Foiled again?

WHEN I heard who had won this year's Newbery Medal, which is to children's literature what the Pulitzer is to journalism, I walked around humming. The Newbery is the great prize for children's-book authors: Its gold-foil medallion on the cover of one's book brings a measure of fame; but, more important, because schools routinely stock medalists in their libraries and use them in their curricula, it means an opportunity to shape the literary experience of rising generations.

Too often, the medal has gone to books that, while not crudely didactic, nonetheless reflect a generally left-wing worldview. Innumerable Newberys sell the virtues of racial diversity and counter-cultural eccentricity, for instance, but in only a few do patriotism or religious faith figure prominently. I know children who flinch from the golden disk as from a spoonful of cod-liver oil.

Hence my delight when Laura Amy Schlitz won the 2008 Newbery Medal for Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village, a wry, humane, and clever series of interwoven monologues and dialogues set in and around an English manor in 1255. Explaining the decision, Newbery judge Nina Lindsay said, "Each entry is superb in itself, and together the pieces create a pageant that transports readers to a different time and place."

Critics of Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! grumble that it's more a worthy book for school libraries than a fizzy read for school-aged children. To my mind, that's part of its greatness: In expecting the reader to meet it halfway, the book represents a turn away from the gauzy perishability of other recent Newbery medalists. Here is a work that is meaty, lively, and original--without a whiff of agenda-pushing or subversive age-inappropriateness. It is not a book just for now; it's a book for good.

Entertaining as some other recent Newbery winners have been, it's impossible to say the same of them. Remember the Great Scrotum Controversy of 2007? It erupted after Susan Patron won the medal for The Higher Power of Lucky, which begins with the ten-year-old heroine eavesdropping on an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. (The setting alone might make the novel indigestible for some parents.) The girl, Lucky, overhears a fellow telling how he'd been drinking rum and had fallen out of his car, "when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum."

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A few pages on, the girl is still turning the mysterious word over in her mind: "Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important, and Lucky was glad she was a girl and would never have such an aspect as a scrotum to her own body."

A handful of librarians around the country decided that however redeeming the rest of the novel might be, they didn't want to be the means of introducing the scrotum to fourth-graders, and chose not to purchase the book. This, for the highly strung, is what amounts to "censorship," and, as you can imagine, there was a mighty wind on the Internet. Bloggers outdid one another in heaping scorn on the recalcitrant librarians, who must surely be dangerous reactionaries rather than, say, reasonable people hewing to a traditional sense of propriety. (Of course the Left, itself intolerant of divergent opinions, enjoys nothing more than feeling that civil society is under attack from the forces of retrograde censorship. I saw this in action at the American Library Association's annual conference in Washington this past summer: Susan Patron was signing books, and it was amusing to see how earnestly she was congratulated for her bravery.)

For many people, especially parents, the scrotum kerfuffle confirmed a vague and gathering unease with the trend of children's fiction generally. The Newbery imprimatur, for example, had once been a kind of visual shorthand for a "good" and suitable book for children. Somewhere along the line, this comfortable assumption disappeared. A while ago, NR's own David Frum had fun tipping the idea on its head: "I have found the Newbery Award a very helpful guide," he insisted cheerfully in his blog on NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE. "If not perverse, it will be vapid; if not politically correct, then it will be grimly didactic." In the Frum household, he said, you will find no Newbery of more recent vintage than 1944's Johnny Tremain.

That's certainly one way to sort 'em. Sticking with pre-1950 medalists means you would indeed be safe among The Voyages of Doctor Do-little (1923), Caddie Woodlawn (1936), and Call It Courage (1941), among many other excellent works. But you would miss--

We'll get to that in a minute. It is true that after the picture-book stage it's difficult to keep up with one's children's reading; at least I find it so. That male genitalia may now be lurking in fiction for elementary-schoolers increases the temptation to avoid all things modern, and makes a trip to the bookstore a delicate exercise. Sure you want them to read, but, ugh--that? I've lost count of the number of parents who, when they learn I review children's books, groan about the awfulness of the new.

Oh, I tell them, I know. Since 2005, I've been reading almost nothing but kid lit, and great has been my gloom at much of what crosses my desk: a steady stream of trashy and transgressive books for teens, shallow kissy books for middle-schoolers, and insipid self-esteem boosters for the very young. Yet it would be unfair to conclude that contemporary children's books are all rot; they aren't. Amidst the darkness and triviality are a great many witty and stirring novels, glorious fantasies, and innumerable lovely picture books. In some respects, we are in a golden age: Never before have so many artists, writers, and publishers toiled to produce so much for the delight of America's young.

Alas, in too many children's books, as in the larger culture, families are wrecked and dysfunctional, fathers are more often absent than present, teenagers drink and sleep together and kill themselves, and homophobia has replaced racial prejudice as the darkest sin of all. Scanning the shelves for teenage readers, in particular, you would be forgiven for not knowing that the world is full of households whose members love one another, who stay married to one another, and who greet the future with optimism, not prescription painkillers.

Perhaps happiness has never made as compelling a story as misery, and adventure can occur only when there's risk and the possibility of loss; still, when you consider the beauty to which literature can introduce children, and the bleak grotesqueries to which many books actually do, it's clear that something is out of whack. Callousness, betrayal, and cruelty make for interesting tales--like the scrotum, they're part of life-but parents don't necessarily want children to dwell on them. It is not censorship that causes adults to withhold certain books from children; it is judgment--the same faculty that allows 15 book-industry insiders to sift through the colossal output of American publishing and pluck a single volume each year to receive the highest distinction.

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It's not possible to sit in on Newbery deliberations--they're conducted in secret--but last summer at the librarians' convention I was able to see how the process works for the ALSC Children's Notables, another awards program that, like the Newbery, is conducted under the auspices of the ALA. (ALSC stands for Association for Library Service to Children.) In a bland conference room, eleven people sat around a table beside a projector screen that showed the book under discussion. Maybe two dozen auditors sat nearby; one young woman was crocheting. A single judge was male; of the ten others, nine wore their hair cut short. Everyone seemed concerned not to be overly, well, judgmental. "I'm not censoring or anything," one woman said gently, of a fictional incident, "but I found that [scene] very jarring."

A hotbed of librarianism, indeed! It was hard not to smirk. Conservatives have long mistrusted the ALA, a group that lobbies shrilly for the freedom of patrons to use library computers without stint or oversight, even when the users want to pull up pornography, or jihadi how-to sites, or both.

Yet at the same time, I felt a pang of camaraderie. Here were serious people talking about children's books and obviously caring as much about them as any bookish right-winger. As a reviewer myself, I know the special agony of literary triage. Furthermore, it's not just movement conservatives who complain about the Newberys. Writing in a recent issue of Publishers Weekly, children's-book reviewer Elizabeth Devereaux expressed disappointment with the un-fun nature of too many medalists: "Consider how often the Newbery winners are didactic or 'worthy': How many take up literacy, civil rights, or freedom of speech; how many Newbery-winning characters are inspiring or crusading teachers (or librarians); how many make a case for classics or poetry? How many of these books are 'good'--meaning good for you, as opposed to a good read?"

The first Newbery medalist was both: The award in 1922 went to The Story of Mankind, a work of nonfiction. In subsequent years, that high-mindedness generally dissipated. The 2006 medal went to Criss Cross, a novel about the inner lives of children on the cusp of adolescence. Here, as with The Higher Power of Lucky, the writing is light and often funny, but there's an impermanence about it that suggests a relatively short shelf life. In this it resembles many other books on the long list of Newbery winners.

But there's no clean cut-off date for when the books went bad. For every Kira-Kira (2005), about unionizing Japanese-American laborers in the 1950s, there's a droll and brilliantly structured story like Holes (1999), or a riveting anti-utopian exploration such as The Giver (1994). Going back a bit, you might wish to bypass the racial-tolerance lessons of Maniac Magee (1991), Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1977), or M. C. Higgins, the Great (1975); but you wouldn't want to miss From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1968), Ginger Pye (1952), A Wrinkle in Time (1963)--actually, as a sixth-grader, I would happily have skipped that one, though now I see its virtues--or Rabbit Hill (1945).

What has changed more dramatically is the age at which certain ideas or words are thought appropriate, which is sadly in keeping with the larger culture. Children's authors today assume a more knowing child at a younger age, for there is an "aging up" process observable with books, as there is with toys and movies. This, I think, is what accounts for the appearance of "scrotum" in a book for children ages nine to eleven. It wouldn't have occurred to Laura Ingalls Wilder to name male genitalia, just as I doubt it would have occurred to WFB to include the word in an early issue of NATIONAL REVIEW. I believe Susan Patron when she says she didn't put the word in to shock or titillate. She is part of the zeitgeist, as I am; that word is one her heroine might have overheard, just as it's an indelicacy I find myself writing about.

Cultural change is not the fault of fiction; it is reflected by fiction. This change in children, this creeping jadedness, was clear a decade ago, as E. L. Konigsburg poignantly observed in The View from Saturday (Newbery Medalist in 1997). In the story, which among other things mocks the idea of taxpayer-funded diversity training, a teacher reflects on how students have altered: "Between the time she had started as an elementary school teacher and the time she had retired as a middle school principal, sixth grade had changed, but sixth graders had changed more. Sixth graders had stopped asking, 'Now what?' and had started asking 'So what?'"

When I started reading and rereading my way through the Newbery medalists six months ago (full disclosure: I didn't get all the way through), I thought it would be easy to discern a pattern of literary decay. It wasn't. The world of the Newbery turns out to be a lot like the real world: abounding in nonsense, yet rich with serious-mindedness; full of knaves, but also of heroes; characterized by heartbreak, but also by redemption and joy--and, like the real world, a shade more to the left than one would like.

Meghan Cox Gurdon is children's-book critic for the Wall Street Journal.