A Compilation of Our Contributors’ Favorite Newbery Books

Choosing one’s favorite Newbery is like choosing a favorite child . . . but here are some favorites of our CAL contributors.

The 1996 Honor Book The Watsons Go to Birmingham, 1963 by Christopher Paul Curtis. I marvel at this book, which deftly moves from hilarity to despair and then to an emerging sense of connection as a way forward. I also love Flora and Ulysses (2014), which was the book that won the year I was on the Newbery Committee. I love so many of the books!

—Susan Polos, Middle School Librarian, Greenwich Country Day School

A tie between The Westing Game (1979) by Ellen Raskin and The Giver (1994) by Lois Lowry, the former for its joyful and clever creativity and the latter for its chilling transformation into dystopian horror.

—Steven Herb

The books I “hand sell” most at the library are two, albeit very different, Newbery winners: Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book (2009), for its clever creepiness, and Kate DiCamillo’s Flora and Ulysses (2014), a masterpiece of playfulness and creating memorable characters.

—Sharon Verbeten

The High King (1969) by Lloyd Alexander, and my top Honor Book, The Black Cauldron (1966), come from the same series. I read the Chronicles of Prydain at age eleven or so in the early 1970s, and it clearly stands the test of time for me. I’ve re-read them every five years or so ever since. As a child, these might have been the most serious books I had read up to then, with agonizing choices (the brooch or the Cauldron?) and beloved characters actually dying (every time I get to “The Red Fallows” chapter, I have to brace myself). The books are also funny, thrilling, and filled with wisdom and insights that have stuck with me for decades.

—Steven Engelfried

The 1988 winner, Lincoln: A Photobiography, is a favorite of mine because it shows so convincingly that historical writing can rise to the level of art. By shaping facts into stories and stories into a tautly constructed, continuous narrative, Russell Freedman performed the real magic trick of taking a fabled figure down from the marble shelf and putting young readers eye to eye in his—Abraham Lincoln’s!—presence.

—Leonard S. Marcus

I appreciate a good surprise in the Newbery winners. One of my favorites is Last Stop on Market Street (2016) by Matt de la Peña, illustrated by Christian Robinson. Winning the Newbery Medal and a Caldecott Honor in the same year had to be an unbelievable experience for this team, and I love how the Newbery drew attention to a picture book as a classic work of children’s literature.

—Mary-Kate Sableski, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Dayton