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Nonfiction award winner.

Article Excerpt
If You Decide to Go to the Moon written by Faith McNulty and illustrated by Steven Kellogg, published by Scholastic Press

A young boy carefully prepares for a flight to the moon by making sure he has a space suit, air tanks, books, a diary, and that essential food for all trips, peanut butter. Faith McNulty informs the facts of such a journey with the poetic mystery of outer space, wrapping the wondrous in familiar images. Steven Kellogg's gritty, stark watercolors heighten the boy's isolation as he explores the moon's surface on his way to visit the site of the 1969 landing. On his return voyage, black foldout pages open to reveal Earth's vibrant life forms sustained by the air and water the moon's atmosphere lacks. In contrast to the boy's solitary landing on his outward trip, his sister and pets are there to greet him when he returns. The best homecoming is the one where you know you will be welcomed and your home, Earth, is exactly the way you left it. MARY BETH DUNHOUSE

Author Faith McNulty died in 2005. Her niece, Katherine Keiffer, accepted the award on her behalf and spoke briefly about her aunt.

I CAN'T TELL YOU how much Faith would have enjoyed receiving this award. She was immensely proud of her work, and particularly of her children's books. Faith died about a year and a half ago, and though she was bedridden for the last months of her life, she had a terrific run, still riding horseback, hiking steep trails to swim in her favorite pond, writing, and wheeling-and-dealing in real estate, pretty much right to the end.

Faith's consuming interest in wildlife began when she was very young. Whether this sprang from her father assuring her that my infant mother was merely a large beetle and nothing to worry about, or from some other cause, she was fascinated by creatures of all kinds. She happily hid a dead snake in my mother's bed when they were little girls and was known for her reckless horseback riding. She grew to be a fearless woman. In fact, we dubbed her the Iron Mouse, since her small stature and delicate good looks concealed an unexpectedly ferocious will.

Most of Faith's stories were about animals and their sensibilities; how they relate to us,...

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