So the 2012 Newberys have been awarded! I’m looking forward to reading Jack Gantos’ Dead End in Norvelt and all the Honor books too. Congratulations, all! (UPDATE: You really have to hear Jack Gantos talk on NPR about how he ended up serving 18 months in the federal pen for drug smuggling when he was in his twenties. Hilarious!)

Speaking of Newbery―some of you know that I’m bringing the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival to Portland, Oregon on March 3. It’ll be at the Central Library (801 S.W. 10th Avenue) from 3-5 pm. I’m also doing other events at area libraries the week leading up to the event; check out the sidebar for details. (Don’t know what the 90-Second Newbery is? Here you go.)

I’ve been lucky enough to have superstar co-hosts for other screenings of the 90-Second Newbery: the hardest working man in children’s literature Jon Scieszka for the New York screening (with a special appearance by Newbery medalist Rebecca Stead!) and the next-big-thing comedian Seth Dodson for the Chicago screening. So who would I get to co-host in Portland?

The answer was obvious: National Book Award nominee and noted pink-hair-flaunter Laini Taylor, the author of the rightly much-buzzed-about and thrilling Daughter of Smoke and Bone (as well as her similarly great Lips Touch and her two Dreamdark books, Blackbringer and Silksinger). I first came to know Laini when she posted a fabulous review of The Order of Odd-Fish on her blog and I’ve since read all her books and become a friend and admirer. We finally met in person a couple months ago when she was blowing through Chicago to promote Daughter (that’s when the above photo was taken).

Portlanders! The deadline for entries to the Portland screening is February 13, 2012. You can find complete rules and details about the contest here. (Hey, aren’t Beverly Cleary’s books set in a thinly veiled Portland? Ramona Quimby, Age 8 won a Newbery Honor in 1982 and Ramona and Her Father won a Newbery Honor in 1978. These definitely need to be done by Portlanders!)

I’ve already received some great videos from the Portland area (check them out here), but here’s the latest―a quite good 90-second version of Sid Fleischman’s 1987 Medal winner The Whipping Boy, adapted by Kieran and his little brother Ackley, along with their friends Lach and Christian. The storytelling is brutally efficient, and I especially liked the doleful way in which the whipping boy gripes “I hate this job” and the resourceful use of Legos for the outside scenes. (Also, is it me, or don’t their “lady” voices sound like Cartman?) We’ll definitely be screening this on March 3, and I’m told Kieran and the rest will be in attendance:

And this is also a good time for me to call attention to some great 90-Second Newbery videos I got last year from the Field School, an all-boy school in Charlottesville, Virginia. I received five videos from them, which I’ve featured on a special page here. But you can get a taste of their moviemaking prowess here, with this adaptation of Avi’s 1992 Newbery winner Nothing But The Truth:

Click through here to see all of the Field School’s great 90-Second Newberys. Great job, and congratulations!

And Portlanders, I’ll see you on March 3!

Happy new year! As mentioned in my last post, this week I’m squirreled away at my wife’s family’s cottage in Michigan, feverishly pounding away on an overhaul of my book. It’s amazing how productive you can be with a full night’s sleep and no babies to tend to! But I do miss Heather, Lucy, and Ingrid, and whenever my computer switches to a screen saver of random photos, it’s almost always of one of them, and my heart melts. But I must persist! Work! Do!

The cottage doesn’t have Internet or even a working phone right now, which is good for concentration, but I had to break down today and catch up on some crucial emails. So right now I’m writing this using the free wifi at a grocery store near the cottage. Not glamorous!

Speaking of, the above image is some Order of Odd-Fish fan art of one of the more glamorous characters in the book, the young actress Audrey Durdle. It’s by Marie, whom I first met when she posted her wonderful and insightful review of The Order of Odd-Fish on her old blog, Leaving Shangri-L.A. Since then, we’ve become friends, and hung out whenever she has been in my neck of the woods (Chicago) or I’ve been in hers (New York).

Marie recently sent me the above image, commenting that “I realized this sketch I did of Audrey all kitted up for the Cephalopod Ball has been hanging in my cubicle for two years!” The Cephalopod Ball! Clearly this is a lost Odd-Fish scene waiting to be written. The picture is gorgeous, of course―and Audrey is really working that squid in her hair. I assume it’s alive and just hanging out. Marvelous job, Marie!

It occurred to me this would pair well with this yet another entry for the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to post. It’s a retelling of The Witch of Blackbird Pond―but with a twist.

Now I’ve already featured a brilliant 90-Second Newbery adaptation of The Witch of Blackbird Pond done in straightforward style by the kids at Laurelhurst Elementary in Portland, OR.

But this one, by the wickedly talented Lucy, Kate, Rebecca, and Elliott of Cincinnati is something altogether different:

What a creative and hilarious take! There was so much to love here: the “I am such a calculus-a-holic” line followed by the exclamation of “Zeus!”, the “Settlers of Catan” reference, the insane makeover montage climaxing in that hip-cocking sashay, and most of all, the whole character of Kit! Such an ingenious idea to update her character into a vapid California girl. The over-the-top puns and winking at the end made me giggle. I thought this was just brilliant. Well done, Lucy, Kate, Rebecca, and Elliott! (And if you can’t get enough of them, their blooper reel is here).

Okay, back to writing!

I hope everyone is having a splendid winter wonder-jumble. Heather, Lucy, Ingrid and I just got back from a restful week or so visiting my family in my hometown of Troy, Michigan (a city which Lucy has been strangely obsessed about).

Now: back to work! I am radically revising my next book, The Magnificent Moots. In January I’m sequestering myself in my wife’s family’s cottage to pound this thing out in splendid winter isolation. How could that possibly go wrong?

In the meantime, here’s some 90-Second Newbery Film Festival videos that I have inexplicably not gotten around to posting yet (there were just so many good ones, I was overwhelmed with the volume).

The theme for today’s videos is of Newbery winners that prominently feature animals.
There’s a lot of of them! As we discovered in the “Newbery $20,000 Pyramid” game show we played at the New York screening (see picture above), all Newbery winners can be divided into three groups: (1) books about animals; (2) book about death; or (3) books about animals and death.

The first one is 1992 Medal winner Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, which is about a dog named Shiloh. It’s been adapted by Mont Kiara International School in Kuala Lumpur. AbdurRahman Bhatti, the young director, showed up at the New York screening with his family and gave us the behind-the-scenes scoop on how it was made. Apparently it took months to shoot this, because the different actors were out of the country at different times. But through the magic of AbdurRahman’s and co-director Mina Hwang’s edits and cuts, you’d never know!

I loved the performances, and particularly good soundtrack work by Thariq Rudy Willoughby. Well done, Mont Kiara International School!

Next up: 1923 Medal Winner The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting, adapted by the Niles Public Library right here in Illinois. Doctor Dolittle is, of course, about a man who can talk to animals, so it fits our theme. I like it when these older titles are represented. I especially liked the “special effects” with the at-sea scenes here, when the Doctor and his young friend are pulled along by dolphins and a sea snail! A little too long to feature in the film festival, but enjoyable nonetheless:

Great job, Niles! Especially the performances―lovely ridiculous accents. “I am middle aged, and I wear this very, very fancy hat.” Good puppet work with the duck, parrot, pig and the rest of animals, too!

Next up: 1973 Honor book Frog and Toad Together by Arnold Lobel. But done in the style of a horror movie! This ominous, haunting short is courtesy of Timothy Hamilton and kids:

“And we’re together!” For ever and ever and ever . . . (do I see a theme developing in today’s post?)

And let’s round up the Animals Edition with this enthusiastic version of 2004 Medal winner The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo, adapted by the Susquehanna County Library. I like how they’re always on the verge of breaking into laughter throughout the entire thing, when they’re not actually laughing:

Thanks everyone! I’m looking forward to what you’ll do for next year’s 90-Second Newbery film festival!

Check out this charming Order of Odd-Fish Christmas card I received from Emily Bricker, also known as Pirka (here’s her DeviantArt profile and Twitter). It’s fantastic!

I’ve featured Pirka’s marvelous art on the blog a couple times before (here’s the first collage I received from her, and here’s a horn-o’-plenty of Odd-Fish art including a very amusing animated video of the Odd-Fish knights and squires singing and dancing to a Monty Python song).

Above, we have Jo, Ian, Audrey, and Nora flying their armored ostriches (I like the neck-armor; makes sense!) with Santa’s sleigh being pulled by a Ken Kiang-mounted Schwenk. With, of course, Sefino at Santa’s side. It’s gorgeous, a delight! But I expect nothing less from the talented Pirka. I’m really glad I got to meet her this year.

2011 was a great year all around. My second daughter Ingrid was born, we pulled off the first annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival (with screenings in New York City and Chicago), I had the privilege of meeting Neil Gaiman and introducing him at the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago, we put on another Odd-Fish fan art show at the Hegeler-Carus mansion . . . and on and on.

I’m very grateful for this year. And I’m looking forward to 2012. I expect big things! See you then!

We’ve seen Shelly Tan’s great fan art for The Order of Odd-Fish before (check it out here) and even her fan art for my work-in-progress The Magnificent Moots (she was one of my writing students and I read the first two chapters aloud to the class; you can see her terrifying squid-worms and dragon-wasps from the book here). Now Shelly has come back with one of her best pieces yet, above―the pernicious centipede journalist Chatterbox, resplendent in his exquisitely tailored “fifteen-piece” suit.

I love it! Especially all the different “business” Shelly has for his palps―grasping his hat in mid-doff, fiddling with his cane, angling in akimbo skepticism, etc. In the lower left hand corner, Shelly notes, “Those brown curvy things near his face are actually a first pair of legs that Nature has modified into a pair of poison fangs. Yes, poison fangs. Awesome, No? (All centipedes have them. And some centipedes eat roach babies. Just a heads-up.)” Whaaaat! So there is a natural animosity between centipedes and cockroaches that I coincidentally alluded to with Odd-Fish’s rivalry between Chatterbox and Sefino? Perhaps I was drawing upon some great collective unconscious of entomological lore. Great work, Shelly! Check out all of her work on DeviantArt here.

Have you heard of the TED Talks? “TED” stands for “Technology, Entertainment, and Design.” Their slogan is “Ideas worth spreading” and it’s a series of talks by smarty-pants people about topics like using video to reinvent education or new insights in brain imaging or counterintuitive statistics about developing countries. At their best, the TED Talks are illuminating and entertaining; but on their off days, there’s a mockable tendency towards naive techno-utopianism, cockamamie schemes for “changing the world,” and a self-satisfaction in the speakers and audience in how smart they are.

Enter the NED Talks of Chicago. Their motto? “Spreading worthless ideas.” It’s ballyhooed as “TED’s idiot brother” and it’s the brainchild of why-aren’t-they-millionaires-yet Chicago comedians Seth Dodson and Kellen Alexander. (The hilarious Seth was my co-host for the Chicago screening of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival).

So last night I did a NED Talk at the Hideout (about the 90-Second Newbery, actually), along with other hilarious presenters Steve Waltien, Christina Boucher, Ross Bryant, and Grace Tran. It was a lot of fun! Someone was videotaping it, but the video isn’t online yet. However, I did find a video of one of the older NED Talks.

As far as I’m concerned, it is the Platonic ideal of all NED Talks―adroitly skewering the preening vocal style of the presenters, Wired-magazine faith in technology, and condescension to developing countries (essentially, a sandbox where Silicon Valley philanthropists can try out their Innovative Ideas), etc. The talk is by Daniel Kibblesmith, speaking here as “Miami Volt,” about his new nonprofit “Level-Up”―a way to help Third World countries through the power of video games. “We all know that you can save the world in video games. But can video games help save the world?”

Brilliant. To learn more about the NED Talks, here’s a story in the Chicago Tribune that also has an interview with Seth and Kellen. An idea whose time has come!

CHICAGOANS. Last-minute notice: I’ve been invited to give a quick 15-minute version of the 90-Second Newbery madness this Wednesday night at The Education Show, “Chicago’s premiere edutainment variety show.” Special musical guests Casimer + Casimir. At the Pub Theater @ The Fizz, 3220 N Lincoln Ave. $5 admission. Bring some new school supplies to donate to kids in need and get a prize! 8 pm.

So now that the New York and Chicago 90-Second Newbery film festival screenings are over with, it’s time for me to hunker down and do some serious writing and family enjoyment this holiday season. That is to say: my postings will be briefer, and there will be more time in between them!

While I’m gone, I’ll be posting some of the 90-Second Newbery videos I’ve received that, while great, I did not have time to post before the film festivals occurred. Today’s offering: a rather urban Bridge to Terabithia as adapted by 14-year old Mana Taylor and her 10-year old sister Soley of Chicago. They’re from Iceland! Mana tells me she wants to be a filmmaker. I say she’s got a flying start! You can also see her “behind the scenes” footage here.

Very enjoyable! Good acting (Mana plays a double part), and the costuming was spot-on too: Leslie’s kooky outfit vs. Jesse’s normal boy clothes. I liked the switch from the normal world to Terabithia (inside a bedroom― resourceful!) by cutting during the camera spinning around Jesse. The sped-up footage effectively got the necessary info across quickly. (Stick around for the charming dance party at the end, too.)

Thanks, Mana and Soley! I’m looking forward to seeing what you cook up for next year’s festival.

So we had our 90-Second Newbery Film Festival screenings in New York City (recap here) and Chicago (recap here). But surely, you exclaim, there’s no way we could’ve shown EVERYTHING we wanted to at the festivals. You’re right. We couldn’t. Because some of the material we received was totally inappropriate for an audience that included small children! Therefore, today let us trawl through the seedy underbelly of the 90-Second Newbery: TOO HOT FOR THE 90-SECOND NEWBERY.

The above video was one of the first videos I received for the contest. Probably the funniest. It’s by Lynne Kelly, an adaptation of the 2007 Medal winner The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron. The joke of it turns on the “scrotum” controversy from when Lucky won the Newbery (the book scandalously used the word “scrotum” in the first chapter. Complete details here.). For some folks, the idea of scrotums (scrota?) and Newberys (Newberies?) don’t mix, and this video pokes gentle fun at the situation. Funny, but TOO DARN EDGY for the chilluns, thus nixed for the actual screening. Enjoy it in all its glory above!

Speaking of edgy, how about the 1994 Newbery Medal winner The Giver by Lois Lowry? In the dystopia imagined in this book, infanticide is practiced to weed out the “unfit”; the book is frequently banned because of the queasy-making, explicit scene in which a baby is killed. Well, for some reason, people making 90-Second Newbery videos love this scene, spending upwards of 10 seconds of their allotted 90 seconds depicting it, frequently with a kind of harrowing glee. To see what I mean, I put together a highlights clip of all the infanticide scenes from all the 90-second versions of The Giver I received. It’s ludicrous―and, again, voted inappropriate to show to an audience that includes elementary school children:

Wait! I hear what you’re saying―there’s no way you’re going to sit through multiple baby-killing scenes. It’s too gross, too much of a downer. Well, don’t worry! Everything becomes hilarious when sped up 400% with “Yakety Sax” playing over it, Benny Hill style:

That video, too, was axed from the final show.

Here’s a final video that didn’t make it into the screenings―not because it was TOO HOT FOR THE NEWBERY, but because we received it too late. It’s by the fine folks at 826CHI: kids at their tutoring center speculating on what the Newbery winners of the future will be. Too bad it came in too late, because this woulda stole the show! Take it away, 826CHI:

Thanks, 826CHI! Great work, and I’m looking forward to seeing 90-second versions of these future winners!

Good news! We are bringing the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival to Portland, Oregon on March 3, 2012! The screening will be at the Central Library (801 S.W. 10th Ave.) from 3-5 pm. Thanks to the Multnomah County Library System!

I’ll be bringing the “best of the best” from the screenings we’ve already done in New York City (Betsy Bird’s recap here) and Chicago (my recap here), and mixing them with entries I hope to receive from the Portland area in the next few months. Plus live Newbery-themed entertainment between the films, cabaret-style! The deadline for entries to the Portland screening is February 13, 2012. You can find complete rules and details about the contest here.

I’ve already received two great videos from the Portland area: Laurelhurst School’s tough-to-top version of The Witch of Blackbird Pond (see above) and Alice McKee-Smith & Co.’s spot-on adaptation of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

And hey, aren’t many Beverly Cleary books set in a thinly veiled Portland? Ramona Quimby, Age 8 won a Newbery Honor in 1982 and Ramona and Her Father won a Newbery Honor in 1978. These definitely need to be done by Portlanders!

Indeed, the Pacific Northwest already has a strong showing: there’s this irresistibly charming Charlotte’s Web from Bainbridge Island and another one of my favorites, a brisk, droll The Giver from Tacoma:

While I’m in the Portland area, I’ll also be doing author visits and programs at the Capitol Hill Library, Rockwood Library, Northwest Library, Kenton Library, Troutdale Library, and Fairview-Columbia Library. See my events page for details.

A final bit of good news: the 90-Second Newbery is now a program under the Kidlit Foundation, an Illinois nonprofit dedicated to “bolstering literacy in preschool and grade school children.” I’ll still be running the film festival, of course; this just enables us to raise money and expand the program.

See you in Portland in March!

Check out the Time Out Chicago’s write-up of the 90-Second Newbery screening! “A brilliant idea . . . never dull . . . no quaint celebration of kid lit: It was a snotty jab at the whole idea of thinking of kid lit as a cute little innocuous genre, which, it hasn’t been in years.” Yee-haw!

The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival screening in Chicago on November 16 was a blast! I was almost afraid lightning wouldn’t strike twice―that the Chicago screening would somehow not be as great as the unforgettable New York City 90-Second Newbery screening. But not to worry! We filled up the 385-seat Pritzker auditorium at the Harold Washington Library downtown. The turnout was helped in large part by Daniel Kraus’ interview with me on Booklist, plus kind mentions we got in the Chicago Reader and Time Out Chicago and Chicago Subtext as well as my appearance on WBEZ’s “Eight Forty-Eight” with the First Lady of Chicago public radio, Alison Cuddy.

How did it go? We got a late start, so one of the school field trips that attended had to leave early. But overall, if I had to sum up the audience spirit it would be this:

After Andrew Medlar of the Chicago Public Library gave his intro, Abraham Levitan of the marvelous is-there-anything-they-can’t-do? band Baby Teeth started up. He launched into his opening song, which amazingly incorporated the titles of ALL TWENTY-FIVE Newbery winners we showed that night:

Stirring and impressive! Bonus points for somehow rhyming “Onion John,” “Blackbird Pond,” AND “Black Cauldron” all together. (Abraham, by the way, also runs a piano teaching company called Piano Power that my daughters will definitely attend when they come of age. Lucy’s favorite Baby Teeth song is “Snake Eyes.”)

I then bounded out with my co-host. Now you might be wondering how I could top my co-host in New York, National Ambassador for Children’s Literature Jon Scieszka. The only possible solution, of course, was Chicago funnyman Seth Dodson, who performed in drag as “Spokesmom, the spokesmodel who is also your mom”―a role he performs regularly at Chicago’s art and design talkshow, The Show N Tell Show (who have an wonderful opening credits sequence worthy of deep study and re-watching).

After Spokesmom and I exchanged some banter, we randomly chose out of a hat three Newbery titles that would be screened. Abraham’s task, as the piano man: to write and perform, by the end of the night, an original song that summed up all three of those movies . . . and what’s more, the song’s genre was to be randomly determined by the spinning of the “genre wheel” (a pretty amazing stunt Abraham accomplishes with verve regularly at the Shame That Tune show at the Hideout).

Unfortunately my video camera ran out before it could record Abraham’s ingenious final song. Curses! But here’s when Spokesmom and I first come out, and when we spin the wheel:

The evening roared on, the videos broken up by hilarious interludes by Hogwash (who did book trailers for “lost Newberys” like Smoky the Cow Horse) the Neo-Futurists (who did three separate bits about The Story of Mankind, Frog and Toad Together, and dead animals in Newbery books) and more. We played many 90-Second Newbery videos, of course―but I won’t re-embed them all here (I’ll be gathering them all in one place soon).

That said, I can’t help but feature again one of the best entries―by Elephant and Worm of Chicago―a full-scale musical adaptation of The Twenty-One Balloons (William Pene du Bois, 1948 Medal Winner):

Afterwards, Elephant and Worm did an “Inside the Actor’s Studio” session with the young girl who starred as the bearded Professor William Waterman Sherman. My favorite part of the interview was when the interviewer asked the girl, “What happened to your beard?” and she answered, “You’re wearing it.” Hey, not every theater company can afford multiple beards!

Along the way, we also did the “Snooki or Newbery?” game show that we did at the New York City screening. Wait, what’s that?

Well, this year, the Today Show inexplicably broke with its fifteen-year tradition of interviewing Newbery and Caldecott winners, instead bumping them in order to do a segment on A Shore Thing, a book written by Snooki of Jersey Shore. This contretemps inspired our game, in which we mixed random quotes from Newbery award winners, and random quotes from Snooki’s book, to see if a random audience member could tell the difference. Astonishingly, it’s quite hard! Here’s proof:

OK, OK, those last three were actually Snooki. I love the roars of outrage from the crowd.

What this evening needed was historical context. Who was this “John Newbery” that the medal is named after, anyway? I called upon Adam Selzer, fellow Brother Delacorte and the author of many young-adult novels, including I Kissed A Zombie and I Liked It, the new Extraordinary, and The Smart Aleck’s Guide to American History (he’s planning a whole line of Smart Aleck books, or “subversive study aids” as he calls them). Anyway, here’s Adam Selzer’s very funny and revealing expose of John Newbery, “morally uptight weenie”:

There were many other highlights of the evening. I could go on and on. Unfortunately, the night itself couldn’t go on and on, and we were obliged to cut the program short, which meant that several worthy videos were not shown. Next time, I’ll learn how to plan these programs out better! I got too ambitious!

In the meantime, let me leave you with one of the most popular of the 90-Second Newbery videos I’ve received. It’s by Max Pitchkites and his friends. You might remember Max as the one who created twenty-eight different mixed-media cut-paper illustrations of The Order of Odd-Fish―one for each chapter of my book. Well, Max is not only an artist, but a filmmaker, and he chose 1960 Medal winner Onion John for his 90-Second Newbery.

Onion John is about a twelve-year-old boy, Andy, who befriends an eccentric hermit who eats onions like apples and lives in a stone hut near the edge of town. Andy’s father gets the Rotary Club to build Onion John a new modern home with electricity, a stove, etc. but Onion John, unused to modern appliances, ends up setting the house on fire. The townspeople want to build him a new house, but Onion John is unhappy in such surroundings, and finally he skips town. It’s actually based on a true story.

Max’s original uncut version is here, but here’s the 90-second version, with a few tweaks made by me for the screening:

A triumph. I could watch that “BEST FRIENDS” bit, with the ringing guitar chord, again and again. Well done, Max―thanks for being part of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival!

Thank you to ALL the filmmakers. For this Chicago show, thanks to Seth Dodson, Abraham Levitan, Elephant and Worm, the Neo-Futurists, Hogwash, and Adam Selzer for their contributions to the live show. Thanks to the Book Cellar for selling books at the event. Thanks to Jill Liebhaben for the pictures. And an extra big thanks to Andrew Medlar, Bernadette Nowakowski, and everyone who helped at the Chicago Public Library, especially Leland Mosley who did the lights and sound. It was a romp of an evening!

I’m looking forward to doing it all again next year! Filmmakers, get ready for the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival 2012!

Our 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is screening in Chicago this Wednesday, November 16! It will be at the Harold Washington Library from 6-8 pm. A word to the wise: if you’re coming, come early! This is definitely going to fill up, just as it did in New York. Wondering what it might be like? Check out Betsy Bird’s recap of the 90-Second Newbery screening at the New York Public Library last week.

We had great special guests at the New York screening, including Jon Scieszka, Rebecca Stead, Ayun Halliday, and more! The Chicago screening’s lineup is just as illustrious. My co-emcee will be the hilarious Chicago comedian Seth Dodson. We’ll be featuring a 90-Second Newbery Theme Song and musical improvisations by Abraham Levitan of the band Baby Teeth. And there’s more! Legendary Chicago theater group the Neo-Futurists will perform, as well as children’s theater Elephant and Worm (who are responsible for the great Twenty-One Balloons 90-second Newbery), the children’s theater Hogwash, young-adult author Adam Selzer, and many more surprises! It will be raucous.

Speaking of raucous, check out the 90-Second Newbery above of Jerry Spinelli’s 1988 Newbery Honor book, Wringer. This is one of the Newbery books I hadn’t yet read, but after this video, I’m really looking forward to it, because it’s one of the bloodier premises I’ve heard for a Newbery book. It’s set in a small town that has an annual tradition of releasing pigeons and shooting them to raise money for charity. The boys of the town are taught to wring the necks of the wounded birds to put them out of their misery. The hero secretly has a pet pigeon named Nipper, but he is pressured to take part in the ceremonies by his “friends.” The story ends with the hero carrying Nipper off the field in the midst of gunfire! At the end, he hears a kid tell his father he wants a pigeon for a pet.

If the book is anywhere near as good as this movie, it’s well-deserving of its Newbery Honor. I love the rapid-fire delivery of all the lines, the speech from the old man, the climactic shootout at the end, and of course the PIGEONS! It turns out that the creators of the movie, sisters Donera (14) and Deralyn (10) Owen of Boise, Idaho, raise pigeons―they have over 100 of them!―and they specially trained some of them for the movie. The movie is a triumph, and was a big favorite at the New York screening. I’m sure it will be a hit at the Chicago screening, too!

Speaking of Chicago, here’s a late entry from Burley Elementary School of Susan Patron’s 2007 Medal winner The Higher Power of Lucky. I didn’t get it in time for New York, but we’ll definitely play it in Chicago:

Great work, Burley! (Full disclosure: I do a weekly after-school writing seminar with some students at Burley, who appear in this video). The Higher Power of Lucky is about a girl, Lucky, who lives with a French foster mother in a small desert town, where she does things like hang around outside the Wind Chime museum eavesdropping on Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, helping her friend correct traffic signs, and dealing with snakes in the washing machine. This is a great sum-up of the story! The acting is good, I liked the “sandstorm,” and the music, voiceovers, and audio cues are all excellent. Thanks for a great entry, Burley, and I’ll see you on Wednesday!