I just hope that this brings recognition to the entire field of children's literature, where such extraordinary work is being done."
"A profound and visceral sense of place is one of the qualities that is most memorable about Karen Hesse's writing," maintained Brenda Bowen in Horn Book on the occasion of Hesse's win of the 1998 Newbery Medal. This "sense of place" encompasses not only landscape--physical locations from Russia to Vermont to Oklahoma--but also spaces in the heart and mind. Whether taking on questions of death and hope in Phoenix Rising, of the meaning of being human and its relationship to language in The Music of Dolphins, of the plight of refugees in Letters from Rifka, or of the tenacity of the human spirit in her Newbery Medal-winning Out of the Dust, Hesse explores her chosen emotional terrain with a sure hand.
History is also part of Hesse's sense of place. Her historical novels--Letters from Rifka, In the Time of Angels, and Out of the Dust--have transported readers to Russia, Belgium, and the United States in the early 1900s, to Boston and Vermont just following World War I, and to the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. "I was once told that writing historical fiction was a bad idea," Hesse said in her Newbery acceptance speech, reprinted in Horn Book.
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