Heavy Medal - A Mock Newbery Blog

"Heavy Medal - A Mock Newbery Blog" by Steven Engelfried, Sharon McKellar, & Roxanne Hsu Feldman. School Library Journal. 2018, blogs.slj.com/heavymedal/.    

Summary: The blog discusses books readers potentially see as worthy of winning the Newbery Medal for that publication year. Each month readers suggest titles to the three bloggers, mock selections take place, and later, the actual Newbery Medal winners are posted. 

Awards:  none

Audience: The audience is school librarians although public children or youth librarians would find the blog interesting as well.

Strengths and Weaknesses:  The strength of the blog is readers get a sense of some of the best books being published in a given year. The titles posted were read and reviewed by professionals in the field. A weakness of the blog is that it is very narrowly focused. Discussion of titles that might not be award worthy are omitted. Libraries are comprised of all types of books – including titles that are not artistic or original enough to earn an award. That doesn’t mean the title doesn’t have worth, but rather it just wouldn’t win an award.

Creative Uses: This blog can be beneficial in that a librarian can use it to identify titles that he or she may want to add to the collection.

Children are excellent at reviewing books as well. I think the blog can serve as inspiration for children to write their own blog for a library and review books. The school or public librarian can solicit advanced read copies of new titles and include them in a Reviewing Book Club (Patalie). Children can then offer opinions about new or soon to be published titles. The benefit is that children become critics and critical of what they read. This works best for older readers who have reached the level of critical thinking needed to not only explain why a book is wonderful, but can also explain why a book doesn’t work well.

Work Cited

Patalie, Natalie. “How to Get ARC Books (and Not be a Jerk About it).” Natalie Patalie, natalie-patalie.blogspot.com/2015/12/how-to-get-arc-books-and-not-be-jerk.html.