Getting Near to Baby
1999 novel
Getting Near to Baby is a 1999 children's novel by Audrey Couloumbis. It was awarded a Newbery Honor in 2000 and is an ALA Notable Children's Book. The book' is aimed at readers between the ages of 10 and 14.
Getting Near to Baby was influenced by the author's personal experience as a child, as her aunt experienced the death of a child due to cystic fibrosis. At the same time, a family living nearby had died of a bacterial illness by drinking tainted water.
Plot summary
The characters Willa Jo and Little Sister are dealing with their grief after the death of their baby sister, who drank contaminated water. Their mother is unable to handle her own grief while caring for the two girls, and her sister, Patty, takes them to stay with her. Aunt Patty has no children, and her household is full of rules. Things become even more difficult for the girls because Aunt Patty does not fully understand them.
When Willa Jo and Little Sister climb up on Aunt Patty's roof to watch the sunrise, then decide not to come down for a while, Patty realizes she has not been fulfilling the girls' emotional needs.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Getting Near to Baby” is 1999 novel. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Getting, Baby and novel, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “1999 novel” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5554630. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999 and 2000.
Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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- Expand the search: follow Getting Near to Baby primary sources, Getting Near to Baby archive and Getting research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Getting Near to Baby” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.