“Best Books,” Mocks, and the Newbery Medal

This is the time of year that book review journals share their “best books of the year” lists.  These are always fascinating, and significantly different from the lists of nominations we collect here on Heavy Medal. That makes perfect sense, since on we’re focusing specifically on Newbery Criteria on Heavy Medal, while the journals have their own guidelines for the lists (and these vary with the different publications). Still, it’s always interesting to compare.

So far I’ve seen four lists by the major journals:  School Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Horn Book, and Kirkus. As far as I can tell, Booklist and The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books are not out yet. [update: Booklist‘s “Editors’ Choice” and BCCB’s “Blue Ribbon” lists are out!] I totaled up the four lists so far in order to compare to the titles we’ve looked at on Heavy Medal. I didn’t track every single title: I only added picture books and teen titles if they received a nomination on HM, for example.  And tried to skip all of the Newbery-ineligible titles. Here are a few observations:

13 books landed on at least three of the lists. Four of those received no nominations on Heavy Medal: one graphic novel (BORDERS), one picture book biography (NINA), one nonfiction (REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME) and one poetry collection (HELLO EARTH). 

This next list shows the 16 books that received the highest number of Heavy Medal nominations. Of these, four were not named on any of the Best of the Year lists so far:  JUST LIKE THAT, LION OF MARS, A PLACE TO HANG THE MOON, and PITY PARTY. 

How has this played out in past years? Below is the list of Newbery and Honor books from the past three years, along with the number of Best Books lists they made and the number of Heavy Medal Nominations.

Most (but not all) Newbery titles also do well in the area of starred reviews (thanks once again to Jen J. for her handy spreadsheet of starred reviews that goes all the way back to 2011). There are more misses on the Heavy Medal column; most (but not all) of those are with books on the lower or higher edge of the age range.

It would be cool if we could look at all of this and come up with a numbers-based way to predict Newbery winners, but I’m afraid not. It’s still going to come down to the 15 individual Committee members and their year of exhaustive reading, intense discussion, and the casting of their final ballots.

Filed under: Book Discussion