Swinging back around to my Newbery posts. hedgebird asked: Is the medalist usually the best of the nominees?

This is kind of hard to answer because it’s so subjective which book is best in any particular year, but my feeling is that overall the likelihood that the medalist is the best in any given year is only slightly greater than chance. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, sometimes you could probably provoke a fistfight over which book is best.

It’s apparently a known phenomenon with award committees that they sometimes go with the compromise candidate that everyone could agree on, rather than the perhaps better but more divisive candidates. There are definitely years where I suspect that's what happened with the Newbery.

My original Newbery project only encompassed the Medal winners. I expanded it to include the Honor books because so many of my personal favorite books are Honor books, and I had a suspicion that I might find some new favorite books or favorite authors that way, which indeed I did. I might have missed Mary Stolz and Jennie Lindquist forever if it weren’t for the Newbery Honor project.

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