Captain Underpants versus Voices from a Medieval Village

I laughed when I first read of the  growing disenchantment surrounding The Newbery Medal, the literary award for children's books. I wasn't wholly convinced to take it seriously by The Washington Post's take.  Of 25 Newbery winners and runners-up from 2000 to 2005, most of them dealt with issues some would consider too heavy for young minds to process. Four of the books dealt with death, six with the absence of one or both parents and four with mental challenges such as autism. The rest centered on tough social issues. Okaaay. 

This piece in the online magazine, Slate, convinced me that a literary war is brewing. (That or the winter storms left some of us with a tad too much time on our hands.

I get that prizes are big business. Since Oprah doesn't read children's books, the Newbery is one of the few ways sellers of children's books have of generating buzz and boosting sales. The golden seal of the Newbery affixed to the cover of a book is enough to get me to pull it from the shelf and peruse the pages. Whether I buy the book or not depends on if I think my 7-year-old will be interested in the storyline. My son is an emerging reader whose motivation to do the heavy lifting of reading depends on the literary reward. Some of the Newbery choices are hits with him, others are, in his words, snoozers.

So many of his choices, Junie B. Jones, Henry Huggins, Encyclopedia Brown and Cam Jansen aren't award winners. But my son loves them. So I guess it says something that I have more of those books on my shelves than those bearing the golden seal.  But what it says, in the grand scheme of things, isn't much.