LITTLE ROCK — I love librarians. My first job, at 15, was shelving books at the public library in my home town in the Chicago suburbs. I say that to inoculate myself because I’m about to say something negative about librarians, or specifically the American Library Association, which annually bestows the John Newbery Medal on the best children’s book of the year.
The Newbery is a big, important award. The winning book gets an embossed golden sticker put on its jacket. The winning author gets the certain knowledge that “Newbery Medal winner” will be in the first paragraph when the time comes for an obituary to be written.
My problem is that too often the Newbery Medal winners seem like books kids should read rather than books kids want to devour. They’re important. They’re serious. They’re sometimes just hard to love.
Like Moon Over Manifest, the Newbery winner from two years ago. It’s a lovely book, but it’s about a girl in Kansas during the Depression who struggles to find out the truth about her father. The 2005 winner, Kira-Kira, follows a young girl’s “journey through a childhood punctuated by prejudice, poverty and family tragedy,” according to the Newbery citation.Crispin: The Cross of Lead, which won in 2003, tells the story of a boy who is suddenly orphaned and stripped of home and possessions and must fight the injustices of feudalism. Feudalism?
I’m sorry, but where is the joy? The wonder of childhood? The invitation to travel to a world where the imagination runs rampant?
Enter The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate, this year’s Newbery winner.
The story of Ivan, a majestic silverback gorilla who is kept in a cage at a mall along with other animals, is, sadly, based on a true story. But what makes it remarkable is that it’s written in the form of Ivan’s journal. If only most humans were half as wise as the amazing creature that Applegate envisions.
This is a book that works as a read-aloud for first-graders and as a challenging treatise on the human (and animal) condition for high-schoolers. (It’s hard to imagine an adult who wouldn’t be entranced as well.)
Everything about the book invites kids in. The first chap-ter consists of three sentences. Talk about an enticement for a reluctant reader. And they are three sentences that defy you not to turn the page.
There are beautiful illustrations scattered throughout the pages. The simplesentences are produced in a large font on pages generous with white space. This is not an insignificant storytelling device.
And then there are those sentences: simple in structure, disarming in their child-like directness, profound in their wisdom. For example, after Ivan gets angry with obnoxious children who spit on the glass of hiscage, he feels remorse: “I’m sorry I called those children slimy chimps. My mother would be ashamed of me.”
Or late in the book, when Ivan is particularly interested in a female of the species, there’s this: “Romance is hard work. It looks so easy on TV. I’m not sure I will ever get the hang of this.”
And suddenly your child is in Ivan’s mind. What doesa silverback gorilla think? Or Stella, an elderly elephant? Or Bob, a stray dog?
Perhaps it is not surprising that Applegate told me her favorite books as a child were Dr. Dolittle and Charlotte’s Web. She has put together a cast of talking animals as memorable as those.
And as in Charlotte’s Web, Applegate’s characters lay out for children some oflife’s hardest truths, but in a way that makes a child feel love and compassion. For any tears that are shed, there are far more giggles of delight. And most importantly, after spending time in Ivan’s world, it’s hard to imagine a child who won’t say, “I want to read another book, just like that one.”
This year, the librarians got it just right.
Family, Pages 35 on 02/20/2013