From the everyday to infinity

An illustration by Beth Krommes from "The House in the Night." ("The House in the Night")

The American Library Association recently announced its big winners. Neil Gaiman (author of "Coraline" and "Stardust") won this year's Newbery Medal for his novel "The Graveyard Book." I found the book ghastly, literally and metaphorically, and since Gaiman is a writer whose inventive genius I respect, I'll pass on without further comment.

I do the same for Uri Shulevitz's Caldecott Honor book, "How I Learned Geography," a touching and artful book praised in these pages months ago.

Beth Krommes, illustrator of "The House in the Night," written by Susan Marie Swanson, earned this year's Caldecott Medal with a book of stunning visual simplicity. Swanson's overly lyrical text leans toward the breathless, but even beginning readers can sound out every word - as the mother of a kindergartener, I appreciate that. Written in the building-block style of "This Is the House That Jack Built," "The House in the Night" conveys worlds within worlds: a house of dreams, words, art, song, toys, surrounded by a dazzling Van Gogh-ish starry night sky. Each scratchboard and watercolor double-page spread is rendered in black and white with one or two gold images literally glowing. The pictures themselves seem to reach out from domesticity toward infinity.

Jen Bryant's picture book "A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams," another Caldecott Honor winner, provides a rich portrait of the poet and, by extension, of poetry's source.

"My Willie has sharp eyes - he notices everything," Mrs. Williams told her neighbors in Rutherford, N.J. When a teacher read poetry to his class, Williams found his calling: "The shifting rhythms of the poems were like the music of the [Passaic] river." Williams began writing formal poems, but moved toward ever-increasing freedom and flexibility in his verse: "There is a bird in the poplars! / It is the sun! / The leaves are little yellow fish / Swimming in the river."

To find some more reliable way to make a living than poetry, he turned to doctoring and became "the busiest man in town." Yet he found time for poetry. Perhaps his best-known poem is his most succinct, accessible enough for any child paying attention: "So much depends upon / a red wheelbarrow / glazed with rain water / beside the white chickens."

Artist Melissa Sweet utilizes every inch of space, part collage, part cartoon, much in the spirit of Williams's own work, in a subtle mix of childlike simplicity and sophistication.

Perhaps my favorite of this year's award books is that least likely contender, "A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever," written and illustrated by Marla Frazee. The Caldecott Honor book is simultaneously hip and old-fashioned; witness a fake 25-cent cover-price sticker with "(you wish)" written under it.

Our heroes, two best friends, have a summer-camp adventure together at the home of one boy's grandparents. They resist all efforts to become one with nature, spending their time nearly becoming one person instead: watching TV, scarfing down banana waffles and ice cream sundaes. But their last night, "they looked up at the sky and out at the ocean. For the first time all week, they couldn't think of anything to do. The sun went down. The stars came out." In short, the stage is set for something truly magical to happen. The friends turn to imaginative play, and the result is the "very best part of the best week ever."

The brilliance of Frazee's book lies in the comic gaps between text and picture. Nature camp "made them look at everything more carefully" and shows two zombie-eyed boys glued to the TV. Their "quiet meditation downstairs" is in fact violent video-game playing. But the humor is always sweet-tempered; the two boys, while entirely cartoony, are at the same instant entirely convincing and lovable.

Finally, for lovers of sport, "We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball," with words and paintings by Kadir Nelson, won this year's Coretta Scott King Medal. Nelson uses a slangy, semihistorical, semifictional first-person narrative voice to tell the moving story of Negro League Baseball. He delivers some riveting figures (Oscar Charleston, "a mean son-of-a-gun" player brave enough to snatch "the hood off a Ku Klux Klansman"; Lloyd "Pepper" Basset, who "used to catch some games in a rocking chair") and facts: portable lights for night games and shin guards were invented in Negro League Baseball; the first made baseball accessible to working folks, and the second guarded against so many white players "accidentally" sliding into black defenders with their spikes high. Nelson's paintings are as impressive as his narrative gifts - his pictures loom larger than life. And there are real-life heroes here. Hardships and prejudice abounded, but "we loved the game so much, we just looked past everything else. We were ballplayers."

Liz Rosenberg reviews children's books in the Globe every month. Her newest book for children is "This Is the Wind," from Roaring Brook Press; her first adult fiction novel, "Home Repair," will be out from Harper/Avon in late April.