| From
the March/April 1999 issue of The Horn Book Magazine
Editorial
Honoring Mike
“ hy
is there no YA equivalent to the Newbery Medal?” When I asked
that question fifteen years ago (School Library Journal, December
1983), it was hardly its first hearing. As far back as 1962, the
Young Adult Services Division (now the Young Adult Library Services
Association) of ALA had proposed an award for the book for young
adults that “most provocatively stretches the imagination,
demands an exciting orientation to new hypotheses, new ideas, new
dimensions.”
This proposal came to naught, as did similar proposals
considered by YASD in 1968 and 1976, but they’ve finally come
through. At ALA’s Midwinter conference in 2000, YALSA will
announce the first winner of an award for the “best young
adult book of the year, based solely on literary merit.” While
this criterion lacks the visionary pizzazz of the 1963 proposal
and seems interestingly defensive, the inception of the award is
surely welcome. It, like the literature it signals, has been a long
time coming.
First, though, YALSA has some housekeeping to do.
In 1995, the YALSA Board of Directors accepted in principle a proposal
from “junior novel” pioneer Amelia Elizabeth Walden
to fund a YA literature award (upon the execution of her will).
Walden has attached some considerable strings to her gift, including
criteria that would count popularity equally with literary quality
and that would demand that any winning book, fiction preferred,
provide a “positive approach to life.” (In Miss Walden’s
still-fine basketball novels, the heroine wins her man and
the state championship.) While YALSA should never have accepted
this complicated albeit generous offer in the first place, it now
must refuse it. You can’t have the same organization giving
one annual prize for “the best book” and another for
“the best book, with a positive approach to life, that kids
appreciate.” It’s hard to know which winner would feel
more cheated.
Let’s hope, too, that YALSA will rethink
a considerable restriction on what is eligible for the award. Although
laudably open as to genre (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or anthology)
and origin (books previously published in another country will be
eligible), the rules contain a walloping exclusion: “to be
eligible, a title must be designated by its publisher as being either
a young adult book or one published for the age range that YALSA
defines as ‘young adult,’ i.e., 12–18.”
What this means is that adult books cannot be considered. Since
when do librarians, YA or otherwise, depend on publishers to determine
which books are for whom? Even the rules for the Newbery Medal —
awarded to a book for readers fourteen or younger — specifically
allow for the consideration of books published as adult titles.
This restriction to the award denies the selection
committee the use of skills honed through both professional study
and work with young readers. It also contains a double irony. First,
library work with young adults has always involved a blending of
resources aimed at children, teens, and adults, and young adult
literature is as much Catcher in the Rye as Chocolate
War, as much House on Mango Street as House of
Stairs. A prize that rewards only a part of the equation doesn’t
add up and in fact begs two questions: are we protecting a certain
class of books from what may be perceived to be stronger competition?
Or are we protecting a certain kind of publishing — juvenile,
primarily — from encroachment on its turf?
The second irony involves the name of the award.
Although the formal details have not as yet been worked out, the
award’s name will in some way honor the memory of the late
Mike Printz, Topeka West High School librarian and winner of the
1993 Grolier Foundation Award for outstanding library work with
children and young people. There could be no more fitting tribute
to the man than a new prestigious prize for young adult literature.
But Mike, whom I met when we were both members of YALSA’s
Best Books for Young Adults committee, spoke eloquently for the
whole compass of books for young adults. This award should do the
same.
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