2008: GOOD MASTERS! SWEET LADIES! VOICES FROM A MEDIEVAL VILLAGE by Laura Amy Schlitz with illustrations by Robert Byrd
The Feast of All Souls, I ran from my tutor - /Latin and grammar - no wonder!
The 2008 movie that won Best Picture at the Oscars was Slumdog Millionaire, a film that I will apparently be referencing multiple times throughout this series. If you care about the Oscars, and you shouldn't, this was actually the start of a very interesting debate, which is still unresolved, about the nature of the Oscars and what kind of movie should win Best Picture. Because another movie called The Dark Knight had come out the same year, everybody saw it, a lot of people enjoyed it, and critics and audiences thought it had a shot at winning Best Picture; Warner Bros. even rereleased the film in a few hundred theaters right before the nomination deadline to grease a path to a major award. But the film's eventual omission from the Best Picture nominees in favor of the Oscars' usual preference for small indies and festival hits caused such a stink that the Oscars literally changed the Best Picture category the following year. They could now nominate up to ten films, to make room for blockbusters like Avatar (which was nominated the following year) or Marvel's Black Panther (which was nominated a decade later), and decide the winner on a ranked-choice ballot.
This didn't fix anything. The blockbuster movies didn't win or really come close to winning. People are still mad that their superhero movies aren't Oscar favorites, even fifteen years later, long after the entire film industry has been fed into the maw of Marvel and DC. Oscar nominations and wins still mainly go to stuff that only industry insiders would see or even hear about, except in 2020, the glorious moment when the whole country got be-swept with Mank fever. The Oscars are still desperate for young people to watch their show; tactics they tried this year to drive up viewership included:
Having viewers vote on an honorary Oscar for "most cheer-worthy moment", which went to something called "The Flash enters the Speed Force"
Having Megan Thee Stallion rap a guest verse during a performance of "We Don't Talk About Bruno", with the lyrics mainly focused on how it's Hollywood's biggest night and all the stars were out to shine
After the failure of the first two tactics, distracting everyone by goading Will Smith into committing assault on camera
Every year, there's this same kind of debate online, between the kind of people who care about this sort of thing: what are the Oscars, and especially the Best Picture race, actually supposed to be for? Are they celebrating movies that everyone has seen and loved? Should they be introducing viewers to smaller films that they otherwise would never have sought out? Is it important that they recognize filmmakers from historically under-represented groups, or will that somehow dilute the prestige of the award? If they make the wrong decision, are they somehow going to turn people off to movies entirely?
The reason I bring this up is because at the exact same time as this debate on the Best Picture award, there was an identical debate about the Newbery Medal. Except their Slumdog Millionaire was a book called Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices From A Medieval Village.
Shortly after the 2008 medal went to Good Masters!, book reviewer Anita Silvey published an article in School Library Journal titled "Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?", igniting what was, by the standards of librarians, the most bruising and vitriolic debate over the Newbery medal in history. By the standards of normal people, the debate was polite but somewhat dull. The image that ran with the piece was a cartoon of people running away, in horror, from a giant Newbery medal coming to murder them:
Silvey interviewed 100 people who work in libraries or are otherwise professionally connected to children's literature to get their read on whether the recent Newbery medal winners were any good, if young readers were getting excited for them, and if the award - one of the few publishing awards that still had a material impact on book sales - had lost some of its prestige:
"Here's the gist of what I learned. Although some public librarians can't afford to buy more than a single copy of the Newbery, they say the last four winners—Kira-Kira, Criss Cross, The Higher Power of Lucky, and Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!—have been particularly disappointing. "I think I know books, but because of the subject matter, these wouldn't be the ones I'd naturally choose to introduce to my kids," said a children's librarian. "Possibly the committee has too many 'experts' on it, and not enough working, small-town public librarians." School librarians say they simply don't have enough money to spend on books that kids won't find interesting—and in their opinion, that category includes most of this century's Newbery winners."
In other words, the Newbery committee was maybe getting a little too pretentious, and starting to pick winners that, compared to earlier eras of the medal, children would not get excited for. Silvey cited the winners from the 90s, several of which became national bestsellers, as a contrast to the more recent winners that, for whatever reason, weren't reaching as many readers. For Silvey, this got away from the original intention of the award, which used to be selected by a national survey of children's librarians before it moved over to an ALA subcommittee:
"In the humble beginnings of the Newbery Award, its founders clearly sought a book that would have broad appeal…Obviously, the founders cared deeply about the opinions and needs of those who worked directly with children. Even the name of the award provides clues about the vision behind it. John Newbery, a highly successful publisher, believed that children's books should offer readers delight and instruction in equal measure. So he searched for materials that would be both popular and profitable. I have no doubt that he would have published most, if not all, of the 1990s Newbery winners. But what about the more recent ones? To my mind, most of these selections have moved away from the spirit and philosophy of those who established the award."
But this just leads me to ask "okay, but what is the award actually for?" Is Silvey arguing that the award should literally be for profitability? When she talks about books that are "both popular and profitable", aren't those just two words for basically the same thing in the publishing world? Is she literally stating that she knows what a dead person would choose to publish, and does that seem like a completely unhinged thing to say? Should we recognize books that everyone knows and loves already? If a book is a major literary achievement, is it okay to give it an award even if it had a small print run? Is there a way to actually measure "excitement" for a book other than straight sales numbers? Erica Perl also asked these questions when she wrote a response to the SLJ piece in Slate, which had some practical critiques - it's not like Good Masters! was in danger of taking any school library shelf space away from more popular books - and took a different view of what the award was actually for:
"Literary awards should do more than simply affirm books that are easy to love and would likely find fans regardless of a medal. They also serve as inspiration for authors to take creative risks, push boundaries, and even reinvent the form…According to children’s books historian Leonard Marcus…promoting innovation in the children’s books field was the reason the Newbery medal was created in the first place. Frederic G. Melcher, head of the National Association of Book Publishers, initially proposed the award’s creation to the American Library Association and championed it as children’s literature’s own Pulitzer Prize. Marcus notes that while Melcher was pleased that the award generated “publicity of the best kind,” his motivation was to provide the nation’s best authors with an incentive to write for children."
If the objective of the Newbery is to encourage authors to write popular and broadly appealing and commercially successful books, well, I don't think you need an award to convince authors to try to do that. If it's to encourage authors to experiment with form and genre and subject what a children's book can actually do, it gives us a different, and possibly better, way to evaluate the recent winners.
Part of what Silvey was arguing was that the Newbery winners of the 2000s seemed to have less of a cultural impact than the heavy-hitters of the 90s; I think it's worth engaging with that point because at a surface level, it kind of feels correct. Winners in the 90s included The Giver and Holes and Shiloh, books people remember from junior high English class with popular curriculum designs and film adaptations; A Single Shard or Criss Cross or Kira-Kira - or Good Masters! - don't appear to have the same reach. But Silvey, and the people she interviewed, jumped right to "it must be because the new books just weren't as good", which is subjective, which ignores a few of the 90s winners that are also relatively obscure compared to a genre-reshaping juggernaut like The Giver, and which also blows right past all of the other much less subjective differences in the Newbery winners between the two decades.
I'm not the right person to say whether the Newbery winners were stronger from a literary standpoint in the 90s or the 2000s, or whether one decade's winners were more accessible or more popular or whether the committee made more of an effort to highlight works with more niche appeal in later years. But there are a few measurable, notable differences between the winners of the two decades that are very interesting.
There's one that's obvious, of course: the authors who won in the 2000s were more diverse. That wasn't hard to achieve: all nine authors who won a Newbery in the 90s were white (there are only nine because Lois Lowry won twice). This is an award that, like a few other awards, has been given overwhelmingly to white artists over its history, which did not accurately reflect the full range of good authors working in children's literature, although it probably did reflect who publishing houses were actually willing to seek out and support for most of the twentieth century. In the 2000s, the ALA didn't fix this problem, but they at least took some small steps in the right direction when they gave a medal to an African American (Christopher Paul Curtis), a Korean American (Linda Sue Park), a Japanese American (Cynthia Kadohata), and a guy who dated Amanda Palmer (Neil Gaiman).
But there's another really interesting difference in Newbery medalists between the two decades, one so interesting to me that I made a graph of it. The Newbery authors over those two decades are plotted chronologically from left to right, and the size of each bubble is an estimate of how many books that author has published in their career, based on a quick online search for their bibliography. Most importantly, though, the vertical axis maps how many books each author published before they won the Newbery. So, the higher the bubble, the more books you already had under your belt before you won a Newbery. Check this out:
There are some outliers, but the trend is clear to me: in the nineties, the median Newbery winner won the medal on their seventeenth book of their career. And the median Newbery winner in the 2000s won the medal on their fourth book (Good Masters! happens to be Schlitz's fourth book). As the decade turned, for whatever reason, the ALA started recognizing writers much earlier in their careers than they had over the past several years1. That's not good or bad by itself, but it has implications for what books kids "get excited" for. It probably wasn't hard to get active readers excited about a new book by Louis Sachar or Phyllis Reynolds Naylor or Lois Lowry or Cynthia Rylant because those kids could have already read multiple works by those authors; a good school library could have easily had a dozen titles by each of those authors on the shelf, and teachers would have been bringing their books in for read-alouds. But there just weren't that many books around by the less established authors who were winning in the 2000s. Teachers hadn't already introduced their students to Laura Amy Schlitz by the time Good Masters! won the medal, because Schlitz just hadn't written that many books yet.
There's one more major difference between the two decades which you've probably figured out if you've thought about it for more than two seconds: the 2000s were also the decade where we had widespread adoption of high-speed internet and the beginning of the collapse of traditional media. "Kids aren't excited for these books" is probably more easily explained by "nobody was marketing books as publishing houses were folding, merging, and pouring their limited resources into whatever hot genre fiction they could fund" than by "the books weren't as good as they used to be", which I see as a very ahistorical and shallow take.
But we do still have to see if the book is any good.
Guess what: it’s really good! Yeah! I liked it! It's definitely better as a book than Slumdog Millionaire was as a movie! I think the reason Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! won the Newbery in 2008 was not because the ALA subcommittee was trying to show off their literary taste or reward an up-and-coming author, I think they picked it because it’s a really good and really original book.
Let’s start with why it’s original: Good Masters! Is a collection of seventeen fictional monologues, and two dialogues, each given by a different teenage child in the same thirteenth-century medieval village. Laura Amy Schlitz, who is a school librarian, originally wrote the pieces as part of a Middle Ages curriculum for her fifth-graders; the idea was that the class would put these on as a performance, and everyone would be able to get a major speaking part. So rather than a novel, this is something closer to a Canterbury Tales for middle grades. The monologues are all written in medieval-speak but vary widely in style, as the characters come from different backgrounds and social classes. Many are in unrhymed verse, a few are in prose, one is in rhymed iambic pentameter.
The book is obviously very well-researched; the language is probably the most obvious sign of that research, but the book also includes regular footnotes to help explain the references and elevated language, there are several one-page asides by the author as brief explainers in topics like "how brutal the Crusades actually were" or "what falconry is", and hearing these stories - which eventually start to overlap with each other as we see causes have effects in later monologues, or the same scene told from two different perspectives - we get a really engaging picture of what it would have been like to live in a medieval village.
And it seems like it would have been horrible, given that everyone is worried about catching the plague (thankfully a concern that society has since outgrown) or getting gored by a boar or getting ripped off by the guy who runs the mill or just enduring the vicious, literally feudal, class and power stratification of the village. The peasants and the lords and the tradesmen throw mud and mock and threaten each other. And this tooth-and-claw world isn't going away any time soon, it's been divinely ordained. The miller's son is regularly beaten by his father, who himself makes a living by cheating the peasants of the village, and he puts it best:
"And half the world's a-thieving
and the other half's a-crawling
The Mouth of Hell is gaping wide
and all of us are falling.
The Judgment Day is close at hand,
the hellfires are burning.
There's no way to retrace our steps,
The mill wheel's turning -For God made the water, and the water makes the river,
And the river turns the mill wheel
and the wheel goes on forever.
My father used to beat me sore -
I've learned that life is grim.
And someday I will have a son - and God help him!"
But through all of this fatalism and misery, there are moments of mercy and kindness - the lord's son leaves a flower as a gift for a girl who reshoes his horse, a girl plays with a Jewish boy at the river instead of throwing a rock at his head, which apparently happened a lot back then - and maybe even one or two moments of the peasants getting one over on the well-to-do. Very human, very moving moments are woven throughout the nineteen intersecting stories, which remind us that our world doesn't have to be a tooth-and-claw theological nightmare, which expand our idea of what forms children's literature can take, which provide an engaging and complex view of medieval society, which are written in beautiful language - my three-year old kept requesting that I read passages of this to her because she liked how it sounded - which are accompanied by beautiful illustrations inspired by illuminated manuscripts, and which get this all done in under 100 pages. If "the [Newbery's] founders cared deeply about the opinions and needs of those who worked directly with children", if John Newbery "believed that children's books should offer readers delight and instruction in equal measure", it seems like they could have done a lot worse than a unique and engaging spin on history written by a school librarian.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1962 medalist, The Bronze Bow by Elizabeth George Speare.
Admittedly I fudged the numbers on Neil Gaiman a bit, since he's very prolific but I didn't count his works that were marketed primrily to adult readers. There weren't a lot of fifth-grade Language Arts teachers reading American Gods to their classes, even though that would have been cool as hell.