November Nominations Results: 52 Possible Medal Contenders

We’ve now completed two of the three rounds in our Mock Newbery nomination process. To this point, Heavy Medal readers have chosen their top five contenders for the 2024 Newbery Award: three in October and two in November. Like the real Committee, we’ll have one more round and add two more titles each, for a total of seven. That December nomination period will run from November 27th through December 2nd. For now, though, let’s look at the totals so far:

• Of the 52 titles on the list, 17 of them were nominated for the first time this month. That’s nearly one third of the total. First-time nominated titles are marked with an asterisk below.
• We still have two titles clearly in the lead. THE LABORS OF HERCULES BEAL and SIMON SORT OF SAYS both have twice as many nominations as the next book on the list. And they were the only two with three nominations this month.
• 30 titles have a single nomination; that’s over 57% of the total, but on the real Committee, every nominated title is in the running. The Newbery Manual notes that “serious consideration is to be given to all nominated books, including those with minimal support” (p 27).
• And of course we have no idea what the real Committee nomination list looks like. After our first two rounds last year, two eventual Honor books had multiple nominations on Heavy Medal: THE LAST MAPMAKER (10) and MAIZY CHEN’S LAST CHANCE (3). But there were no nominations for FREEWATER, the Medal winner, or the other Honor book, IVELIZ EXPLAINS IT ALL. Are we missing winners again? We’ll have to wait until January to find out. Here’s our list to this point:

Filed under: Nominations