Our second round of Mock Newbery suggestions begins today! Following the practice of the real Newbery Committee, we ask readers to share titles of possible contenders for the 2026 Newbery Medal. Results from our first month’s suggestions are here.
It’s early in the year and it looks like there’s a good variety of titles so far. Maybe a couple of early trends…but I’m reaching a bit. My first one: Books set in wartime where the friends/enemies divide turns out to be not so simple. There’s one set in World War I (THE ENEMY’S DAUGHTER), one in World War II (MAX IN THE LAND OF LIES…my front-runner so far), and one during a staged military coup, which also involves aliens (WHAT FELL FROM THE SKY).
There may be something badger-ish going on too, with two excellent badger books so far (BAD BADGER and THE UNDEAD FOX OF DEADWOOD FOREST), plus a third Skunk and Badger title coming in the fall (ROCK, PAPER, INCISORS).
But of course, we’re really not looking for trends…we’re looking for books that are strong enough to at least strong enough to be included in a Mock Newbery discussion. Please submit your own April suggestions in the comments below. We just need authors and titles, and we limit suggestions to books that have been published in print already. You can submit up to five titles per month, but fewer is fine too. For more details about our suggestion process, see this post from last month.
We’ll accept April suggestions through the end of the day on April 12th and post the accumulated results soon after that.