DOWN SAND MOUNTAIN WINS 2008 GOLDEN KITE AWARD
The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators just named Down Sand Mountain the winner of the 2008 Golden Kite Award for Fiction. Here’s a link to the SCBWI press release.
And here’s a link to my new blog, THE LAUNDRY ROOM, about winning the award.
We’ll be flying out to L.A. in August for the SCBWI conference and awards ceremony. It’s a nice follow-up to the New England Independent Booksellers Association’s selection of “Down Sand Mountain” as one of the top 10 Young Adult books of the year.
Here’s the Candlewick Press catalog copy on “Down Sand Mountain”:
Down Sand Mountain
It’s 1966 and Dewey Turner is determined to start the school year right. No more being the brunt of every joke. No more “Deweyitis.” But after he stains his face with shoe polish trying to mimic the popular Shoeshine Boy at the minstrel show, he begins seventh grade on an even lower rung, earning the nickname Sambo and being barred from the “whites only” bathroom. The only person willing to talk to him, besides his older brother, Wayne, is fellow outsider Darla Turkel, who wears her hair like Shirley Temple and sings and dances like her, too. Through their friendship, Dewey gains awareness of issues bigger than himself and bigger than his small town of Sand Mountain: issues like race and segregation, the reality of the Vietnam War, abuse, sexuality, and even death and grieving. Written in a riveting, authentic voice, at times light-hearted and humorous and at others devastating and lonely, this deeply affecting story will stay with readers long after the book is closed.
In a tale full of humor and poignancy, a sheltered twelve-year-old boy comes of age in a small Florida mining town amid the changing mores of the 1960s.
From Booklist (Starred Review):
In 1966, a white kid discovers the cruelty in his small, segregated Florida mining town, where “everybody knew everybody else, unless they were colored,” and racism is the norm, in himself, too. All Dewey, 12, wants is to fit in and have people like him, but that gets even harder after he stains his face with black shoe polish to dance in the local minstrel show, and the white bullies choose him as a target. Then his father, a miner, runs for city council again, even though he always loses because he wants to improve the blacks’ neighborhood, where Dewey hates going. In his debut YA novel, award-winning adult author Watkins tells a classic loss-of-innocence story. The simple, beautiful prose remains totally true to the child’s bewildered viewpoint, which is comic when Dewey does not get the big picture (“you never knew what was really going on”), anguished when he finally sees the truth. The plot includes Dewey’s secret romance with his classmate and the sweet revenge on the bullies, and the daily detail about small things. Multiple local characters sometimes bogs the story. Still, there is neither too much nostalgia nor message, and readers will be haunted by the disturbing drama of harsh secrets close to home.
–Hazel Rochman
