Death by Newbery Medal

""The dog always dies. Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on the cover. Trust me, that dog is going down.""

- Wallace Wallace, No More Dead Dogs

There is a Slice of Life story about childhood and coming of age. The main character has a best friend (an animal, another child, or a family member) who is a source of joy, wisdom, and understanding in their life. This friend is often frailer, more unworldly, or otherwise more "special" than the main character. Bonus points if the character is cute or adorable.

At the end of the story, this very special best friend is abruptly killed off, usually in a clear-cut case of Diabolus Ex Machina. A favorite trick is to have the death happen entirely offscreen. The more horribly poignant the tragedy the better.

All this is generally accompanied by lots of "end of the innocence" angsting from the main character, along the lines of "That was the day my childhood ended..." Really, it's just the author's way of having a child suddenly make the jump to adulthood via a single defining tragedy.

The Newbery Medal is a prestigious award given to American novels written for children. To win one, it helps a lot to use a story like this.

Bridge to Terabithia won a Newbery for its handling of the topics embodied by this trope. Thirteen years later, Shiloh may have actually won its medal because it didn't go for the easy win by killing off the dog at the end. Still, most books for "young readers" (and similar movies) deal with these issues in a fairly Anvilicious fashion, and are obviously bucking for critical acclaim or recognition by killing off a beloved character in a children's book.

Here's the rub: It works.

This trope is so pervasive, some readers expect that the most lovable character won't get to see the end of a critically acclaimed work of fiction.

Be warned: merely reading the titles listed below could result in spoilage, although the medal on the cover comes close.

Remember, one reader's predictable, Narm-filled Award Bait can be another's Heartwarming-Crowned Childhood Classic that will always hold a special place on their bookshelf.

Compare Oscar Bait, which often employs the same principle. Probably a subset of True Art Is Angsty. A form of The Plot Reaper, death for the sake of story. And see these two AV Club lists.

Note: one "r" in Newbery.

Newbery Winners and Honorable Mentions

 * Elizabeth Coatsworth's The Cat Who Went to Heaven. Yup, Exactly What It Says on the Tin. (Newbery winner, 1931)
 * In Esther Forbes' Johnny Tremain, 1944 Newbery Medal winner and another favorite middle-school reading assignment, Rab dies at the end.
 * Rab lives in The Film of the Book, however, which was unsurprisingly the work of Disney.
 * E.B. White's Charlotte's Web: Admittedly, it is a pig, not a child, who suffers the loss, but the theme of death and emotional maturity is still present. And its still an epic Tear Jerker. (Newbery Honor, 1953)
 * Scott O'Dell's Islandofthe Blue Dolphins (Newbery Medal, 1961) kills off not only the heroine's little brother in the beginning of the novel but her friendly wolf companion toward the end. Given that these were her only companions on a deserted island, it's pretty harsh.
 * The sequel Zia deals with the heroine's niece describing life under Spanish oppression (a fate which befell all of the other inhabitants from her island that left). Considering Kirana dies at the end of that book without even her freedom, Island of the Blue Dolphins actually looks pretty cheery in comparison.
 * Lloyd Alexander's The High King (Newbery Medal, 1969), final book of the Prydain Chronicles, takes this trope Up to Eleven. While the series hadn't exactly shied away from death before, the fifth book kills off Prince King Rhun, Annlaw Clay-Shaper, the High King Math, Loino, Coll, and Achren, depicts veritable carnage in what's ostensibly a children's book, and then throws in a rape threat for good measure. The previous book, Taran Wanderer, had been the series' Coming of Age story, and had its own angsty death. Alas, no Newbery for that one.
 * William H. Armstrong's Sounder (Newbery Medal, 1970).
 * Jean Craighead George's Julie of the Wolves is a Newbery Medal winner (1973) that ends with Amaroq the Alpha wolf of the pack that adopted Julie getting shot and killed and the heroine turning her back on humanity, in part because it kills animals for sport.
 * A Taste of Blackberries (Newbery nominee, 1973). A boy and his pal pick blackberries: One will die from bee stings, the other will survive to eat delicious fresh berries and angst about the loss of his friend. Considered by many to be the children's book that firmly cemented the death-of-a-friend trope, it ironically did not receive a Newbery honor but was only nominated; the aforementioned Death by Newbery Medal selection Julie of the Wolves won for 1973.
 * The 1974 Newbery Medal winner The Slave Dancer by Paula Fox has its protagonist, already forced to perform music to exercise the human cargo of a slave ship, witness the crew tossing most all of the slaves overboard to avoid detection by authorities. While a young slave boy survives and escapes a life of slavery, and the protagonist finally makes it back home, he is so traumatized by what happened that he never enjoys music again. A colossal downer, and cynical to boot.
 * James Lincoln Collier's My Brother Sam Is Dead (Newbery Honor, 1975): Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
 * Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising; for the final battle between good and evil, nobody really dies. But the only book in the series which won a Newbery Medal (1976) is the one where they literally Shoot the Dog, The Grey King.
 * Mildred Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is another Newbery Award winner (1977). A young black boy is accused of a murder, made into the scapegoat by the older, white instigators (complicated story). There's almost a lynching of a thirteen-year-old boy. Almost.
 * Instead, he gets tried and executed in the sequel. The book after that includes a premature death, too.
 * Katherine Paterson's Bridge to Terabithia (Newbery Medal, 1978). While killing a little girl out of the blue may seem way over the top for a children's novel, the book was based on a real-life incident when a friend of the author's son was struck dead by lightning at the age of eight.
 * Turtle from The Westing Game (Newbery 1979) has to face death three times: first by finding Westing's dead body, then by witnessing the fatal collapse of her doorman friend Sandy, and finally (as a grown woman) by staying at the bedside of dying Mr. Eastman. The book is a very convoluted puzzle-mystery; all three are the same man, who'd faked his death twice. Turtle's maturation is typical of this trope, nonetheless.
 * In A Gathering of Days: A New England Girl's Journal 1830-32 by Joan Blos (Newbery Medal, 1980), the main character's best friend dies of an illness.
 * Jane Langton's The Fledgling (Newbery Honor, 1981), in which the young girl (as shown on the cover) learns to fly with a Canada goose; he is shot.
 * Cynthia Voigt's Dicey's Song This one would have a greater effect on readers who have read the preceding book, Homecoming. The mother dies but she's been missing/hospitalized for most of the book - her death is only a confirmation of what was coming all along(Newbery Medal, 1983).
 * Marion Dane Bauer's On My Honor (Newbery Honor, 1987) In this one, the friend dies doing something the protagonist had promised not to do, and thus gets inflicted on tweens whose teachers think it's an important lesson.
 * Avi's 1990 Newbery Winner, The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (1990). One person is thought to be dead, while two other people die for real.
 * Lois Lowry's Newbery winner, Number the Stars (1990). Involves Nazis, and ends with the leader of La Résistance Peter Nielsen dying, although protagonist's Jewish friend survives, as she is evacuated along with other Danish Jews.
 * Lowry won another Newbery medal in 1994 with The Giver, which involves the twelve-year-old protagonist, Jonas, being forced to take on endless memories of war, pain and other assorted horrors, causing him to become only one of two people in his whole world to have feelings. Jonas' final "growing up" moment occurs when he learns, via a nonchalantly graphic video, just what happens when the smaller of a pair of twins is Released to Elsewhere. And the ending is extremely ambiguous, giving the impression that Jonas and his toddler "brother" may very well have frozen to death.
 * Recent Word of God says that Jonas, at least, survived (and he has a cameo in the sequel); though it's possible the award committee assumed he died, or considered the ambiguous ending especially artsy.
 * And then, there is Lowry's A Summer to Die, winner of the International Reading Association’s Children’s Book Award, is the fictionalized story of the death of Lowry's sister.
 * Averted (amazingly) in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh (Newbery Medal, 1992), which had all the elements mentioned in the trope's quote, yet somehow, the titular dog managed to live. Possibly because the book focused on moral difficulties more than it did "a boy and his dog".
 * 1993's winner, Missing May: The titular character, the narrator's Aunt and adoptive mother, dies very early in the book, the coming of age story focuses on the narrator and her uncle dealing with their grief. Later, the narrator fears her uncle has lost the will to live from the disappointment, only to quickly snap out of it for her sake.
 * In Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons (Newbery Medal, 1995), this trope is played twice. First time it's subverted because the girl's mother has been dead the whole time, she's just in denial about it. Played straight when her Grandma dies though.
 * Author Sharon Creech later put a spin on the dead dog version of this trope with Love That Dog, a book written as a series of poems by the main character for a school assignment. It's slowly revealed that he lost his dog a while back. Learning about poetry helps him express his sadness and also his memories of the good times, to the point that the titular poem that closes the book is upbeat.
 * In the Newbery Honor-winning book that got some people into reading, Gail Carson Levine's Ella Enchanted (1997), Ella's mom dies early in the book as a result of not doing what the fairy godmother told her to. But, hey, it's a take on "Cinderella"; the mom has to die.
 * 1998 Newbery winner Out Of The Dust, by Karen Hesse, because accidentally setting your pregnant mother on fire is just not bad enough.
 * Subverted in Jerry Spinelli's Wringer (1998), a Newbery Honored novel about a boy who overcomes peer pressure by saving the life of a bird.
 * Joan Bauer's Hope Was Here (Newbery Honor, 2001). The protagonist's father figure is dying of leukemia throughout the book.
 * Linda Sue Park's A Single Shard (Newbery Medal, 2002): "Wherever you are on your journey, Crane-Man, I hope you are walking on two good legs."
 * Kira Kira by Cynthia Kadohata (2005). Katie and her sister Lynn move to 1950's Georgia. While Katie struggles with being the only Japanese-American in her classes, Lynn seems to be becoming more popular. Eventually, Lynn gets lymphoma and dies, and teaches Katie that one should never lose hope.
 * If a reader is Genre Savvy enough, they would notice the Newbery Medal insignia on the cover, open up to the very first page where the narrator talks about how special her sister is and how much she loves her, and instantly reach a Foregone Conclusion.
 * Savvy (Newbery Honor, 2008). Mibs' father does not die after entering his coma, but he wakes up with amnesia and severe paralysis, making him effectively "dead" despite still technically being alive and still with the family.
 * The Underneath (Newbery Honor, 2008). The calico cat drowns in the river when Gar-Face tosses her into it.
 * The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman's 2009 Newbery Medal winner, is an interesting case. It does kill off the werewolf character, but in spite of a climactic set-piece or two it focuses on the very long process of maturation, beginning with childhood. It's not death that changes the main character, with all but one of his loved ones consisting of a vampire and many ghosts; it's life.
 * Gaiman's Newbery win was mentioned during a "Who's Not Honoring Me Now" segment on The Colbert Report, with Colbert remarking "Hey, I've got a great children's book too -- it's called F--k It, We're All Going To Die. Newbery please!"
 * Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me (Newbery winner, 2010). Miranda slowly becomes friends with sometime bully Marcus. At the end of the book she discovers that an older version of Marcus has traveled through time to die for another child.
 * A Corner of the Universe by Ann M. Martin, where the heroine meets a long-lost uncle she didn't know she had and they become great friends. Unfortunately, he has a learning disability and is mentally ill, and commits suicide at the end. Wasn't that cheery, boys and girls?
 * E. L. Konigsburg is currently the only writer in American history to win both the Newbery Award and the Newbery Honors in the same year (1967), yet interestingly, neither of those novels--From The Mixed Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William Mc Kinley, And Me, Elizabeth, respectively--involves death in any appreciable way.
 * Death was not a subject in her other Newbery winning novel The View From Saturday.
 * Subverted with Moon Over Manifest (2011). The character Ned in the gypsy Miss Sadie's stories dies in battle during World War I. Abilene Tucker is shattered by this, believing Ned was her father. This turns out not to be the case, and her father is still living, and his name in the story was "Jinx".

Anime & Manga

 * AnoHana: If there was a Newbery medal for anime, this would win one hands down. It's a sort of double-subversion layer cake with played-straight icing in the middle. The doomed character is a ghost who died years ago, but she still manages to "die" at the end by vanishing in the tear-jerkiest possible way; and her literal death in the backstory turns out to be a total Newbery Medal death in itself (at what would have been the climax of a Love Triangle plot in a Slice of Life series, she arbitrarily falls into a river and drowns).

Film

 * Marley and Me. Within a week or so of the movie's release on DVD, everyone knew the ending was this.
 * The French-Canadian film La Guerre des Tuques (of the Tales for All series) took its English title, The Dog who Stopped the War from the ending of the movie. Of course the dog ends the (snowball) war by dying. Poor girl has a snow fort collapse on her. No Newbery (obviously), but several awards and nominations anyway, and an acclaimed and beloved classic to this day in Quebec.
 * Little Heroes. Never heard of it? Well, you're lucky. Not only does the dog die but it dies in a random way when he eats poisoned bait meant to kill a fox that is a nuisance to the local chicken farmers.
 * What's Eating Gilbert Grape. At the beginning of the film it's established that Gilbert's younger mentally-impaired brother Arnie was expected to die as a young child and still "could go at any time": viewers familiar with the trope would naturally assume that Arnie would die near the end of the movie. It turns out he lives -- their morbidly-obese mother is the one who dies.
 * All Dogs Go to Heaven. Once again, just read that title.
 * Thomas Sennett (Macaulay Culkin) in My Girl (1991).
 * My Dog Skip looks like it's heading this way (twice, if you also count the initial possibility that Skip will starve to death in the crypt he got trapped in) but subverts it with a Disney Death. Skip does eventually die of old age at the very end of the movie, but it's more of a footnote than anything else; his owner has grown up and moved an entire ocean away by that point.
 * Old Yeller though It Was His Sled

Other Literature

 * Bel Ria by Sheila Burnford, better known as the author of Incredible Journey, which was made and remade into films. The dog doesn't die. All its masters do, though.
 * In a straight example, the forest boy Tacit would mourn the death of his fiery-haired, lame-of-leg friend in the last chapter. But this is a subverted example, for that friend is Peter David's Sir Apropos of Nothing, and he would eventually steal Tacit's destiny out from under him.
 * Lampshaded in Diary of a Wimpy Kid, where Gregory is told to read Charlotte's Web, and predicts that either the girl or the pig doesn't make it to the end of the book.
 * Earlier, he said that his mom was picking out what she called "classics", the criteria of which being, in his opinion, it has to be more than 50 years old, and some person or animal has to die at the end. While most things he says are untrue and biased, this is the (unfortunately brutal) truth.
 * Parodied (brutally) in Harlan Ellison's post-apocalyptic novel A Boy and His Dog (Nebula Award for Best Novella, 1969). The titular boy escapes with his new girlfriend to find that, in his absence, his telepathic, erudite dog has been beaten nearly to death. His girlfriend, who's kind of a jerk, makes clear that he can either save the dog, or save her. Cut to the next scene, with the dog's injuries wrapped in the girl's dress, both of them complaining about how full they are, and... something... roasting over the remains of their fire.
 * Ironically, in more typical examples of this trope (like Bridge to Terabithia), it is the girl (or the boy) that dies, not some dog.
 * Fred Gipson's Old Yeller -- but not its sequel Savage Sam, which far fewer people have probably heard of, let alone read. Although it was also filmed by Disney.
 * John Green's Michael L. Printz Award winning book Looking for Alaska features an nerdy young teen who goes to a boarding school and meets a beautiful, adventurous girl with green eyes named Alaska. She has issues about her dead mother, so she drinks and smokes a lot and drives a beat up old car with bad brakes. You can see where this is going.
 * A Girl Called Al and Beat the Turtle Drum, both by Constance C. Greene.
 * Spoofed in No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman, which starts out with the main character writing a book report about "Old Shep, My Pal", a fictional medal-winning book. He notes he knew Old Shep was going to die when he saw the award sticker, and then name-checks Old Yeller, Sounder, Bristle Face, and Where The Red Fern Grows.
 * Inverted in Jack London's The Call of the Wild: The dog is the protagonist, undergoing a transformation through hardship (and sometimes abuse) from dutiful pet to wild wolf, and when a Diabolus Ex Machina abruptly kills his loving human master (off-screen), it allows him to make the final jump to fully wild. Not primarily for children.
 * Carolyn Meyer's Elliot and Win has as its climax a (extra-disturbing since the actual act is all that's offscreened) fairly brutal rape of the main character's best friend, who heretofore was a spunky, active, well-developed character.
 * Ginga Tetsudou no Yoru ("Night on the Galactic Railroad") - a novel by Kenji Miyazawa, made into an anime film - although the death doesn't occur at the end of the story, only the reveal of it.
 * The pig named Pinky dies in the climax of Robert Newton Peck's A Day No Pigs Would Die. Not an official Newbery Winner either, but the themes present in the other examples are most definitely there.
 * Wilson Rawls' Where the Red Fern Grows gives us two dogs, both of which are dead by the end of the book. The horrible wounds of the first dog to die and the death of the bully who disembowels himself on his own hatchet are described in graphic detail.
 * Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows included one death that J.K. Rowling has acknowledged as being for this purpose, that of Hedwig. Readers might see other examples in the preceding three books, Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire (check Cedric's noble, mournful look on some versions of the cover, and certainly the movie poster), Harry Potter and The Order of The Phoenix (being Harry's father figure and friend rolled together makes Sirius a prime Growing Up Sucks death), and Harry Potter and The Half Blood Prince (Dumbledore finally gets a cover! Oh.)
 * In Deathly Hallows Dobby especially falls into this.
 * Most of the latter half of Felix Salten's Bambi, starting when Bambi loses his mother, is one long series of Deaths By Newbery Medal. Particularly Gobo, the deer who was rescued and raised to adulthood by Man. He assumes all humans are his friends and dies horribly for it.
 * Viciously and repeatedly mocked in Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz Series.
 * Anthony Simmons' novel The Optimists of Nine Elms (adapted into a film starring Peter Sellers) is an interesting variation. The old busker Sam's dog, Bella, indeed dies, but it's not a shock to the kids who befriend them or the reader. Sam knows and accepts this will happen sooner or later. The climax of the novel is not Bella's death, but the children managing to bury her in Hyde Park's little dog cemetery to fulfil Sam's wish that she be laid to rest there. The kids accomplishing Bella's burial--and leaving their own dog with Sam--is actually a bittersweet triumph for idealism.
 * Catherine Storr's Marianne Dreams and its film adaptation Paperhouse, in which the main character never meets the best friend who dies thanks to the action taking place in Dream Land.
 * Theodore Taylor's The Cay features a Magical Negro who cares for a racist blind boy while they live stranded on a tropical island, then dies in a hurricane. The book has become a classic and received a number of awards, though not an actual Newbery.
 * Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole, pretty much a perpetual adolescent, finally grows up (at the age of 35!) when his son's army buddy is killed in action in Basra.
 * Bill Wallace's A Dog Called Kitty. The dog actually survives being mauled by wolves and makes a full recovery, only to be crushed under a falling truckload of drill pipe.
 * James Hurst's short story "The Scarlet Ibis", but with a physically disabled little brother.
 * Each Little Bird That Sings by Deborah Wiles. Slice-of-life story? Check. Dog featured on cover? Check. Award winner (not Newbery, but you get the picture)? Check. Does the dog get killed off? Oh yeah. Does the main character turn angsty and Jerk Assy over the dog's death? Surprisingly, no - that happened earlier in the novel, but it continued for a while after the dog died. Three out of four isn't bad, though.
 * Goodnight Mr. Tom won half a dozen awards; the protagonist's baby sister dies of starvation in his arms, and his best friend is killed in an air raid.
 * Stone Fox, a critically acclaimed children's book about a boy and his dog entering a sled race to save his ailing grandfather's farm. The dog dies at the end.
 * Roger, the heroine's best friend, dies in the first book of His Dark Materials. It's especially gut-wrenching because Lyra, the heroine, spent most of the novel trying to find a way to save Roger, and then she ends up causing his death unintentionally (to make things even worse, she
 * David, the heroine's brother, in Cherie Bennett's Searching For David's Heart. For extra angst points, she blames herself for his death.
 * The Berenstain Bears Lose a Friend deals with the loss of a pet goldfish.
 * Jock of the Bushveld. Jock winds up getting shot by accident, because people were on the lookout for a chicken-stealing dog. Jock, having killed the actual culprit, returns to the farm and gets shot in a case of mistaken identity. The trope is justified here because it's a true story.
 * Mick Harte Was Here, aside from the Anvilicious moral ("Wear a bike helmet!"), is a well-done example that shows how the narrator Phoebe and her family deal with the loss of her big brother. It won the William Allen White Children's Book Award.
 * Ramona Forever, the most acclaimed novel of the Ramona Quimby series, climaxes with the death of the family's pet since book one: Picky-Picky, their cat.
 * Hurt Go Happy: Poor, poor Sukari.
 * The titular Snowman.
 * The Green-Sky Trilogy played this one straight by giving Too Good for This Sinful Earth Raamo a Disney Villain Death. Snyder realized (after being swamped with mail) that the Senseless Sacrifice was a bad idea, but couldn't go back and change it...But then she got approached by some video game designers, and made what was probably the first Canon video game sequel to a book, having the player take on the role of one of Raamo's True Companions to save him.

Snyder's earlier book The Changeling seems to be heading in this direction, to the point that some readers still think Ivy dies toward the end. Snyder settled for sending her to a New York ballet school.
 * The title character in Freakthe Mighty has Morquio Syndrome -- or, as one character puts it, he died because his heart was too big for his body.
 * E. Veltistov's "A Gulp of Sun" pulls this off brilliantly. We do know from the beginning that somebody was killed by the cloud, but we assume this is Singaevski, the other pilot. However in the end he ends up Only Mostly Dead and  dies instead.
 * Sorta subverted in My Dog Skip : Skip does die at the very end, but it's almost a throwaway line. He does, however, survive a pretty traumatic scene immediately before, and simply dies of old age years afterwards.
 * Of the books in the Redwall series, Martin the Warrior is generally held as the best, and the most tragic. Martin's true love Rose is senselessly killed at the end. Also note that as this was a prequel, it was pretty much guaranteed to have a Downer Ending.

Live Action TV

 * That one episode of Sesame Street where Mr. Hooper dies. The actor had actually died and the writers decided to address the topic directly. As a nice subversion, none of the kids or child like characters have a "my childhood is over" moment.

Newspaper Comics
"Dogbert: It's a downer. Somebody probably gets a disease and loses the farm.""
 * Lampshaded in a Dilbert Sunday strip. According to Dogbert, if a movie is said by reviewers to have "powerful performances", then...

Video Games

 * In Portal the companion cube exists solely as a riff on this trope -- for the one level you have it, it's played up as the only companion you have, and in order to proceed, you have to "euthanize" it, while GlaDOS informs you it would want you to go on without it. No subsequent revelations or coming of age ensues, however.
 * Although G La DOS does try to guilt you later by calling you a psychopath for killing your only friend. She's that kind of psychotically manipulative pseudo-mother figure.
 * In Portal 2 it ultimately ends up subverted. You escape the facility and step outside the door which shuts itself behind you. You get a chance to look around for a moment before the door opens again and a heavily charred companion cube gets tossed out with you.
 * Fable II has  Countless hordes of players were frothing at the mouth for Lucien's blood after that.
 * But with the right DLC, you can resurrect him.
 * No More Heroes toys with this. During the build-up to the #3 battle,
 * This is the favored theory when Team Ico (creators of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus) announced "The Last Guardian". To sum up - either the boy will die, or the baby gryphon dies. At least one of the two will occur.

Western Animation

 * The Arthur episode "So Long, Spanky" deals with the death of DW's pet parrot, Spanky.
 * Parodied, along with other Oscar Bait-related tropes, with "Oscar Gold" in American Dad.
 * The Smurfs episode titled "Squeaky," in which Smurfette finds and befriends a sick mouse. With the help of Papa Smurf, the mouse is nursed back to health, but dies later after being in a house fire.
 * The 1980s cartoon of Alvin and The Chipmunks did this with their new cat, Cookie Chomper |||, Within the last 5 minutes of the episode, Cookie Chomper dies in an accident.
 * The Casper the Friendly Ghost short There's Good Boos Tonight.
 * The Charlie and Lola episode "I Will Not Ever Never Forget You Nibbles" deals with Charlie helping Lola come to terms with the death of her pet mouse.