Prizing Children's Literature: The Cultural Politics of Children's Book Awards ed. by Kenneth B. Kidd and Joseph T. Thomas, Jr (review)

Kenneth B. Kidd and Joseph T. Thomas's study explores the prizing practices of children's literature in Australia, Canada, and the United States. As Kidd and Thomas note in the opening line of this anthology, "the prizing of children's books has a long history" (1). At least since the establishment of the Newbery Medal in 1922 and the Caldecott Medal in 1937, there has been ongoing debate in our field about the merits and value of literary prizing and the cultural ideologies that motivate the selection of award-winning children's books. Noting that there are now more than three hundred awards for English-language texts and authors, the editors explain that this collection was born out of their desire to advance professional conversations beyond individual prizes toward a broader examination of prizing. Kidd and Thomas's combined expertise on the subject is extensive and almost unrivaled among scholars of children's literature. Kidd's resume includes two often-cited (and award-winning) journal articles on the history and cultural politics of prizing in children's literature, and among Thomas's related work is his role as The Lion and the Unicorn's first Poetry Award Editor. The fourteen essays included in this volume offer perspectives on a range of literary prizes (their histories and functions), with particular attention focused on English-language awards and many of the debates that surround them.

The collection opens with what Kidd and Thomas title "A Prize-Losing Introduction." As its name suggests, the introductory essay is filled to the brim with the clever language, playful turns of phrase, and nuanced insights characteristic of the work of these two scholars. Across eighteen pages, the introduction outlines the history of prizing, some of the criticism and complexities that surround literary awards, the differences among prizes (and their function) for children's and adult literature, the rhetorics and ethos of prizing communities, and issues of identity and representation in awards. Although they note that "most of the contributors [to this volume] have mixed feelings if not strong doubts about prizing" (3), the editors concede that "for better and for worse, none of us is independent of prizing or its consequences" (10).

The book is loosely organized into four major sections. The chapters constituting the first section "address[] the ideological work of prizes in enforcing norms and ideals beyond and alongside their stated purpose" (10). In "Prizing National and Transnational: Australian Texts in the Printz Awards," Claire Bradford demonstrates quantitatively the lack of diversity in Michael L. Printz Award winners and honor books from 2010 to 2014. After arguing that the Printz Award is dominated by winners from the United Kingdom and the United States, Bradford focuses her attention on the winning/honor books from Australia in order to explore the ways in which this award privileges some deployments of certain types of cultural references at the expense of others. Referencing James English's observation about the effect that children's literature awards have on sales figures, Bradford concludes her essay by underscoring calls for critical understandings of discourses about prizing the "best" books and the need to "be conscious and critical of how commercial systems influence the literary production and reception, and the role of prizing in these commercial systems" (30). Next, in "Prizing the Unrecognized: Systems of Value, Visibility, and the First World in International and Translated Children's Texts," Abbie Ventura builds upon Kidd's arguments about claims of universality by the Newbery Medal in order to examine prizes for translation (she touches on awards such as the Hans Christian Andersen Award, but focuses primarily on the Batchelder Award). Unique to Ventura's chapter is her use of data regarding the popularity of specific texts to support her argument that, ultimately, "more under dominant Western publishing trends, international is a limited and singular concept...