The Carnegie and Greenaway Medals

The winners of the 2003 Carnegie and Kate Greenaway Medals, the most prestigious children’s book awards in the UK, will be announced in July. But how do the shortlists shape up? Rosemary Stones investigates.

The Carnegie Medal shortlist

According to the press release for this year’s Carnegie Medal: ‘The six books on the 2003 Carnegie Medal shortlist will appeal not just to children and young people, but to the whole family. Each of the titles selected offers outstanding and immensely satisfying reading for anyone of 10 years and over, blurring the distinction between the traditionally separate genres of adult and children’s books.’

Sorry CILIP*. The crossover novel may be the new black of the children’s literary world but the appeal of most of these shortlisted titles is to children, not to ‘the whole family’. And so it should be. The crossover claim (with its implicit suggestion that crossover is somehow a good thing) obscures discussion about what makes a good children’s novel.

Of the six shortlisted titles, The Fire Eaters, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and A Gathering Light could claim the attention of adult as well as child readers. The Fire Eaters is the best novel on this list with its sparsely poetic evocation of place, time and the internal world of its young narrator, Bobby. Almond has difficulty with endings – here Bobby’s father does not die and it is as if something is being avoided. Could it be a bleakness that cannot be laid before a young readership? This is, however, the best kind of children’s novel that an adult might wish to read for that very reason. The Curious Incident commands attention via the assured nature of its unusual perspective – that of a boy with Asperger Syndrome – that informs the reader without needing to be informative while Christopher’s inevitable lack of emotion subtly provokes the reader’s own feeling response. A Gathering Light is a well researched and engaging historical novel with a feminist twist reminiscent of those once republished by the newly fledged Virago. Adult readers of Cold Mountain would not be disappointed.

The remaining novels can make no claims to crossover. Within a multi-layered family saga Sisterland explores what it is to be a refugee from grandmother ‘Heidi’ whose German origins are found to be more complicated than anyone knew to her granddaughter Hilly’s relationship with a Palestinian Arab. While Newbery’s psychological portrait of a displaced child is astute, the novel lacks the inner sense of dislocation that such a family secret imposes upon subsequent generations. The Garbage King breaks new ground in its portrayal of the precariousness of the lives of the godana or street people of Addis Ababa. While Laird’s plotting can be convoluted, this novel movingly gets behind the anonymity of child beggars. Private Peaceful goes down a well trodden path with stock characters in a novel that is overly full of the need to inform.

The CILIP Carnegie Medal Shortlist

David Almond, The Fire Eaters, Hodder Children’s Books, 0 340 77382 0 (10+)

Jennifer Donnelly, A Gathering Light, Bloomsbury, 0 7475 6304 7 (12+)

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, David Fickling Books, 0 09 945676 1 (13+)

Elizabeth Laird, The Garbage King, Macmillan, 0 330 41502 6 (10+)

Michael Morpurgo, Private Peaceful, Collins, 0 00 715006 7 (10+)

Linda Newbery, Sisterland, David Fickling Books, 0 385 60470 X (13+)

NB The age ranges have been suggested by the judging panel.

The Greenaway Medal shortlist

Criteria issues come to mind in relation to one of the books on this Greenaway shortlist. One of this award’s aims, surely, is to promote high standards in the publishing of illustrated books in the UK. The Wolves in the Walls is a most imaginative and technically competent book, both scary and wittily dramatic, but it was first published in the US by HarperCollins who presumably both commissioned and edited it. Its place on this UK shortlist is therefore a waste. There are more than enough US prizes to help raise standards in their children’s book publishing.

The two outstanding books here are Beegu and Bob Robber and Dancing Jane. Alexis Deacon is the best new artist on the children’s book scene for some time. His restrained text and very good pencil line work together to evoke both humour and pathos in this subtle story of an alien outsider. Deacon’s line appears to have undergone lots of processing (with a photocopier?) which turns it to a sensitively smudgy black against well related flat colour. There is a satisfying harmony to each page and in the book as a whole. With Andrew Matthews’s poetic text for Bob Robber, Bee Willey has a good story that matches the ethereal quality of her unusual palette and sensitively assured use of pastel. Her use of dark and light to draw the eye is consummately done and she is as good at close-ups of her characters as she is at more distanced views.

Two Frogs, The Shape Game and Ella’s Big Chance are solid books from experienced hands but not their best work. Wormell’s agreeable book takes rather too long to get to the punch line without huge rewards on the way while Browne’s introduction to looking at paintings has pages that work and pages that don’t – viz ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ where he takes the painting away from its subject. Hughes’s version of Cinderella uses, she tells us helpfully, gouache colour and pen line but the two are reconciled with difficulty. Is the colour doing light and shade or the pen line? The result (oddly for one for whom drawing is so important) is overworked and scratchy rather than elegant.

Of the rest, The Pea and the Princess is an uncertain offering. Grey’s style and the level of exaggeration and caricature she employs are full of inconsistencies. It was, perhaps, unfair to shortlist Grey’s second picture book when her third, Biscuit Bear, shows us that there will be much better things to come from this new artist. Gliori’s Always and Forever, however, is the sort of book that has no place on an illustration prize list. It is lively and cute with an appeal to some parts of the market but the drawing is painfully bad.

*The Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals

The CILIP Kate Greenaway Medal Shortlist 2003

Anthony Browne, The Shape Game, Doubleday, 0 385 60136 0 (7+)

Alexis Deacon, Beegu, Hutchinson, 0 09 176829 2 (3+)

Debi Gliori, Always and Forever, text by Alan Durant, Doubleday, 0 385 60503 X (3+)

Mini Grey, The Pea and the Princess, Red Fox, 0 09 943233 1 (6+)

Shirley Hughes, Ella’s Big Chance, The Bodley Head, 0 370 32765 9 (6+)

Dave McKean, The Wolves in the Walls, text by Neil Gaiman, Bloomsbury, 0 7475 6953 3 (9+)

Bee Willey, Bob Robber and Dancing Jane, text by Andrew Matthews, Jonathan Cape, 0 224 06465 7 (7+)

Chris Wormell, Two Frogs, Red Fox, 0 09 943862 3 (5+)

NB The age ranges have been suggested by the judging panel.

Rosemary Stones is Editor of Books for Keeps.