I just finished The Girl Who Drank The Moon, the most recent Newbery winner. I’ll have to sit with it a bit, but I think it might end up near the top of my list, a warm and original fantasy with a lot of Despereaux flavor to its ruminations on relationships.
Read two of them recently, both mentioned by other posters above. One I liked a lot, the other…not so much.
Like and recommend: Katherine Applegate’s The One and Only Ivan. Reminiscent in plot of Charlotte’s Web, with a gorilla reluctantly playing the role of Charlotte in an attempt to save a young elephant (and not so incidentally himself as well). Ivan, the gorilla, is a very well-drawn character who learns and grows and develops as the story progresses. I was initially a little put off by the writing style, which resembles free verse, but it came to fit Ivan and what we know about him. Effective, interesting, and brings up worthwhile questions about sentience and communication and memory.
Didn;t much like and don;t recommend: Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer. Published in the thirties, about a girl in the 1890s who zips around her corner of Manhattan on roller skates making friends with a multiethnic multiclass cast of characters. The book is fairly well written, the setting is interesting and evocative, and the main character, Lucinda, is fun at first…but I grew weary of her after a while. While she has the gumption and spunk and curiosity of, say, Harriet (the Spy) or Ramona (the Pest), to name two fictional heroines of a later generation, she lacks their flaws, and as a result never came to life for me. Also, the book is more than a little condescending to the lower-class people Lucinda befriends; I know, modern sensibilities and all, but I find that kind of thing easier to overlook in books that have great literary merit, and this one…just doesn’t. Oh well!
In the school where I teach part time I share an office with a reading specialist. She recently read The Westing Game with a group of fourth graders. They loved it. My colleague didn;t see the point. “It’s the only Newbery winner I haven’t liked,” she told me. I haven;t read it since I was a young adult; believe I’ll try it next.
Caddie Woodlawn (1936), by Carol Ryrie Brink. Indulges in some cringeworthy and offensive stereotypes about American Indians, though even I will admit it’s not intended to be mean-spirited. Kinda goofy gender roles. The story is fairly episodic, which isn’t a favorite technique of mine, but it’s better structured than some. The ending plot point (not the dog) is eyeroll-worthy.
Recommendation: I’d say it’s worth reading. It’s pretty charming quite often, and the writing and characters are quite good.
I think I’m at 40 of 96? read now. Still trucking, though slowly!
LOL, I know what you mean by the ending plot point. At least it didn’t come utterly and completely out of the blue, there was actually some hint of it early on, but I had to wonder whether it was really part of Carol Ryrie Brink’s grandmother’s story or whether it was just made up?
Yeah, parts of it were actually handled well, but geez. I felt like I was supposed to be humming America the Beautiful while reading it. 
Shiloh (1992), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. Nicely drawn characters, strong setting, realistic plot. I enjoyed this a lot. I wouldn’t put it in the very top tier, but it’s a good book, well-told.
Recommendation: I think most adult readers could enjoy this and get something from it.
The View From Saturday
This won? I mean, it’s a nice enough book, but hardly all that great. I think an advanced 6th grade class would enjoy it since it is about advanced 6th grade students who compete in a quiz bowl, beating the 7th and 8th grade along the way.
It’s a very short book, only 150 pages. Even the audio is only 4 hours long and I do recommend the audio version as each child is voiced by a different voice actor and it helps bring it to life.
Not bad, but nothing special.
Did you know this is a sequel? I am a teacher and next year, we are using her All Alone in The Universe as a book. It’s the original. I’ll likely read both just to have total mastery of the first one.
Ooh, I didn’t know that. I’ll have to check it out.
For any Caddie Woodlawn fans, the real life grandmother whose story inspired Carol Ryrie Brink
And her father who like the father in the story was born in England
Yes, Criss Cross is the famous one even if it is the second one. The first one is super short.
Flora and Ulysses (2014), by Kate DiCamillo with illustrations by K.G. Campbell. Really funny, touching, and sweet. I loved the art, especially ones showing Ulysses’s expressions. He just looks so damned pleased! I cared about all of the characters and wanted to spend more time with them.
Recommendation: Read this one. It may not work for you, but if it does you’ll be glad to have read it.
I glanced at this post and was thinking, what a coincidence, I just read that one too, and then took a closer look and realized–oops–it’s Sounder (1969) by William Armstrong that I just read. Another dog story, and a boy in the rural South.
I read Shiloh around 8 years ago and liked it, but my impression is that Sounder is for an older audience; it’s darker and more painful. If I’d been writing this 25 years ago I would have stated unhesitatingly that it’s an excellent book. However, today with all the debate about cultural appropriation, the viewpoint that people of another race aren’t the most authentic storytellers when it comes to telling the story of a minority culture does need to be acknowledged.
Recommended with caveats. And not just the race aspect–it has some violence as well, not for anyone with a weak stomach.
This was my daughter’s favorite for about a year. I didn’t really see it–I like it, but didn’t love it like she did. Different strokes and all.
On your recommendation I reread Dicey’s Song. It’s very good, and Dicey is a wonderful character, bone-deep plausible and compelling and awesome without being anywhere near perfect. What a depressing novel.
Curious what others think about The Girl who Drank the Moon when they get around to reading it. I’m halfway between thinking it’s twee philosophy a la Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and thinking it’s quietly and wonderfully profound. Can’t make up my mind.
About The Girl who Drank the Moon, I thought it was good but didn’t like it much. Maybe because, as you say, it was a bit twee and self-consciously profound. It reminded me more of The Alchemist and not so much Jonathan Livingston Seagull but then the last time I read the latter book was 40 years ago. (I’m not too big a fan of The Alchemist either) Antain in The Girl who Drank the Moon reminded me of the protagonist in The Alchemist (Santiago?)
I just finished Marguerite Henry’s King of the Wind. It was all right but didn’t really have a strong protagonist–Sham, the horse, isn’t that developed a character and the stable-boy who takes care of him, Agba, is just too mute and helpless and limited–he’s shown as an “exotic foreigner” and not really someone for the reader to fully identify with.
I just finished The Girl Who Drank the Moon too, and I really enjoyed it. I thought the voice was great, especially the way it found a balance between the profundity inherent in a fable, and the whimsy of a fairy-tale. I read it very quickly, and mostly right at the ends of my days, just before I fell asleep, and some of the dreaminess I’m attributing to the story might have come from my own mental state 
I hated the swamp monster’s name.
I read most of Kwame Alexander’s The Crossover at the library the other day, and it didn’t really do much for me. I also heard the author on a podcast (KidLit Drink Night, which I can’t wholly recommend, as it is only of sporadic interest). He seemed kind of smug.
I read two in the last couple of weeks.
I really liked the beginning of Konigsberg’s View from Saturday. The first half of the book is mostly a series of short stories, with each of the main kid characters narrating a section. I thought the kids were generally interesting, and interestingly quirky, and they seemed well rounded. The kids have their own voices, mainly, and the writing is good: I laughed out loud a few times.
But then the book degenerates into a description of how these four kids come together to play David to everyone else’s Goliath and win the NY state middle school quiz bowl. And I found myself really not caring. The characters lose their identity, and the issues involving them that were introduced early in the book disappear as they become “the team” (technically, “the Souls”). I suppose that’s part of the idea–these individualists finding each other and becoming part of an “us” for the first time–but it makes for a rather dull second half of the book. I don’t think it’s a BAD book, exactly. But it could have been so much more interesting.
The other book was The Westing Game, and I present this review a bit trepidatiously as I know many of the people participating in this thread love, love, **LOVE **this book. I think I get why people do (and one of our fourth graders kind of said as much to me when I asked her what she liked so much about it): the book does not condescend in any way to readers; it does not simplify the clues to fit the knowledge base of a standard ten-year-old; the book includes a lot of characters to keep track of without a scorecard; it deals with some adult situations; it basically throws readers into the deep end and says, “here, make sense of this yourself.” And I’ll add that, unusual among children’s literature, most of the characters are grownups. Turtle is the main character, to the extent there is one, but we get a lot of the narrative from the point of view of adults, and I think for a certain kind of kid that’s a real plus.
As for me, though, I did not love, love, love this book, or even like it all that much. I found it hard to care about the characters; I kind of liked Angela and the two brothers, and Judge Ford was fine, but the rest of them were kind of bland and uninteresting, and they did not come to life for me. (I thought Turtle was over the top; she didn’t really work as a character for me.) I thought the writing style was pedestrian, verging on clumsy in spots. I didn’t appreciate the deus ex machina, or the invisible hand, or whatever we might call it, that guides many of the actions of the characters. And perhaps most fundamentally, I just didn’t think the mystery was all that interesting. (As an adult, I read a lot of mysteries, for whatever that’s worth.) I read to the last page more out of a sense of completeness than because I cared about the solution to the puzzle or about the characters.
But as I say, I do get a sense of what might attract young readers, especially GOOD young readers, to this book, and I wonder what my reaction might have been if it had come out when I was a good young reader myself, instead of several years later.
I agree 100% with you. I reread the book a few months ago to try to see whether I liked it any better as an adult, and again it left me flat. Some folks explained to me why they like it so much, and I guess intellectually I can appreciate that; but I didn’t connect to the book at all.
I gave up.
MC Higgins, the Great (1975), by Virginia Hamilton. I hated this damned book. It’s set among my Appalachian people and it made me angry for portraying them like fucking freaks. I made it until
He sneaks up and attacks and cuts a girl with a knife for NO FUCKING REASON before deciding my life is too damned short.
**
Recommendation:** I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone.