The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Check Out a Winner at the Library
Donna Barba Higuera
The 2022 John Newbery Medal winner was “The Last Cuentista” by Donna Barba Higuera. The Newbery Medal is awarded to an author for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children.
“The Last Cuentista” is the story of Petra, a 12-yearold girl who, with her family, is one of a small group of people chosen to travel to another planet after a comet destroys Earth. During the
370-year journey, the travelers are placed in a state of suspended animation, but Petra is revived before the trip ends.
When she awakens, she discovers that the children have been “reprogrammed” and the adults have been eliminated, and she knows it’s up to her to become the cuentista — the storyteller — like her grandmother was back home. She must keep Earth’s stories alive among this new version of humanity.
Donna Barba Higuera is a Mexican American who was born in California. As a child, she loved reading and making up stories about the names she read on tombstones at the cemetery.
Her own grandmother was a storyteller.
Today, Higuera lives in Washington with her family, three dogs and two frogs.
Jason Chin
The 2022 Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished
American picture book for children was awarded to
“Watercress.” It was illustrated by Jason
Chin and written by
Andrea Wang.
In “Watercress,” Wang tells the story of a young girl whose parents, immigrants from China, stop to gather wild watercress, a green leaf vegetable, growing along the side of the road in Ohio, where they live. She can’t understand why they would cut food from a ditch, or buy used furniture, and her family can’t understand why she’s embarrassed by them.
Through Wang’s story and Chin’s illustrations, they weave a way for the family to recognize each other’s experiences and to have empathy for each other.
Jason Chin grew up in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. He said he studied Chinese calligraphy and painting while in college and used some of those elements while illustrating “Watercress.”
“Chinese painters use soft edges and empty (or nearly empty) space to convey expansive distance, and I’ve always felt this gives the paintings a dreamlike quality,” he said.