Tink and Purl: Ends and beginnings...and middles

The final eight:

A young girl and her friends take the complicated strands of life and weave them into something beautiful.
Nobody Owens, who is raised in a graveyard after his parents were murdered, searches for a true light.
Escaping from an oppressive juvenile correction facility, a boy (who had been accused of a crime he did not commit) digs through the holes of the past and fills the holes of the present.
The young runt of the litter rat learns about having to choose and choosing to chose between light and darkness, love and anger, sin and forgiveness.

The people (high, low, and in-between) of a medieval village are presented is a series of 17 monologues.
A summer visitor to a small post-Depression/recession town in 1936 uncovers treasures, mysteries, secrets, revelations, scams, and hopes through the stories told about the same town in 1918.
Through several storylines, photos, illustrations, and drawings, the paths of several young people cross and recross as they wait for things to happen.
A young girl learns life lessons when she is sent from Chicago to live with her eccentric but devoted grandmother in a small "hick" town.

Hooray! I have read all the Newbery Award winners from 1922-2011. The basic joys and pains of growing up- fears, mistakes, thrills, sorrows, discoveries, separations, laughter, tears, journeys- have not changed...they are manifested in a myriad of ways. And writers still love to personify animals and delve into science fiction and fantasy to help us understand reality and the inevitable changes in life.

The Newbery challenge has ended, but I am still in the middle of the hat challenge.

I have decided to move on from the blues. Earth, air, fire, water... the four elements are my organizational pattern for using up acrylic and knitting 52 hats in 2011. There is still some water left, but I am ready to move on to earth.