So! I’ve been at the NYC teen authors festival, and there are so many fantastic people there that you should definitely run and check out the next events — unfortunately I’ll be working Saturday, and I have nothing to sign for the signing on Sunday but I may get out there anyway.

Today there were a number of panels at NYPL, and I was on the debut author panel with Ebony Wilkins, Angie Frazier, and Alyssa Sheinmel. I will for sure be looking forward to their books.

Just before the panel, I leaned over to my sister and whispered, “I think David Levithan is wearing my shoes!”

You see, I have extremely large feet. I generally wear a women’s 12. But there are a lot of manufacturers whose 12s don’t fit me, especially manufacturers who make formalish shoes rather than sneakers. So when I got out of college and stopped wearing New Balance sneakers every day, I mostly switched over to men’s hiking shoes. And when I have a more formal occasion to go to but don’t want to wear my Girl Shoes, I wear my Fluevogs. (Yes, I know Fluevog makes women’s shoes up to size 12. Their twelves are too small for me too. I am so sad.)

And David Levithan was wearing the same shoes (but in black, otherwise it would have been awkward).

For a huge-footed girl, this feels kind of like a fashion triumph.

If I had to make a top-ten of books about feminism – or if I had to assemble my Printz shortlist, as poorly-read as I am this year - I’d put E. Lockhart’s fabulous The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks on either one. So I’m pretty thrilled that it’s nominated for the National Book Award. But I can’t exactly call it my favorite until I finish reading the other ones.

Okay, I have a confession. Anita Silvey at School Library Journal has a point.

In the course of doing readers’ advisory, I have never handed a kid Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!, or The Higher Power of Lucky, or Criss Cross or Kira-Kira.

I thought that Good Masters was excellent, Lucky charming, Criss Cross beautifully written but slow, and I had some issues with Kira-Kira. But what all of them had in common is that I’m hard pressed to find the actual child they would work for — except Lucky, maybe, although even that has trouble finding its audience. I think that it’s written on a 2nd grade level for someone with the emotional maturity of a 4th grader.

Now, I know that the Newbery committee isn’t supposed to consider “kid appeal” as a factor in their decisions, and I totally approve of that, because kids will always be able to gravitate to Twilight and Harry Potter and High School Musical novelizations regardless of what has a shiny gold sticker on the cover. But even from a standpoint of pure literary quality, I think I would have chosen different books.

And so would anyone. This is subjective stuff.

Still – yes, I think Silvey has a point. That disconnect I see in Lucky between the target age group and the emotional maturity a book requires of its readers is also present (I think) in Criss Cross and Kira-Kira. They feel more like adult books about childhood than children’s books.

I wonder if there’s an inevitability to that. There are the occasional magical books that relate to young people so completely that they encompass great truths without going over anyone’s head; the Frog and Toad books, Where the Wild Things Are. In the absence of a book like that, the prize for literary merit goes to the books that reflect emotional maturity, and ask for it.

That’s no bad thing, but I do think it leads to Newbery winners that only really work for a few readers.

In literary fiction for adults, as well as for children, I would like to see more appreciation for play, for pure silliness, for broad strokes of black and white (like A Wrinkle In Time, from an adult perspective so lacking in moral nuance). But you only have to go back one year to find that among the Newbery Winners, in The Tale of Despereaux… and that is a book I do hand to kids.