' books: Picture books

Some picture book authors to check out. I know there are many, many more, so please add suggestions in the comments.

Jacqueline Woodson has a number of picture books, including Coming On Home Soon, a World War II era book with an African American "Rosie the Riveter" mom; and The Other Side, in which two girls become friends in spite of their segregated town.

He's got the Whole World In His Hands , the traditional song illustrated by Kadir Nelson

Pam Munoz Ryan
We've read several of her picture books, my favorites are One Hundred is a Family and When Marian Sang, which is the amazing story of the black opera singer Marian Anderson.

Rachna Gilmore (East Indian, now lives in Canada) has a number of picture books and early readers, including a three-book series about a girl named Gita, a recent immigrant to Canada from India.

Uma Krishnaswami currently lives in New Mexico. Some of her stories are set in the U.S., others are set in India. Her most recent, Many Windows is co-written with Pakistani-Canadian Rukhsana Khan: A collection of seven stories about six children who are in the same class at school, two white boys, a black girl, a Chinese girl, an Indian girl, and a Pakistani boy. They are not friends, but they all come together in one community at the end of the stories. Each story in the collection centers on a different celebration within the faith of that child, and in the appendix at the back of the book, each of the celebrations is explained in more depth, as it is celebrated within that faith community: Bhuddism, Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism. Each story represents a window into the life of the child, or, from a different point of view, the child's window looking out to the world.

In addition to Many Windows, Khan has written several other children's books, many with Muslim and immigrant protagonists. Coming to Canada, a 52-paged novel the Canadian government commissioned and gives out to immigrant children, will be available to purchase for the first time under the title A New Life, in February, 2009. It focuses on two children, 8 and 10, who leave Lahore, Pakistan and begin a new phase of life with their parents in Canada.

Allen Say has written picture books and short novels; my favorites are How My Parents Learned to Eat, about an American sailor courting a Japanese woman during World War II, and Grandfather's Journey, but there are many more I haven't read.

Kids' books: middle grade

I know several challenge members are planning to use children's books as some or all of their challenge books. Here are some authors to check out, if you haven't already.

Pam Munoz Ryan
She has some fabulous picture books, and her middle grade novels have consistently high ratings on Amazon and they look fabulous. Here are two I plan to read with my boys:
Esperanza Rising is loosely based on the experience of Ryan's grandmother, and depicts a girl's forced immigration with her mother, from Mexico to California.
Becoming Naomi Leon(2005) Half-Mexican Naomi Soledad, 11, and her younger disabled brother, Owen, have been brought up by their tough, loving great-grandmother in a California trailer park, and they feel at home in the multiracial community. Then their alcoholic mom reappears after seven years with her slimy boyfriend, hoping to take Naomi (not Owen) back and collect the welfare check. Determined not to let that happen, Gram drives the trailer across the border to a barrio in Oaxaca to search for the children's dad at the city's annual Christmas arts festival.

Brendan Buckley's Universe and Everything In It by Sundee Frazier. Ten-year-old Tae Kwon Do blue belt and budding rock hound Brendan Buckley keeps a "Confidential" notebook for his top-secret scientific discoveries. And he's found something totally top secret. The grandpa he's never met, who his mom refuses to talk about or see, is an expert mineral collector and lives nearby! Secretly, Brendan visits Ed DeBose, whose skin is pink, not brown like Brendan's, his dad's, or that of Grampa Clem's, who recently died. Brendan sets out to find the reason behind Ed's absence, but what he discovers can't be explained by science, and now he wishes he'd never found him at all. (Reviewed by Becky's Book Reviews)

Hope Anita Smith has two books of narrative poetry intended for 4th-8th grade readers.
The Way a Door Closes (2003), illustrated by Shane Evans, contains poems from the perspective of 13-year-old CJ, focused on his family life leading up to his father leading home.
Keeping the Night Watch (2008) offers the same boy's poetry focusing on his father's return to the family.

Christopher Paul Curtis
Elijah of Buxton (winner of the Coretta Scott King Award and a Newbery Honor Book for 2008)
Eleven-year-old Elijah is the first child born into freedom in Buxton, Canada, a settlement of runaway slaves just over the border from Detroit. He’s best known in his hometown as the boy who made a memorable impression on Frederick Douglass. But things change when a former slave steals money from Elijah’s friend, who has been saving to buy his family out of captivity in the South. Elijah embarks on a dangerous journey to America in pursuit of the thief, and he discovers firsthand the unimaginable horrors of the life his parents fled—a life from which he’ll always be free, if he can find the courage to get back home.
Bud, Not Buddy (Newberry Honor Book of 2005 )
Bud is fed up with the cruel treatment he has received at various foster homes, and after being locked up for the night in a shed with a swarm of angry hornets, he decides to run away. His goal: to reach the man heAon the flimsiest of evidenceAbelieves to be his father, jazz musician Herman E. Calloway. Relying on his own ingenuity and good luck, Bud makes it to Grand Rapids, where his "father" owns a club....Bud's journey, punctuated by Dickensian twists in plot and enlivened by a host of memorable personalities, will keep readers engrossed from first page to last.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham--1963 (Newberry Honor and Coretta Scott King award, 2000)
The year is 1963, and self-important Byron Watson is the bane of his younger brother Kenny's existence. Constantly in trouble for one thing or another, from straightening his hair into a "conk" to lighting fires to freezing his lips to the mirror of the new family car, Byron finally pushes his family too far. Before this "official juvenile delinquent" can cut school or steal change one more time, Momma and Dad finally make good on their threat to send him to the deep south to spend the summer with his tiny, strict grandmother. Soon the whole family is packed up, ready to make the drive from Flint, Michigan, straight into one of the most chilling moments in America's history: the burning of the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church with four little girls inside. Christopher Paul Curtis's alternately hilarious and deeply moving novel, winner of the Newbery Honor and the Coretta Scott King Honor, blends the fictional account of an African American family with the factual events of the violent summer of 1963.

Jacqueline Woodson has three books about a girl named Maizon who goes away to boarding school. Also:
Feathers (2007) which takes its title from the Dickinson poem: "Hope is the thing with feathers” starts the poem Frannie is reading in school. Frannie hasn’t thought much about hope. There are so many other things to think about. Each day, her friend Samantha seems a bit more “holy.” There is a new boy in class everyone is calling the Jesus Boy. And although the new boy looks like a white kid, he says he’s not white. Who is he? During a winter full of surprises, good and bad, Frannie starts seeing a lot of things in a new light—her brother Sean’s deafness, her mother’s fear, the class bully’s anger, her best friend’s faith and her own desire for “the thing with feathers." (from the publisher)
Locomotion (2003) A novel in poems. When Lonnie was seven years old, his parents died in a fire. Now he's eleven, and he still misses them terribly. And he misses his little sister, Lili, who was put into a different foster home because "not a lot of people want boys-not foster boys that ain't babies." But Lonnie hasn't given up. His foster mother, Miss Edna, is growing on him. She's already raised two sons and she seems to know what makes them tick. And his teacher, Ms. Marcus, is showing him ways to put his jumbled feelings on paper. Told entirely through Lonnie's poetry, we see his heartbreak over his lost family, his thoughtful perspective on the world around him, and most of all his love for Lili and his determination to one day put at least half of their family back together.

Louise Erdrich's The Birchbark House series has been called a "Native American Little House on the Prairie." My boys and I enjoyed the first book a few years ago.

Also, check out the past and present winners of:
The Pura Belpré Award. Presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.
The Coretta Scott King Award Given to African American authors and illustrator for outstanding inspirational and educational contributions, the Coretta Scott King Book Award titles promote understanding and appreciation of the culture of all peoples and their contribution to the realization of the American dream.