Another one bites the dust. Soon, my Newbery winners and nominees will be done and gone forever. This one really wasn't so bad. As you may be able to deduce just by the cover and title, it's a story about a black family that heads eastbound and down to Birmingham, Alabama in the midst of some racial turmoil. But while I expected the family's road trip to be the central part of the story, it took place in just one of the fifteen chapters. The first hundred pages of the book set up the story and introduce us to the family. They live in Flint, Michigan, and halfway through the book decide to go visit Grandma in Birmingham. The story and literary skills displayed here were more or less par for the Newbery course. All in all, I'd call it an average to above average Newbery read, or in other words, a four out of ten. Fine, a five. At least in this book there was a historical lesson about racial problems in the American South; it wasn't just about some 19th century New Hampshire girl babbling about her mundane life or some Appalachian hick cousins who learn to deal with their shitty parents leaving them. One more thing of note - Wikipedia says that The Watsons Go to Birmingham—1963 has already been made into a movie and that it will be released (straight to DVD?) later this year. Weird timing, no? The book is from 1996, and it took this long both for me to read it and for anyone to adapt it into a screenplay. Of course, Wikipedia has been wrong before, and I just have this feeling that an article about a 1996 Newbery also-ran is one where errors may in fact go unchecked and unnoticed.
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