Pertinent information for those interested in serving on Caldecott committees: There are certain rules and regulation to bear in mind.  

According to the rules placed by ALA, no committee member may blog while serving on the committee: 

“Members should not use social media or electronic forms of communication in relation to eligible titles during their term of service. Of course this excludes the virtual committee work that takes place in closed forums among members, ALSC staff, and ALSC leadership, such as email and private ALA Connect groups or Zoom meetings. Prohibited forms of communication include, but are not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Library Thing, blogs, and review websites.” 

Additionally, there may not be any conflict of interest with the titles being discussed. I myself served on a Newbery committee where I filled in for someone who had looked at an early manuscript of one of the books up for consideration.

With all this in mind, is it not interesting how ALA doesn’t really care boo about publishers wining and dining committee members during the course of the year?  

To put this in context, I’ll begin by saying that I was not impressed with The Yellow Bus by Loren Long on a first read. I tend to read all my picture books in large batches and this book didn’t lend itself to a casual read particularly well. I liked it fine, dismissed it, and moved on. It seemed simply nice on a first cursory glance. Nothing more. Nothing less. 

Enter the actual school bus.

At the American Library Association Annual Conference in San Diego on Saturday, June 29th at 10:30 a.m., an honest-to-goodness yellow school bus took a troop of librarians and conference attendees to the main location of the San Diego Public Library. Was I amongst them? Heck yes I was! Once we arrived at the library, we were treated to tasty snacks, prosecco, and Loren Long himself. There, in a truly lovely outdoor space, he appeared in a gray outfit with yellow shoes and yellow sunglasses (IYKYK). Matt de la Pena appeared briefly to speak, and then Loren launched into a heartfelt explanation of how The Yellow Bus came to be. He outlined the sheer amount of work certain spreads took. He talked about the stray dog hair you can find in the book if you look really closely, the model town he created so that he could draw the book from every angle, and how that model had to change as time passes in the story. It was informative and interesting and, most important of all, eye-opening.

Caldecott members were also most certainly in attendance, and ALA is absolutely 100% fine with that. As they say in their Caldecott Manual, “It is fine for you to accept such invitations, as long as they do not conflict with your committee meetings.” If ALA is concerned about anything it’s about committee members discussing the award contenders with those publishers. “You should be very vigilant about maintaining confidentiality in these sorts of gatherings, because many people will hang on your every word.” So, to sum up, you cannot blog your opinion of a book that may be up for contention, but you can definitely nosh cheese and crackers with the creator if you like. 

This would be a less complicated case if The Yellow Bus were not worth serious consideration. Because what became clear in the course of Loren’s talk was, in fact, the true Caldecott worthiness of his bus. If my initial read of the book was cursory, second, third, and fourth reads were quick to correct my earlier missteps. This is something I’ve found to be common amongst librarians that initially dismiss this book. At the outset, it appears to be little more than a stylish homage to classic works about the inner lives of inanimate objects, like The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton, for example.  In this story, a single bus goes through a lifetime of changes. While it ages, people and animals age around it as well. The bus being a bus does not have a face, and if it feels anything it’s the satisfaction of doing its job. When it can no longer transport children, it transports the elderly. When it can no longer run, it houses the unhoused, goats, and finally fish (or, as one reader pointed out to me, it’s gone from taking kids to school to hosting schools of fish). All the while, Long is showing a town that around the bus is experiencing all kinds of growth and change. The bus itself is briefly abandoned in a field without the goats, making for a touching low point in its life.

I have always said that a true Caldecott winner must combine technical prowess with emotional heart. The heart is absolutely there. The repeated line about the bus being happy calls to mind how the tree felt in The Giving Tree (albeit without the enormous baggage that book engenders). Long, who has been a New York Times bestseller many times, hones his prose to a point, not a superfluous word to be seen. Few would care to contest that The Yellow Bus is by far his most sophisticated book to date. The amount of detail work and care is evident. At times Long would scratch for hours at his own illustrations, just to get the links in a chain link fence exactly right. The use of color is heady, with the outside world consisting of nothing but black and white and the yellow of the bus and anything that happens inside the bus bursting to life and color. Even a view of a beautiful sunset is viewed from inside the bus itself, an inversion of the story’s normal and natural state at a pivotal moment.

The Yellow Bus is absolutely worthy of Caldecott Award consideration. Loren Long has paid his dues over the years, and this new solo turn that both honors the picture books of the past while bringing his own unique and individual spin will undoubtedly rate some serious conversation from the committee. But as I come to understand my own re-examination of the book, I cannot help but note the degree to which my own reconsideration was perhaps due less to discussions with my colleagues and more to its publisher’s largesse.

Let no one say they cannot be swayed by a loquacious creator and a lovely glass of prosecco.

[Read The Horn Book Magazine review of The Yellow Bus]