Which is not to say that all Newbery medalists are as dull as dust. The medal has landed on some wonderful books. Even during the 1960s and 1970s, which may have been the award's nadir, the Newbery found such compelling books as Madeleine L'Engle's "A Wrinkle in Time," E.L. Konigsburg's "From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" and Virginia Hamilton's "M.C. Higgins, the Great." Its most recent spectacular find is the 1999 Newbery winner, Louis Sachar's "Holes," which I couldn't put down, an intricately plotted and beautifully written tale of despair and redemption, in which a boy is exiled to a brutal juvenile correction camp in the desert for a theft he didn't commit, a story that begins as hyperrealism and opens up, with deadpan absurdity, into interlocking tall tales of family mythology, fate and freedom.

In fact, only one of the 1990s medal-winners that I read was as dutiful and boring as the Newbery medalists of my 1960s childhood. But that doesn't mean the Newbery winners are now perfect. Most recent winners are solid B, B minus or B plus books, boppy and superficial, albeit clever and well-written. This year's winner, Richard Peck's "A Year Down Yonder," is one such readable if mediocre offering. Its feisty rural granny is entertaining, and you do learn how to shoot a fox, but its 15-year-old "main" character scarcely exists.

That's a serious flaw -- because what makes the difference between a memorable and a tiresome children's book is how believably the characters struggle with the gap between emotions and actions, between what should be and what is. At 10 and 12 and 14, kids are in such dorky-looking and angry pain partly because they're just beginning to realize that life demands that, like the White Queen, they must practice believing six impossible things before breakfast. Childhood is a passionate battle to make sense of the world, to reconcile apparently polar but deeply tangled opposites: right and wrong, safety and freedom, responsibility and desire, honesty and kindness, fear and courage, bullies and friends, parents who are heroic and loving and parents who are deceptive and fallible.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"