Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | T | The Horn Book Magazine

Prizes and paradoxes: the sand in the oyster.

Article Excerpt
Upstairs at the Hollywood Public Library in the 1940s, just inside the entrance to the children's room, there was a display that appeared at the beginning of summer every year. "Newbery Awards!" the sign proclaimed, on a table where gold-medal-emblazoned books were lined up, the newly chosen winner right in front. I, a voracious reader, would make a big circle to avoid that table and go on to my own choices from the shelves. That gold seal was the kiss of death for me. Johnny Tremain had convinced me that all those books were deadly dull, and so I never read a Newbery winner again as a child.

Is the ALA's Printz award, which has been touted as the YA Newbery, on its way to building such reader aversion? Recent impassioned controversy over the teen appeal of the last three winners of that award (Postcards from No Man's Land by Aidan Chambers, An Na's A Step from Heaven, and Kit's Wilderness by David Almond) have brought to the fore issues surrounding the eternal YA tussle between quality and popularity, as well as several other dichotomies and paradoxes that are inherent in young adult literature. These questions probably have no final answers, but it may still be useful to ask them, especially at this time of year, when the 2003 Printz winners are just being celebrated.

When the quality vs. popularity debate is applied to the choices of the Printz committee, it must be remembered that the award is given exclusively for literary excellence, although the rules also say that only books designated by the publisher as YA are eligible. (To simplify the argument, this column intends to focus on fiction.) Teen appeal has been implicitly, if not explicitly, excluded from...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!