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A Monster Calls Wins Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness was a 2011 Bram Stoker nominee for superior achievement in a Young Adult novel, a category that contained truly brilliant writing.  A Monster Calls was much different than the other books in the category, though, an experience as much as a powerful story, due to the dark and frightening world drawn in the margins and throughout the pages- the illustrations and text complemented each other perfectly,  packing an incredible and terrifying emotional punch. The chair of the committee, Rachel Levy(quoted in this article in Publishers Weekly), said it better than I can, when expressing why the book would win both an award for the text (the Carnegie) and one for its illustration (the Greenaway):

Jim Kay’s illustrations for A Monster Calls created the perfect synergy between the text and illustrations… Using only shades of black, white, and gray, he has beautifully, skillfully captured the atmosphere and emotion of the story and has produced a book that gives you a whole and satisfying experience.

 

That’s it exactly. This intense and emotional story was completely deserving of the double award it received. Congratulations to Patrick Ness and Jim Kay for their awards, and for bringing a new dimension to storytelling. Now go read the book.

Posted on June 14, 2012 by , Reply

Diversity is Good… So Are School Libraries.

I was saddened to read this article today in the New York Times, about a neighborhood school with forty percent of the children receiving free lunch that was struggling to save its school library. By digging deep and rallying their community the students of PS 363 in New York City raised the money to save their library and keep their school library program going for another year.

I am lucky enough to live in a district with reasonably well-funded schools, due to a referendum that passed a few years ago. This allows the schools to offer a school library program staffed with professional school librarians not just during the year but also for several days during the summer. The article in the Times notes that while diversity is considered to be a benefit of a public school education, cuts in education are creating casualties in schools like PS 363 (aka The Neighborhood School), where the socioeconomic diversity is enough to make fundraising efforts difficult, but not quite extreme enough to qualify for extra federal funding.

We’ll never escape the inequities of school funding. Some schools will have extraordinary resources available to them, and others will struggle. One way to even the playing field is to make sure that schools like PS 363 have great school library programs staffed by professional librarians- there are strong correlations to significant improvements in student achievement and literacy, for kids at all socioeconomic levels (you can check out Scholastic’s excellent report summarizing the research here– the school also has a link to the report on their fundraising webpage).  Where is the money going to come from? PS 363 showed that supporting  vital, if unfunded, educational programs requires a community effort. It is amazing to me how the school community and surrounding neighborhood pulled together and saved the library program for another year.  The only way it’s going to happen is if each of us gets personally involved in saving an imperiled school library, regardless of the situation the students, and school, find themselves in.

 

Posted on June 7, 2012 by , Reply

A Giant is Gone: Ray Bradbury Dies

 

Today I learned that Ray Bradbury had died.

From the day I snagged a library copy of Fahrenheit 451 (due to a school board election in which one candidate ran on the platform of removing it from the curriculum), Ray Bradbury had me hooked. It’s funny how his short stories sneaked in to the most unusual of places. I found  “The Flying Machine” and “A Sound of Thunder” in my middle school English textbook, and my junior year, after reading “The Fall of the House of Usher”, my American Lit teacher stuck a photocopy of “Usher 2000” in my hands. There were anthologies edited by Martin Greenberg that had his stories within, and somewhere in my days as the librarian for the science fiction society I belonged to in college, I acquired a used hardcover copy of  three of his anthologies bound together- The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and Dandelion Wine.  I just read a short essay on Bradbury criticizing him for not having written anything of note since the 1960s, but I completely disagree- although these are probably still my favorite stories, I love his writing for making me think.

I heard Bradbury speak once, on a double bill with Douglas Adams. I have to say that Douglas Adams, as much as I love his writing, was not a great speaker. Bradbury, however… Even in a wheelchair, mere days after a stroke, he was compelling and fascinating. Age, and even illness, did not stop his agile mind.  Just this year, I discovered the “official” graphic novel of Fahrenheit 451, with an introduction by Bradbury, where he wrote about how, as time passed, he had been able to reflect and recognize the origins of the book. Which has, ironically, been the target of censors many times, including his own publishers. If not for libraries, this book could never have been written- it’s a true dime novel, written on a typewriter in the basement of a library, at the cost of ten cents per half hour. You can find it at your library and check it out today, knowing that libraries have not only defended the book, but also allowed for its creation in the first place.

Bradbury resisted having his books come out as ebooks, but they did recently come out in that forrm. If you’ve never read his work now is an excellent time to start, and you have all kinds of choices.  A giant of literature, with the talent to create compelling, disturbing, and sometimes terrifying visions of the future present, he will be missed.

 

 

Posted on June 6, 2012 by , 1 comment
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