Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Native authored-books on the 2011 Notable Children's Books list

Quoting from the website of the Association for Library Service to Children:
Each year a committee of the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC) identifies the best of the best in children's books. According to the Notables Criteria, "notable" is defined as: Worthy of note or notice, important, distinguished, outstanding. As applied to children's books, notable should be thought to include books of especially commendable quality, books that exhibit venturesome creativity, and books of fiction, information, poetry and pictures for all age levels (birth through age 14) that reflect and encourage children's interests in exemplary ways.
On the list this year are...


Tim Tingle's extraordinary Saltypie: A Choctaw Journey from Darkness into Light. I wrote about it last year. Saltypie is one of my favorite books.

Congratulations, Tim!










Matt Dembicki's Trickster: Native American Tales, a collection of 21 trickster stories in graphic novel format is also on the list. (Note 1/15/2011: Dembicki is not, to my knowledge, Native. All the authors who have stories in the book are Native.) I like the book very much, with one quibble...  The designer didn't provide information about each story's origin with the story. It's in the book----in the back! It would have done a lot more teaching if that info was included with the opening panel of each story.





S. D. Nelson's Black Elk's Vision: A Lakota Story.  I've got it on order.

2 comments:

Jill said...

I just finished reading this one, and loved it, too. But I had that same feeling - why not put a little paragraph at the beginning that told a bit more about the story's origins? I did like the author/artist bios at the back, which introduced me to some new authors I'm going to definitely be on the lookout for.

Anonymous said...

Hello. I have become a big fan of you and your blog while taking a library and information science course on children's library materials this semester. Next week, our last week, we are looking at graphic novels and I noted Matt Dembicki's Trickster on your blog. Are there any others that you could recommend? Have you heard of Chickasaw Adventures: The Set of Johnny's First Four Adventures by Jen Murvin Edwards? I think I found a reference to this on someone's paper through your blog, but am not sure about this. Thank you, Ellen