The Best Books of 2020
On Monday, the American Library Association announced the top children's books of 2020. Here are the winners.
Devotion
Author Clare Vanderpool took home the John Newbery Medal for outstanding contribution to children's literature for Moon over Manifest. The book is about a young girl's magical adventures in a small Kansas town, in 1936.
Vanderpool said that she was shocked to learn that she had won. "You grow up reading legendary authors like Madeleine L'Engle, but I never expected to be put in a category with her," Vanderpool told TFK. "It's fabulous."
Picture This
The picture book A Sick Day for Amos McGee won the Randolph Caldecott Medal. The book was illustrated by Erin E. Stead and written by her husband, Philip C. Stead. It tells the story of an elderly zookeeper and the animals that visit him when he's not well enough to go to work.
"I love drawing animals and I love drawing people and I love drawing the emotional connection between animals and people," said Stead.
More Honored Books
The Coretta Scott King award, given to an African-American author and illustrator of "outstanding books for children and young adults," went to Rita Williams-Garcia for One Crazy Summer. Set in 1968, the novel follows three sisters from Brooklyn, New York, who visit their mother, a poet who ran away years ago and lives in California.
The king prize for best-illustrated work went to Dave the Potter: Artist, Poet, Slave. The book, which was written by Laban Carrick Hill and illustrated by Bryan Collier, tells the story of a skilled potter who engraved his poems on the clay pots and jars that he made. The enslaved potter, known only as Dave, lived in South Carolina in the 1800s.
