Newbery – Susan Uhlig

What a sweet winner!
PDF Creation in Quark 7 This past week I got to meet Kansan Newbery winner Clare Vanderpool, who wrote the lovely book, Moon Over Manifest (Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2010). She shared with us how shocked she was when she got the call from the Newbery committee. Seeing her tears, her husband thought something was wrong! She said there’s definitely a “before” and “after” when you win the Newbery. You can read more about what she thinks about the 2011 Newberry Award on her site. Click on the Upcoming Events tab to see where she’s speaking.
Moon Over Manifest is a layered book with two time periods and two separate stories going on. It’s a great story. The characters and place are so real.
It’s 1936 and 12-year-old Abilene has been sent to live with her father’s friend in Manifest, Kansas. No one there talks about her father, though she knows the town’s people must have known him. But she’s found something else to keep her occupied–a box with letters from 1918 and “treasures” under the floorboards in her bedroom. From info in those letters she and her friends decide to see if they can discover who the WWI spy is.
Not only did I have sympathy for Abilene separated from her father, but for Ned and Jinx and what they went through as revealed by the letters and the local diviner, Miss Sadie.
This is definitely a must read with a satisfying ending!

So the 2008 Newbery winners have been announced, but it’s only been in the last several months that I managed to read the 2007 winner and one of the honor books. I always love it when I agree with the committee.

The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron (Newbery winner) and Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson (Newbery honor) were both so good I made my husband read them.

Here are brief summaries and my thoughts:

Higher Power of Lucky (Atheneum/Richard Jackson Books, November 2006) early Middle Grade novel

Summary: 10 -year-old Lucky is sure her guardian Brigitte wants to go back to back to France and she’ll end up in an orphanage. (Brigitte is Lucky’s father’s first wife that he arranged to come take care of her after Lucky’s mother died.) “The meanness gland in her heart and the crevices full of questions in her brain make running away from Hard Pan, California (population 43), the rock-bottom only choice she has.”
Author Susan Patron has such a way of putting you right there with Lucky; I think it’s her attention to details – one in fact which got some negative attention in the press. This book is so hopeful. It’s one I think all kids should read.

Hattie Big Sky (Delacorte Press, 2006) Young Adult Novel Summary: “For most of her life, sixteen-year-old Hattie Brooks has been shuttled from one distant relative to another. Tired of being Hattie Hear-and-There, she summons the courage to leave Iowa and move all by herself to Vida, Montana to prove up on her late uncle’s homesteading claim.”
I loved the character of Hattie. I loved learning more about a time period–WWI–that I was less familiar with. Made me wonder what my own ancestors had experienced.