Paula Fox never softened a thing for young readers. The Slave Dancer, which won the Newbery Medal in 1974, puts a boy aboard a slave ship and refuses to look away, and it trusts its readers to bear what it shows them.
Her sentences are cool and exact. The feeling comes not from the prose straining for it but from the facts, cleanly told. It is a hard discipline, and it is why her books have lasted.
We publish in that tradition: the belief that children can be told the truth, and that a book is more, not less, humane for telling it plainly.