Last year, I followed the ALA YMA on Twitter while preparing to teach seventh graders online research skills; the year before, I watched in my pajamas with my five-year-old on my lap. This year, I missed the beginning of the livestream, but the timing worked out so that a third grade class was in the library when the Caldecott awards were announced, and they were so excited!
As I watched not just the Caldecotts but all the other awards roll in, it struck me more than any previous year how many deserving books there are. Not that I disagree with the committees’ choices – plenty of books I cheered for, others I hadn’t read – but there are just so. many. good. books in any given year! And because I was on this year’s Heavy Medal committee (Mock Newbery) and ran a Mock Caldecott program at my school, I was more attuned than usual to award predictions.
So rather than recap today’s winners, I’m going to list a few middle grade and picture books I think could have gotten awards, and just happened not to, but are still wonderful and you should read them:
Middle grade:
- A Rover’s Story by Jasmine Warga
- Violet and Jobie in the Wild by Lynne Rae Perkins
- The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill
- Different Kinds of Fruit by Kyle Lukoff
- Where the Sky Lives by Margaret Dilloway
- The Insiders by Mark Oshiro
- The Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander
- Black Bird, Blue Road by Sofiya Pasternak
- A Duet for Home by Karina Yan Glaser
Picture Books
- Mina by Matthew Forsythe
- Blue: A History of the Color as Deep as the Sea and as Wide as the Sky by Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond, illustrated by Daniel Minter
- Sweet Justice by Mara Rockliff, illustrated by R. Gregory Christie
- A Spoonful of Frogs by Casey Lyall, illustrated by Vera Brosgol
- I Don’t Care by Julie Fogliano, illustrated by Molly Idle and Juana Martinez-Neal
- Endlessly Ever After by Laurel Snyder, illustrated by Dan Santat
- Farmhouse by Sophie Blackall
- Snow Horses by Patricia MacLachlan, illustrated by Micha Archer
Squirrels that turn out to be cats, magic doors that lead to a refuge and friendship, a Mars rover with human emotions, a choose-your-own-adventure fairytale, escaping frogs, an unsung civil rights hero, some beautiful collage, and more – there’s something for everyone, and awards are only a piece of it all. Congratulations to all authors and illustrators who put something out into the world in 2022; readers are grateful.
End-of-year lists: For #kidlit people, Betsy Bird’s “
Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreno Played the Piano for President Lincoln by Margarita Engle & Rafael Lopez
Back in 2016, I wrote a post 
She writes that science fiction “allows us to imagine possibilities outside of what exists today,” and asserts that science fiction is the only genre that “allows us to question, challenge, and re-envision everything all at once.” Imarisha uses a new-to-me term as well: “Visionary fiction offers social justice movements a process to explore creating those new worlds….This term reminds us to be utterly unrealistic in our organizing, because it is only through imagining the so-called impossible that we can begin to concretely build it. When we free our imaginations, we question everything….That is why decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive decolonization process of all.”
Oliver and His Alligator by Paul Schmid
Jenny Arch 