As a younger reader, I didn’t really have my eye on whether a book won a major award or not. In fact, sometimes I’d see “award-winning” and automatically equate it with “boring and preachy.” Fortunately, I think we’re long past the time when that may have been true, and well into an age when award jurors see the merit not only of tales which readers can learn something from, but also tales in which the reader happily gets lost. After all, it’s by tasting what the world has to offer that you really learn its lessons—being told what to do and what not to do doesn’t quite cut it. Of course, one of the most enjoyable ways to vicariously experience someone else’s world is through stories, and the last two years’ Newbery Award winners—one realistic, one fantastical—created worlds I was happy to get lost in, and left me with messages of hope and tolerance that I was hardly aware of absorbing along the way. (And that’s the way I like it!)
I found myself eager to read Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux soon after hearing about it on NPR, and wasn’t disappointed. This book about a mouse who falls in love with a princess is one which I will not hesitate to describe as charming, and I mean that in the most non-patronizing way possible. It is a charming story, with funny twists, scary turns, and appealingly goofy-named characters. With names like Chiaroscuro, Miggery Sow, and Princess Pea, how can you go wrong? Its skewed-fairy-tale aesthetic will appeal to readers looking for something a little deeper and less trite than your average retold Grimm or Andersen story; something that’s a tiny bit more Roald Dahl than Walt Disney.
Plus there’s DiCamillo’s amusing take on the Victorian convention of addressing readers directly within the writing—with “Dear Reader, take note” and so forth. It’s a device that was often used to draw the reader’s attention or signal overt moralizing, something that I’ve already mentioned disliking. In this book, it has a surprisingly disarming effect, and is, of course, used to full humorous advantage. I immensely preferred this novel to her previous one, Because of Winn-Dixie. Though I did enjoy Winn-Dixie, I felt Despereaux had much more depth of story and craft, and I definitely agree that it’s a winner.
This year’s Newbery Award winner was vastly different in every way possible, but no less of a good read. Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata chronicles a story of a family’s loss of one of their daughters to cancer, and its effect on the remaining family members, through the eyes of the younger daughter, Katie. Running through the whole book is the theme of growing up Japanese-American in the 1950s and 60s. This world was unfamiliar to me but described in such loving, down-to-earth detail, vivid and bright and glittering, echoing the meaning of the title word kira-kira.
In the end, it is a world that seems brittle, but is ultimately strong, like Katie herself. It is a world that is funny and tragic at the same time; a world of contradictions where there isn’t always a happy ending, but there is always room for hope. This last message is one present in both Newbery winners—that life doesn’t always present you with a fairy-tale ending. People die. People fail to fall in love, marry, and live happily ever after. And life doesn’t always seem fair. But the struggle, in the end, is so often worthwhile just the same, thanks to the small moments of friendship and family, love and adventure.
