Margaret Balderson’s When Jays Fly to Barbmo (Oxford): There has never been a worthier Book of the Year winner than this, and it was runner up for the Carnegie Medal in Britain too. It is an outstanding novel which, if taken up by the adult market at the time, would have been a best seller-and elevated its author to a position she deserves. This first novel is set in Norway during World War II and concerns a girl’s insistence on discovering the truth about her origins.